Tag Archives: Clark Gable

‘Red Dust’: Lewdness amid the Rubber Trees

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Original poster.

Original poster.

One of the real treasures from the Pre-Code Era, “Red Dust” (Metro, 1932), is quite possibly the raciest picture Metro ever released during the twenty-seven years that Louis B. Mayer ran the place — I can’t think of another that even comes close. Clark Gable plays Dennis “Fred” Carson, the hard-driving, hard-drinking, womanizing overseer on a rubber plantation in Indochina. Harlow plays an on-the-lam whore named Vantine, who fetches up at the plantation one night. Here’s how they meet.

The passed-out drunk is Donald Crisp, cast against type: in this one, he’s a thoroughgoing swine. He’s not very good in the part, but it’s a relief to see him do something different from the insufferably dignified gentlemen he usually played. Gable’s partner, McQuarg, is played a fine old character actor named Tully Marshall.

Before I saw “Red Dust” for the first time, I never really understood Harlow’s appeal. In “Dinner at Eight,” for instance, the dumb broad she plays is so spoilt and bad-tempered and shrill, I find her far more irritating than amusing. (It doesn’t help that most of her scenes are with horrible Wallace Beery.) But she’s tremendously appealing and funny in “Red Dust,” and she steals every scene she’s in. In his own quiet way, however, Tully Marshall in this next scene gives her a run for her money. (Willie Fung is the racist cartoon of a houseboy. The ugly Asian stereotypes in “Red Dust” are pretty breathtaking by today’s standards.)

Whenever I’m in a bad mood, Tully Marshall’s performance — especially his reading of “If it was the summer of eighteen hundred and ninety-four, I’d play games with you, sister” — is always enough to chase the blues away. Marshall is the sort of old pro that makes me love old movies. Two years before he made this picture, he appeared with John Wayne in Raoul Walsh’s “The Big Trail,” which was shot in Mexico. During the shoot, Wayne was afflicted with a dose of la turista so terrible that he lost eighteen pounds in a single week; for the rest of his life, the memory of that awful week made him shudder involuntarily. When he was well enough to return to work, the first scene he shot involved Tully Marshall and a big jug of liquor. He entered with Marshall slung over his shoulder. According to Wayne, “I set him down and we have a drink with another guy. They passed the jug to me first, and I dug back into it. It was straight rotgut bootleg whiskey. I’d been puking and crapping blood for a week and now I just poured that raw stuff right down my throat. After the scene, you can bet I called him every kind of an old bastard.” Despite his notoriety as a world-class booze-hound, Marshall was in constant demand; he appeared in almost two hundred pictures, including “Ball of Fire” and “Grand Hotel.” Every time I see him, I think of how the old soak and his jug of San Juan possum juice almost turned “The Big Trail” into “The Last Run” for young Duke Wayne. Over the past year, it has become abundantly clear to me that good supporting performances like Tully Marshall’s are very often what I like best about the pictures that give me the most pleasure.

But in this particular case, it’s Harlow who owns the picture. Her combination of vulgarity, street smarts and sunny good-nature has never been surpassed. Like so many movie stars of the Studio Era (and unlike so many of today’s stars), her voice is as unmistakable as her face, but it’s also notable — especially for that era — for its foghorn ugliness. The advent of talking pictures ruined the careers of so many Silent Era glamour queens, yet Harlow’s career didn’t really take off until audiences got a load of the strident clamor that issued from her milk white throat. She rarely sounds perfectly natural — overemphasis and sing-song are two hallmarks of her vocal style — but her commitment to the material is absolute; her facial expressions and body language are so spontaneous and lively that her overtly artificial vocal mannerisms work in her favor (at least, they do in “Red Dust”). In her scenes with Gable, she’s clearly acting — putting on a show — but she’s not acting for us: she’s showing off for the guy she’s trying to hook. Look at how deftly she warms him up and wins him over in this next scene. He’s irritable and she’s exhausted, but she’s so attracted to him that she can’t stop flirting. The more she chatters, the madder he gets, but the more violently he tells her to shut up, the hornier she becomes — she’s impossible to insult. His steely hostility hasn’t a chance against her saucy vivaciousness. She and Gable make a brilliant team, but she’s the one who drives the scene, and she does it with great wit and verve.

This next clip is the best-known scene in the picture: Harlow takes a bath in a rain barrel. She did it topless. We don’t get a peek, but Gable sure did. At one point between takes, she stood up, gave the crew below a good look and said, “This is for the boys in the lab!” The film never left the set, however: Victor Fleming had it removed from the camera. He didn’t want it to turn up on the black market.

