Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) (31 page)

Mahin wrote the script, by the skin of his teeth. “We were starting the picture with about ten pages of script and were going to spitball it as we went along.” (That sounds like Hollywood hyperbole, but the Production Code correspondence backs his story. Viewed against the uninhibited finished movie, it also illustrates how toothless the code could be, when handled properly, before 1934. Mahin’s
Scarface
didn’t fare as well: censorship fights kept the film from opening until a month after
Red Dust
did in the autumn of 1932.)

The turning point for
Red Dust
came when Mahin saw an up-and-comer playing a lady-killer chauffeur in William Wellman’s
Night Nurse
and told Stromberg, “There’s this guy, my God, he’s got the eyes of a woman and the build of a bull. He is really going to be something.” Stromberg looked at Mahin as if he thought the writer “was queer or something,” but finally said, “By God, you’re right.” Clark Gable made thirteen movies in the single year before
Red Dust
and was well-known on the Warner Bros. and MGM lots (if not to Mahin or Stromberg!) for his smoking physical presence. He hadn’t carried a film by himself, but he’d already partnered a handful of the era’s sirens, including Garbo (
Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise
), Barbara Stanwyck (
Night Nurse
), Norma Shearer (
A Free Soul
), and, most often, Joan Crawford (
Dance, Fools, Dance
;
Laughing Sinners
;
Possessed
).

It was natural to link him up with Harlow, the sound film’s update of Clara Bow. Harlow was born Harlean Harlow Carpenter in Kansas City, and Gable in Ohio. Each had youthful experiences of Hollywood—Harlow as a precocious eighth grader at the Hollywood School
for
Girls, Gable as a West Coast theater actor who made Hollywood his base at the age of twenty-two. Harlow’s mother was so devoted to her daughter’s stardom that she’d ice Jean’s breasts before each shot to perk them up. Gable had a series of lovers and wives who helped teach him art and “class” and even, in the case of Pauline Frederick, temporarily fixed his lousy teeth. Indeed, in 1931, his first wife, Josephine Dillon, the Portland acting coach who felt she’d given him discipline, confidence, and naturalness as an actor, threatened to sell her story of how she made Gable who he was unless Louis B. Mayer paid her to keep quiet. She wound up with $200 a month—out of Gable’s salary! In a thank-you note to Mayer, she offered her teaching skills to MGM and said, “I wish I could do something about John Gilbert’s voice for you. I know it can be done.” It’s poignant to think of Gable’s ex-wife wanting to aid Gilbert just when Gable was taking his place. (In 1932, Gable stopped the payments.)

Gable and Harlow may have been homegrown, but they were also wised-up. They projected a democratic and down-to-earth sexuality and smarts that made them ideal fantasy figures for Depression audiences. By the time Stromberg brought them together for
Red Dust,
they were crack camera actors. Yet they didn’t know their own strengths; they were still insecure.

With Gable in, Feyder was out. Mahin described Feyder as “a sweet, delicate Frenchman who didn’t know too much.” The screenwriter called him “an old-timer”; actually, Feyder had some glory years ahead of him. In 1935 he made
Carnival in Flanders
in France, in 1937,
Knight Without Armor
in Britain. But Stromberg needed a robust presence on the set and initially hired Rowland Brown, an attention-getting, volatile director who had recently made
Quick Millions
(1931) and
Hell’s Highway
(1932). The
Los Angeles Times
noted that Brown was “famous for his departures from the set”; in the case of
Red Dust
he departed before shooting began. Gable hadn’t yet worked with Fleming, but the star had done a 1931 film called
The Easiest Way
for Vic’s old friend Jack Conway.

The director-star rapport must have been immediate. Fleming shared more with Gable than with Cooper. Gable had grown up on an Ohio farm. He’d worked part-time as a garage mechanic and labored as a rigger and tool dresser and cleanup man at Oklahoma oil wells and refineries. Like Fleming’s stepfather (but with less success), his father had dreamed of founding his own oil empire. Fleming and Gable knew
how
much toil went into failed dreams but hadn’t let that knowledge blunt their ambitions or dull their appetites.

