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Red Dust (1932)

Director: Victor Fleming
Writers: John Lee Mahin (screenplay) (as John Mahin), Wilson Collison (stageplay)
Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Gene Raymond
Genre: Pre-Code Drama


Rockin good fun! That's the way I like my movies and Red Dust delivered. Clark Gable as the roguish, tough & rumble boss of a tropical rubber plantation, coupled with the unabashed, brassiness of platinum blonde Jean Harlow...what more could you ask for in film? I loved the exotic feel of the rainy, steamy jungles in a remote region where just about anything could happen. That's world building and I talk about that a lot in my reviews. Well that's because escaping for a brief while into an enticing movie world is appealing to me.

Wow, was that really Mary Astor, I never seen her look so young, I'm use to the older version of her, like in The Maltese Falcon. I hardly recognized her here.

The story was bold, ruckus and fun...I loved the playfulness that Jean Harlow brought to the screen. I've never thought she was that pretty, I mean where has her eyebrows gone too? But she's so cool and so fun that her performance is infectious....like malaria!...all hot and chilly at the same time. I don't think she's the greatest actress, but she sure has style! So does Clark Gable, back in the day women swooned over him and men wanted to be like him. Gable is cool!

My favorite scenes are Gene Harlow in the bathtub, such a fun scene. I read that during filming of the rain barrel scene, she stood up...topless and said 'here's one for the boys in the film lab'....Hot damn! Oh and for some reason I got a kick out of her scraping the parrot poop out of the bottom of the bird cage, and commenting that it was 'hard as cement'. Only in a pre-code film would you see that!