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VINTAGE MOVIES

Vintage Movies: “Red Dust”

MAGNET contributing writer Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 500 titles—from the silent era through the ’90s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every week.

RedDust

Red Dust (1932, 83 minutes)

Seven years before Gone With The Wind, a mustache-less Clark Gable had a hardboiled, sarcastic love relationship with Jean Harlow in Red Dust similar to his affair with Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara. Gable plays Dennis Carson here, manager of a rubber plantation in what was then French Indochina and would become Vietnam. He’s searching for an employee who’s tapped the rubber trees three years too soon, endangering their growth, then taken the boat for a binge in Saigon.

He finds the bird he’s looking for, passed out in his unlit room, and tosses him roughly onto his bed. “Well, for the love of mud! Where am I sleeping, on a racetrack?” shouts a scantily clad dame, already occupying the bed. “Come on, let’s have it. Who are ya and where’d you come from?” barks Gable, sizing up the broad’s profession.

“I’m Pollyanna, the glad girl,” retorts Vantine (Harlow). “I came up in the boat. but not with that. Get him outta here!” she says, beginning to push the unconscious drunk off the bed with both feet.

“Why’d you get off the boat, at all? You do know it doesn’t stop again for four weeks, don’tcha?” says Carson. “For the same reason I did in Saigon,” she says. “I got mixed up in a little trouble and thought I’d stay out of town until the gendarmes forgot about it. But don’t worry, big boy, I’ll stay out from under foot,” she cracks. As Carson departs she pleads, “Hey, you’re not going to leave that corpse in here? Please, this room is full of lizards and cockroaches, as it is.” As he ducks out he says, “One more won’t hurt!”

“You ever think about quittin’, Mac?” says Carson to his grizzled foreman. “I could sell out pretty.” Mac (Tully Marshall) replies, “But you won’t. You was born smellin’ rubber and you’ll die that way.” Carson bristles: “You think I’m gonna spend my whole life here with dry-rot so the world can go around on balloon tires, and old ladies can take hot-water bottles to bed?” Puffing on his pipe, the old man answers, “As long as there’s one baby left in this world to suck on a rubber nipple.”

Right on cue, Vantine appears in her flimsy, pre-production code bedtime ensemble. “I thought you were going back to sleep,” says Mac. “I’m not used to sleeping during the day,” she says, munching on a cracker smeared with gorgonzola. Drinking whiskey, Carson tells the houseboy to clear the beans from dinner. “You won’t grow up to be a big strong boy like grandpa if you don’t eat your din-din,” quips Vantine. “Why don’t you put that cheese where it’ll do the most good, in your mouth!” snarls Carson—joined by the roar of a wild tiger roaming the jungle outside.