According to studio conference notes, Fleming came onto the production realizing that
Red Dust
hadn’t found its “driving dramatic force.” With Howard Hawks as an unofficial adviser, he tore apart the original piece. A play that in the studio précis reads like a big mess became one of Hollywood’s lasting comic-romantic melodramas about sex, love, honesty, and duty. “Just thinking out loud, suppose we change the order of the entire story,” Fleming said. “Open up as Hawks felt with a stunning dramatization of a rubber plantation in the throes of Hell. Let’s forget about the play and its feeble motivations and see what characters we can evolve whose own emotions will give us the situations. We open on the plantation as the red dust is furiously blowing. The rebellious and faithless coolies are deserting at all turns and we characterize Dennis [the hero] as almost giving up the fight.”

Americanizing the characters and also vitalizing them, Fleming and Mahin arrived at a startling blend of high and low romance and comedy. They gave the men and women caught in this hellish part of Cochin China more facets and harder edges—any angels here are fallen, any devils have real sting. That push toward complexity pays off in adult entertainment value. Dennis Carson (Gable), born into the rubber trade, has tired of living with one sloppy, drunken co-worker, Guidon (Donald Crisp), a cheerful, simple Chinese cook, Hoy (Willie Fung), and one friend he trusts, observant, mellow Mac (Tully Marshall).

Dennis’s exhaustion opens him up emotionally instead of burning him out. Guidon returns from a trip to Saigon with a prostitute named Vantine (Harlow). Dennis tells Mac that he’s sick of whores being the only women available to him, but Vantine is frank and funny and has standards: she won’t tumble for a foul drunk like Guidon. She wins Dennis over, gets him into bed. It’s her rotten luck that the next boat brings in gung-ho but green-at-the-gills Gary Willis (Gene Raymond) and his upper-crust-lovely, Philadelphia-born wife, Barbara (Mary Astor).

From the moment Dennis and Barbara lock eyes in a mirror, they’re goners. Vantine knows it because Dennis turns brusque and rude to her, feeling that her presence lowers and vulgarizes him. In fact, Barbara refers to Dennis and his crew as “civilized barbarians,” a locution that suits the film’s brute elegance. Barbara, Dennis, and Van-tine dance out a roughhouse gavotte, with Gary and Guidon breaking
in
at crucial points. Gable has his cocksure stride and Astor a magnetized grace. And Harlow has, as the critic Gerald Weales puts it, a walk that’s “a marvel. It contains little of the teasing seductiveness that Hollywood sex goddesses are supposed to display. Her sexuality is direct and matter-of-fact; she moves like an athlete.”

In this masterpiece of erotic choreography, Dennis dazzles Barbara with masculine aplomb. First, he cures her boyish husband of jungle fever. Then, when Gary does his first full day’s work, Dennis shows Barbara the plantation. The ensuing documentary about creating rubber ends when Dennis splashes rubber milk with acetic acid to make it stiffen. A monsoon comes up suddenly and drenches both of them. Dennis picks Barbara up in his arms and doesn’t let her go until he’s kissed her, long and hard, back in her room.

What makes Gable so sexy in
Red Dust
is that he isn’t the John Gilbert great-lover type: he’s fresh in every sense. When he comes up with seductive patter or a bold and winning gesture, he’s not overly practiced. Making things up as he goes along, he surprises even himself. He
is
in love with Barbara. That’s what drives Vantine batty, not merely because she loves him as much as Barbara does, but because she knows what Dennis denies—he loves Vantine in a way, too. The movie is as lusty, funny, and sad as it should be. It wrings humor and pathos from the unfairness and ruthlessness of love, and hopefulness from the varieties of love.

The play wasn’t even
about
adultery—the equivalent of the Gary Willis character dies before any hanky-panky. The movie is about respecting another man’s marriage. It isn’t prescriptive. If Gary weren’t a good fellow, and if he didn’t hero-worship Dennis; if the idea of wooing Barbara weren’t tied up in Dennis’s head with the thought of leaving Cochin China; if Vantine weren’t around to call a cheat a cheat, and to supply a more suitable alternative—who knows?

“They would go through the script,” said Graham Mahin, “and they’d break it into cards, or pieces of cardboard, or whatever. And they’d look at it and say, well, does it fit into the story? [And if my father said no], Victor would say, ‘Don’t throw it away, I like the scene. We’ll put it somewhere—we’ll put that bit in somewhere else.’ ”
Red Dust
kept changing during shooting, growing bolder and keener and cruder. The scripted finale, for example, had been protracted and talky. In the finished version, Fleming has Barbara catch Dennis and Vantine in a sexy tussle, so that Barbara thinks Dennis is a
heel
before he says anything. (Donald Ogden Stewart supplied the amusing coda.)