“Red Dust” certainly looks like a Metro high-gloss picture of the era: the glamorous lighting for Gable and Harlow, the familiar indoor jungle settings and the backlot shores of Metro’s Lot One Lake (where the early Tarzan pictures were shot) — everything about its look is unmistakably Metro. But it sure doesn’t act or think like a high-gloss Metro picture. The randy banter between Gable and Harlow is breezy and fun-loving, not passionate and earnest — and their complacence about sex is completely at odds with Metro’s fastidious primness. In fact, I can’t think of another American picture of its era in which adult sexuality, promiscuity and marital infidelity are treated with such buoyant nonchalance. Before the picture’s over, jealousy will lead to gunfire, but nobody gets killed or is even seriously hurt. The whole point of view is radically different from Metro’s strict moral code. In this picture, Gable has sex with Harlow the day they first meet; he carries on with her for a month, and when he’s ready to try a new flavor, he gives her a big wad of cash, slaps her on the ass and puts her on the boat back to Saigon. Then he promptly forgets about her — until her boat runs aground and she comes back for more. But when Harlow returns, Gable’s already busy seducing his new employee’s wife (Mary Astor), and treats Harlow badly. Gable carries on with Astor until he discovers that her husband (Gene Raymond) is a decent guy. Angry with himself and disgusted with her, he sends her back to her husband and tells them both to get lost: “You two pack your tennis racquets and go back where ya belong.” It’s hardly what one expects from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. And through it all, we root for Gable. It’s not only the sexiest picture Metro ever made, it’s also the most subversive.

There’s something else that sets the sexuality in “Red Dust” far apart from other pictures of its era: sex looks like a lot of fun. Garbo, John Gilbert, Joan Crawford, Jack Barrymore and all the other famous screen lovers of the era made lust look horrible and serious — their idea of wantonness looks like my idea of a hanging judge as he pronounces sentence. But there’s nothing brooding or terrifying about the sexiness in “Red Dust”: it’s happy and fun; it’s a romp. Lust doesn’t make Gable, Harlow and Astor frown and smolder, it makes them light of heart and full of laughs. Me too.

‘San Francisco’: Stirred and Shaken on the Barbary Coast

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Original Poster.

Original Poster. ‘Together for the first time’ . . . and the last.

When “San Francisco” (MGM, 1936) was first announced, the combination of Clark Gable (as Barbary Coast saloon-keeper Blackie Norton) and Jeanette MacDonald (as fluttery songbird Mary Blake) must have seemed an unlikely one, but they make a surprisingly effective pair. They have real chemistry: he seems genuinely to attract and terrify her (as the story calls for), while her nervous bravado genuinely seems to amuse him. MacDonald frequently played women on the run from the baritone or tenor into whose caress she would inevitably fall, but this may be the only time that the Iron Butterfly (as she was often called) seemed to be in any real danger of losing control of the situation. She was never funnier. Here she is near the beginning of the picture, when she comes looking for a job from Clark Gable.

The guy who cracks wise at the end of the scene is Ted Healy, a popular comedian of the era. Among other things, Healy was well-known for his a long association with the Three Stooges (he and Moe Howard were childhood friends). In the 1920s, he was the highest paid entertainer in vaudeville. He died in 1937 under mysterious circumstances. His death certificate issued by the State of California lists the cause of death as toxic nephritis, but newspapers at the time reported that he died of complications from a serious head injury sustained in a nightclub donnybrook while celebrating the birth of his first child; other reports claimed he died of a heart attack at home. Take your pick. I like the head injury story — it comports well with the Three Stooges connection.

As Mat, the manager of the Paradise, Healy plays a small but important one-joke role. He thinks Blackie’s crazy for hiring this dame — her kind of singing will drive the customers away. Blackie has big plans for his new discovery, but some changes will have to be made. The first time he hears her twittering the title song, he stops her.

Blackie: Wait a minute, whaddya think I’m runnin’ here, a funeral parlor?  Give it this! [He goes to the piano and bangs it out in loud-and-fast whorehouse style]

MacDonald, Gable: 'Give it this!'

MacDonald, Gable: ‘Give it this!’

Blackie: Put something into it!  Heat it up! That’s what it’s about!  San Francisco!

Mary: But I can’t sing like that, Mr Norton . . .

Blackie: That’s the way you’re going to sing it, or you’re not gonna sing it for Blackie!

That’s Blackie the pragmatic saloon-keeper talking; in his heart, he knows that she’s slumming, that she’s too good for his trap.  Mat does not: he has little use for her airs and graces, and none at all for her lugubrious ululations. So he serves as an insurance policy for low-brows (and for opera connoisseurs, too). Every time she opens her mouth, Mat is on hand to pull a sour face and make it all right for us to dislike her kind of singing, too.

