Review of Red Dust

Out in the jungles of south-east Asia there are westerners running rubber plantations. Three days by boat from Saigon—here pronounced "say gone"—is the plantation owned by Denny Carson (Clark Gable). A surprisingly pretty blonde just shows up one day, explaining that she'd gotten in trouble along the river and thought it best to lie low a while. She's Vantine Jefferson (Jean Harlow), and she's no better than she should be. Even though Denny is a terrible bully, always pushing his "lazy coolies" around and treating Vantine like dirt, she breaks through to him with amusing chatter about Rocquefort and Gorgonzola cheese. They "hook up," as the current parlance would have it, and when she leaves on the boat after a while Denny hands her money. Idiot. Then on the scene comes the new surveyor, Gary Willis (Gene Raymond), young and green and ill with malaria—and along with him comes his wife Barbara (Mary Astor), obviously used to and expecting better things. There's friction between her and Denny, and between her and Vantine, who's returned. And the friction between Babs and Denny turns heated while her husband has been sent away to survey an exceedingly wet part of the jungle. A rotten trick. The love story is supposed to be heated, what with Gable's manly grasping and Astor's melting eyes—and she looks pretty good in thin, summer-weight rain-soaked clothes, too. Denny's all set to tell Willis, but hearing the young man talk about his plans, he has a change of heart. He rides six hours back from the wet jungle camp and drinks and kisses Vantine, telling her with disgusted tones he's turned all angelic. Babs sees them rolling about, and Denny explains he was just using her, and she shoots him just as her suspicious husband arrives. Babs stands there shaking and Vantine pipes up with the right lie, that Denny had been after her relentlessly and she finally shot him, and Willis believes the story. All is well, with Denny and Vantine, who suit each other, together. The plot is grade B melodrama, weighed down by the colonialist subtext—somebody has to get the rubber from the jungle to the balloon tires, and the coolies won't do anything if they're not bullied into it, and weighed down by the pervasive racism, and weighed down by the incredibly annoying notion that a tall, handsome, arrogant, misogynistic brute is the ultimate in sex appeal, and weighed down by the utterly predictable love triangle plot. The only thing that saves the movie is the fizzy dialogue between Harlow and Gable, and the jaunty, sexy, teasing flirtatiousness of Harlow, who brightens every scene she's given.