Red Dust

Everyone sweats copiously in Victor Fleming’s “Red Dust,” a breezy, tough-talking 1932 melodrama. Clark Gable plays the manager of a Vietnamese rubber plantation -- he kicks and punches the coolies and, periodically, talks about traveling to “Say-gone.” A new man arrives at the plantation, half-dead from malaria. The new employee has brought his elegant and beautiful wife, the role played by Mary Astor who is, in fact, alarmingly gorgeous -- she has a bruised,slightly aggrieved and sophisticated glamor. Gable’s brutal roustabout has been fornicating with Jean Harlow, a whore from Say-gone who has turned up at the steamy plantation on a grim-looking little river-faring vessel that looks like “the African Queen.” Harlow’s prostitute talks in double-entendres and wears diaphanous, tattered gowns and it’s obvious that she and Gable belong together. But Gable falls for Mary Astor and, after rescuing her from a monsoon, she seems to love him also. Gable arranges for Mary Astor’s boy-scout husband to be stationed far from the plantation. Poor Harlow thinks that she has been abandoned and moons around the sultry, ramshackle plantation house -- huge banana-leaves suspended over the wooden table move the air above the place where the characters sit to exchange wise-cracks and slug down shots of whiskey and quinine. Gable rides six hours through the rain to confront the Astor character. He insults her -- always a good way to end a problematic relationship -- and she plugs him with a little revolver concealed in her kimono. Harlow and Gable both lie to the aggrieved husband when he appears a few minutes later, having pursued his boss through the torrential typhoon; they claim that Gable tried to rape the wife and that, as a “virtuous woman”, she had to gun him down. Gable is only wounded and Harlow has to penetrate him -- she drives a fat rod dipped in iodine through the bullet hole in his side, certainly, one of the strangest and most grisly sublimations of intercourse ever filmed. After this improvised surgery, they get gloriously drunk together. Mary Astor and her whimpering husband leave Indochina and, I guess, Harlow and Gable live happily ever after, boiling together in the humidity -- he’s shirtless and wet and she’s wearing a filmy negligee and, presumably, wet as well. There’s nothing much in “Red Dust” -- the title refers to the dry winds that blow dust around the plantation when its not raining buckets out of the soundstage sky. The movie is obviously derived from a stage-play and its talky and artificial. There’s nothing atmospheric about the picture but some of the scenes showing the river and the little paddle-wheeler chugging upstream in the monsoon. At the center of the film, there’s a brief documentary style sequence showing how rubber is made, an interesting little digression that has nothing to do with the plot but which imparts a kind of educational patina to the proceedings. Harlow’s acting style is brazen and zippy; Mary Astor is equally seductive, but has a kind of decadent elegance -- both women get to show off their breasts in a variety of skimpy transparent blouses, in Miss Astor’s case wet down by the monsoon rains. There’s a tiger in the bush and a comical Oriental cook. The film is clearly an imitation of “Rain”, the Joan Crawford South Seas vehicle also made in 1932 -- “Rain” is a much better film, featuring performances of alarming ferocity by the entire cast, most notably Walter Huston. “Red Dust” is lightweight and never really generates much emotional interest.