The first time we see Mary perform publicly at the Paradise, she’s dressed in one of Adrian’s silliest costumes, though there are a few others in the picture to rival it. She looks like a cross between Big Bird and the Merry Widow, but her prim stuffiness also reminds me of a star-bellied Sneetch.

Jeanette MacDonald: Swing out, sister! She's a good sport, I'll give her that.

Jeanette MacDonald, the Toast of the Barbary Coast: Swing out, sister! She’s a good sport, I’ll give her that.

Upon hearing Mary Blake rehearse a number at the Paradise, a visiting opera impresario, il maestro Baldini (William Ricciardi), expresses his admiration by quoting a proverb from Plautus’ comedy, “The Captives”: “Ut sæpe summa ingenia in occulto latent!” After a slight pause, Blackie says, “Ya took the words right outta my mouth.” Roughly translated, the Plautine maxim is, “How often the greatest talent lies hidden in obscurity!” or more roughly translated, “What’s a nice girl like that doing in a dump like this?” No translation is offered in the picture. I assume this is because Latin was still taught in public schools when the picture came out, and the quotation was nearly as familiar to Latin students as Caesar’s “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.” The quotation has something in common with Shakespeare’s famous maxim, “To thine own self be true”: in both cases, the character in the play who speaks it is a comic scoundrel. In “The Captives,” the speaker of the apothegm is listed in the dramatis personæ as “Ergasilus, the parasite” — he’s an ancient blend of George Costanza and Cosmo Kramer; he says the line as a means of flattering the rich old fool from whom he’s trying to cadge a free dinner. This strikes me as a nice metaphor for “San Francisco” as an entertainment: at heart, it’s a roguish stew of romantic comedy, melodrama and cheerfully corny music, but it is tricked out with Latin quotations and operatic sequences to give it class and flatter our intelligence. Ironically, the highfalutin stuff makes the picture more vulgar, not less. At any rate, it’s a lot of fun.

The picture also contains more than a few speeches by God-fearing Catholic Cassandras, who assure us that San Francisco’s godlessness is bound to lead to the Armageddon of the final reel. The first time I saw the picture, the amount of religious chatter about wickedness and divine retribution startled me. In places, it’s practically a love letter to the Church of Rome. Not only Father Mullin (Spencer Tracy) gets to spout, but comical old Mrs Burley (Jessie Ralph) has a long, maundering speech about End of Days, and MacDonald sings not one, but three hymns: “Jerusalem,” “Nearer My God to Thee” and, at the very end “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” . . . all this in a picture written by that arch-flapper, Anita Loos! Lorelei Lee takes the veil. Is it possible she was serious? At length, I decided it was just Metro’s way of putting on airs, because they thought it gave the picture gravitas. It doesn’t. It doesn’t do any harm, either: it merely makes it a little bit sillier. It amuses me that il signor Baldini actually misquotes Plautus quite badly (the quotation above is correct: why rehearse error?) . . . I’d like to think this was intentional, but I doubt it.

Gable, Tim Holt, William Ricciardi: The Plautus thickens . . .

Gable, Tim Holt, William Ricciardi: The Plautus thickens . . .

Here’s a scene with Gable playing Big Bad Wolf to MacDonald’s Little Red Riding Hood, and with some Godly rigmarole thrown in. It offers a fair idea of what the whole picture is like — saints and sinners side by side. MacDonald’s timorousness in the last seconds of this clip is, I think, the wittiest bit of acting she ever did. Elsewhere in the picture, she’s up to her usual, artificial tricks — indignant little sniffs, silent era pantomime gestures and so forth. Her acting in this scene isn’t exactly realistic, either, but it’s specific, beautifully timed and very funny. The way her eyes dart about before she she speaks Blackie’s name, and the fraidy-cat whisper she employs when she says, “Blehckie . . .” give the impression that she believes she has just taken her first uncertain step down the primrose path to Perdition. I think it’s hilarious. Billie Burke couldn’t have played this moment better.

Blackie’s atheism is just scornful enough to let you know that he’ll have to convert in the final reel, after the vengeful God has set his rafters a-rattling and crushed thousands of sinners, women, children and dress extras under piles of balsa wood debris.

As a matter of fact, the earthquake sequence is thrilling. The special effects are astonishingly realistic; the juxtaposition of ceilings caving in, walls crumbling, buildings collapsing, pavement opening up, followed by moments of quiet and then even more calamitous aftershocks — sudden explosions, fireballs, nearly-rescued victims being buried under new torrents of falling bricks — it’s all very life-like and terrifying. And unlike nearly every disaster flick that followed “San Francisco,” the story does not seem like it’s simply marking time before the disaster strikes.

Here’s the Judy Garland version of the title song, with the witty verse written specially for her by Roger Edens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hqb9v2Z7bm0