Victor Fleming | Red Dust / 1932

even in the jungle

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Mahin (screenplay with help by Donald Ogden Stewart [uncredited] based on a play by Wilson Collison), Victor Fleming (director) Red Dust / 1932

 

Reminding one a little of another film about life on a rubber plantation, William Wyler’s The Letter (1940), in which the cheating wife of a rubber plantation owner in Malaysia, Bette Davis, shoots her lover for his betrayal, Red Dust ends with Mary Astor shooting rubber plantation head Clark Gable in Indo-China (now Vietnam) for similar reasons. All that heat, sweat, monsoonal rains,  hard work, and maybe just the milky sap dripping from the trees obviously stirs up melodramatic emotions.

       Fortunately, the central couple in Victor Fleming’s 1932 film, Dennis Carson (Gable) and Vantine Jefferson (Jean Harlow) don’t quite take their feelings quite so seriously—although Dennis almost gets hooked by the proper lady airs of Barbara Willis (Astor) until, discovering just how much her young husband, Gary (Gene Raymond) (a man even his wife Jeanette MacDonald realized was gay or bi-sexual when she found him in bed with actor Buddy Rogers)—a couple clearly unfit for the tropics—loves his wife, he puts on his halo and becomes a momentary saint by denying his love for her and returning to his fellow kind, Saigon (specifically pronounced “Saygone” in this work) prostitute Vantine.

       But in between his affairs with both women, Fleming allows the young Gable the opportunity to pull open the buttons of his shirt and mash his sweaty face and body into both women at will, establishing his macho Douglas Fairbanks-like image (who Fleming, often himself described as a “man’s man,” worked with and directed early on) that would propel him to Gone with the Wind fame (also under Fleming’s direction, after Gable had George Cukor sacked for being a fag or, perhaps, it is rumored he knew much about Gable’s early days as a male prostitute).

      Frankly, when it came to women’s feelings, Gable (and in this case Dennis Carson) didn’t give a damn. In both cases he rejects the intrusion of women into his man-cave until he has a few drinks, gets horny, and virtually rapes them—although the recalcitrant and unrepentant prostitute Vantine is perfectly happy with the situation. But then, so too does Babs become desperate for physical contact with this misogynistic mess.

       But he does truly care about his men, and spends several days by Willis’ side when he arrives with case of malarial fever. He knows just how to deal with it, telling Willis’ wife that he’s only lost three patients. And he later is so moved by Willis’ devotion to his wife, that he abandons his plans to steal her away from him. Men are an important commodity in the jungle, while women are simply sexual stimulants, like the later craze for sex toys.

       Despite its totally racist—Dennis almost gets joy from kicking around the “coolies” and even the saintly Willis admits that you can’t trust them—and sexist attitudes, Red Dust is often fun to watch, if for no other reason than the electricity between Harlow and Gable, who give and take abuse with equal amounts and seem to enjoy the interaction. When Dennis suddenly grows prudish in an attempt to spare Barbara’s more refined sensibility, Vantine dives into the drinking barrel to take a bath in the nude, the curtains Babs has whipped up for the sake of discretion thrown wide open for all to witness. Even as Dennis comes to straighten out the situation, she dives in and out of his hands like a bar of soap, frothing up the scene with early-30s playfulness regarding nudity. Evidently, in shooting of the scene she stood up at one point totally in the nude just to give some pleasure to the hard-working crew. This Hollywood legend sounds like something Harlow truly would do.

     Married to the German psycho, as writer Anita Loos described Paul Bern, Harlow in the midst of shooting had to face his suicide, a death of which some suspected her involvement and which was later found to be related to Bern’s former and current lover’s Dorothy Millette “suicide” by jumping from a steamship—Bern later being suspected as having killed her before killing himself. Harlow missed only 10 days of shooting, however, some evidence such as a change in hairdo, left behind. But throughout Harlow remains front and center, the only figure who has utterly no pretensions and, unlike the numerous other Hollywood scarlet women of the screen, had no compunction playing a whore who loved her job, serving as the truly moral voice of the film by lying to the gullible husband.

     She not only wins’ back the love of Dennis for her fib, but gets to close out the film by reading children’s bunny-rabbit stories to the macho bed-ridden hero healing from his gun wound. Certainly we can guess where this is leading.

        What perhaps only Richard Barrios’s study of gay screen figures in Screened Out will tell you is that even in Vietnam gay sissies cooked the food and washed and ironed their “master’s” panties and pants. In this case the often hysterical Hoy (Willie Fung) plays much the same role in Dennis Carson’s household as Butterfly McQueen’s Prissy performs in Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation mansion—a much exaggerated commentator on the old masta’s and guests’ outrageous behavior; only Hoy is also clearly queer, at one point after carefully ironing Barbara’s panties holding them up to his own bulky midriff and giggling with all the glee of an effeminate Asian houseboy (see Reflections in a Golden Eye of 1967 for a later example); Harlow’s comeback: “You even find them in the jungle!” By them I presume she mean’s girly-boys, not women’s panties, but with Vantine you can never tell.

       Red Dust, despite all its flaws and apparently for its several delights, was chosen for inclusion in The National Film Registry and made a hefty sum for MGM movies.

 

Los Angeles, September 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).