Romancefest 2017: Red Dust

Another year, another Romancefest. I'm going to watch 28 romantic movies in 28 days and write about each of them. This year I'm pulling my list from filmesite.org, a website I've used for reference ever since college. For some reason it only recently occurred to me to use them as a source for my various lists. As usual I'm sticking to either films I've never seen or films I may have seen but remember so little I may as well watch them again. This year I'll be going in chronological order whenever possible, though some of this depends on what is and is not checked out at Movie Madness.

We start with 1932's RED DUST, starring Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. This flick was directed by Victor Fleming, the credited director on both THE WIZARD OF OZ and GONE WITH THE WIND, among many other classics. It was cool to see a younger Clark Gable in this movie, especially working with the director who would later go on to immortalize him.

Gable stars as the owner of a rubber plantation in French Indochina. As the movie opens he's sick of the shitty conditions and dealing with the natives, and things only get worse when Jean Harlow shows up as a prostitute on the run from some trouble upriver in Saigon. At first Gable doesn't want a girl in his way, no matter how much she looks like Jean Harlow (va va voom), but eventually he warms up to her. She's "one of the guys," and has no trouble putting up with the extreme conditions, so they have a short affair and soon it's time for her to move on.

Next, an engineer (Gene Raymond) shows up to work on the plantation with his wife (Mary Astor) in tow. I'm not familiar with Ramyond but it was fun to see Astor in something other than THE MALTESE FALCON. Here, rather than playing a femme fatale, she plays the opposite of Harlow – she is NOT one of the guys, and although she tries to put on a brave face, she's not at home at all in the jungle conditions.

Still, Gable's into her, soon seduces her, and the two embark on an affair. Around this time Harlow shows back up again, eager to strike back up her friends-with-bennys relationship with Gable, only to find some cowardly sneaking around is going on. Needles to say she doesn't like it.

Eventually someone gets shot, which is funny, since up until this point this didn't seem like the kind of movie where someone would end up shot, and things resolve themselves. Overall the movie's pretty good, with 3 compelling leads and a (mostly) lighthearted romantic storyline. The setting is exotic and it's interesting to see some of the workings of the rubber plantation, although this also leads to some of the movie's more awkward moments as the natives aren't treated in a very culturally sensitive way, specifically Willie Fung as the very racially-stereotypey house servant who's supposed to be the comic relief but will make modern audiences cringe, which is a shame, since it's not Fung's fault.

As far as romance is concerned, this pre-code flick has plenty of steamy scenes including Harlow bathing in a barrel and Gable and Astor's impassioned embrace in the middle of a monsoon. But the main attraction is the chemistry among the stars. That outshines the soap opera plot.