Fleming’s direction is more than assured: it’s electrically instinctive. William Kaplan said it simply: “He had a knack of [knowing] what a man would do under certain conditions.” And women, too. The exactness of the extra seconds Gable looks at Astor is matched by the moments when she registers her troubled response and then covers it up. In the script, after they kiss, Barbara says, “You should never have done that.” In the movie, she says, “
We
should never have done that.”

Fleming savors the intensity of their passion as well as the heartiness of Harlow’s high jinks; Vantine sometimes plays the joker, but she’s too consistent and candid with Dennis and Barbara to make a fool of herself. The male relationships are equally detailed. Dennis starts the movie by saving Gary’s life and ends it by saving his marriage, with Vantine’s quick-witted help. Reluctantly, he responds to the canine devotion that Gary extends to him as his boss and wilderness mentor. Fleming left Gene Raymond to his own devices when it came to playing Gary, but the director probably saw that the actor’s neediness was working for the character. Gary proves disarmingly semi-aware in his touching eagerness to please both his wife and Dennis; he may know when “Babs,” as he keeps calling her, gets upset, but he never suspects the reason. He intuits that Dennis understands his love for her, but not exactly why. Gary’s character is entirely different from his counterpart in the play. The younger-brotherliness he extends to Dennis may reflect Mahin’s growing friendship with Fleming. At one point, Gary tells Dennis his and Babs’s old dream of living thirty-five miles up the Hudson from New York—just what Mahin once did with his first wife, Derr.

Filming on sets from MGM’s
Tarzan,
Fleming achieved a texture far denser than what John Ford got shooting on location in his light, enjoyable 1953 African remake,
Mogambo.
(Also starring Gable, with Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner,
Mogambo
is an airier movie all around.) Astor remembered the constant dampness from the rain machines and Fleming “being tough about our complaints: ‘So what! Everybody sweats in the tropics—that’s the way it is!’ ” The propman Johnny Miller testified to Fleming’s insistence on evoking the right atmosphere when he spoke of the director ordering him to assemble a flotilla of moths to interrupt a rubber-company meal and “fix one of
’
em so it would light on Gable’s lip.” Even though Miller discovered it was a tough season for gathering moths, and they’re impossible to train anyway (“I know, because I tried it”), he “did figure out a scheme which had about one chance in a million to work . . . I took one of the moths and put a little glue on it. I shut my eyes and threw that moth at Gable and it landed smack-dab on his lip, just like Fleming ordered.”

“I see the most gorgeous shot of Barbara,” Fleming said in his conference notes. “When holding her in his arms he suddenly lifts her up to him and kisses her passionately. I see a close up shooting down on her face to catch the madness that is sweeping over her. Her eyes are open wide—she trembles—she is more alive now than she’s ever been in all her life.” Fleming thought if the scene were “emotionally and psychologically sound,” they would “hit upon a terrific situation in the story.” He adds, “If Gable were really the ‘great lover’ type (which he isn’t)—in other words if it were Freddie March or Valentino or Jack Gilbert (in silent days)—we would write it out and play it for a fierce sex scene.”

In a June 1969
Reader’s Digest
story, “What It Was Like to Kiss Clark Gable,” Astor provided the most intimate account of Fleming commanding a set (she later revised it and formalized it slightly in her book
A Life on Film
). “Now I don’t claim to have total recall,” she wrote—but she really did, starting with the early scene where she arrives by riverboat at the rubber plantation.

Clark, the handsome superintendent, escorts me with great politeness along the dock to the house, away from the camera. Vic stops the first take and says, in front of everybody, “Mary,
please
! Go to your dressing room and take off that damned girdle. We need the bounce!”

We had completed several days on the plantation set—and many shots of Clark carrying me through the mud, gasping from the force of a “monsoon.”

We had just finished the continuation on the stage inside where he carries me up the veranda steps into my bedroom, soaking wet, breathless.

Fleming said, “OK, let’s move in on a tight two.”

The scene in the script reads, “Dennis suddenly kisses her. Barbara at first recoils, but cannot take her lips from his. She raises her hand as if
to
strike him, but it stays suspended. As he kisses her, he slowly lets her down to her feet, his mouth still on hers. Then he takes his lips from hers, and smiles.”