Directed by Victor Fleming
Filmed in the same over-heated, studio designed, orientalist tropics as The Letter, Red Dust features Jean Harlow as a Singapore floozie who has finally found her man in Clark Gable’s gone-native plantation owner. They are made for each other, though he doesn’t know it, because he falls for the civilized, but married, Mary Astor. Gene Raymond as the husband sports his usual non-sex-appeal, so Mary is soon in the arms of the beast, then thinks about her pocketbook. All the virtues of pre-Code cinema are here: the frank discussion about sexuality, the depiction of adultery, the unsentimental view of class relations.
MGM. Producer: Hunt Stromberg. Based on the play by Wilson Collison. Screenwriter: Wilson Collison, John Lee Mahin. Cinematographer: Harold Rosson, Arthur Edeson. Editor: Blanche Sewell. Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Gene Raymond.
