Red Dust

The hooker with a heart of gold is among the most predictable and dishonest of Hollywood’s clichés. But the hooker with a sense of humor is another matter. As Vantine, the Saigon floozy stranded on a rubber plantation in the jungle, Jean Harlow is easy-going and generous, but also tough and astute, with an irrepressible wit that is by turns quirky and acerbic. She pines after the plantation owner, a sweaty and rough-hewn Clark Gable, but she never wilts, even after he dumps her for a prim, hypocritical married woman (Mary Astor). At loose ends, she passes the time bathing in a rain-barrel, cleaning the parrot’s cage (“What’ve you been eatin’, cement?”), hilariously debating the merits of rocquefort and gorgonzola, and puzzling over the story of Little Molly Cottontail while Gable’s hand goes hippity-hop, hippity-hop towards her leg.

In the hands of master-craftsman Victor Fleming, Red Dust manages to be simultaneously torrid and tongue-in-cheek, guiltily pleasurable and candidly adult. Astor’s crime is not only to betray her husband while he’s sweating out a fever in the jungle, but to lack a sense of humor about sex. This was far from true of Astor off-screen, and in her book A Life on Film she devotes an amusing, debunking chapter to the filming of her big, hot kiss with Gable, which took so long to shoot that technicians had to keep dousing them with water to make it look like they’d just run in from a storm, and the arc lights made their wet clothes steam, sending the crew into hysterics.

As for Harlow, she doesn’t so much steam up the screen as blow through it like a gust of fresh air.

by Imogen Sara Smith