Red Dust (1932)
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- Conditions are spartan on Dennis Carson's Indochina rubber plantation during a dusty dry monsoon. The latest boat upriver brings Carson (Clark Gable) an unwelcome guest: Vantine (Jean Harlow), a floozy from Saigon, hoping to evade the police by a stay upcountry. But Carson, initially uninterested, soon succumbs to Vantine's ostentatious charms...until the arrival of surveyor Gary Willis (Gene Raymond), ill with malaria, and his refined but sensuous wife Barbara (Mary Astor). Now the rains begin, and passion flows like water...
- Actors:
- Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Gene Raymond, Mary Astor, Donald Crisp, Tully Marshall, Forrester Harvey, Willie Fung
- Directors:
- Victor Fleming
- Producers:
- Victor Fleming, Hunt Stromberg, Irving Thalberg
- Writers:
- John Lee Mahin, Wilson Collison, Donald Ogden Stewart
- Genres:
- Classics, Comedy, Drama, Romance
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Reviews (1) of Red Dust
Brazen, Flimsy, Enormous Fun - Red Dust review by griggs
Pre-Code Hollywood rarely gets more brazen than this: a rubber plantation, a rain-barrel bath in full view of the staff, and a shooting that gets tidied up with astonishingly little paperwork.
Jean Harlow owns the film from the moment she arrives. The famous bath scene has earned its reputation, but it's her confidence afterwards that really sells it: she treats the place like she already owns it.
Clark Gable is a magnificent cad as the plantation boss, juggling Harlow and Mary Astor's married character with the moral awareness of a damp towel. The story flirts with guilt and consequences, then gives up and heads for the nearest exit. Astor shoots him; Harlow takes the blame; everyone agrees to move on at record speed.
The plot is flimsy, but the Harlow-Gable sparring has enough fizz to cover the cracks. One warning: its treatment of Indochinese workers is casually racist and grimly typical of the period.
It barely makes sense, yet it’s enormous fun.