Classic Films in Focus: RED DUST (1932)

Steamy Pre-Code sensuality drives the plot of Victor Fleming’s Red Dust (1932), in which Clark Gable and Jean Harlow prove the powder keg appeal of their onscreen chemistry. The story unfolds against the equally heated backdrop of an exotic tropical location, where tigers and torrential rains mirror the violent natural forces at work in human hearts. Like many classic films with Eastern settings, Red Dust suffers from an Orientalist attitude toward the native workers and a horribly stereotypical Chinese domestic, but Gable and Harlow are so good that the movie works in spite of it, and Mary Astor gives an excellent performance as the married rival who loses her moral high ground by falling for Harlow’s man.

Gable stars as Dennis Carson, the head of a remote rubber plantation in Indochina. When his masculine world is invaded by streetwise Vantine (Jean Harlow), Carson complains loudly but soon takes advantage of the situation and Vantine’s considerable charms. Vantine hopes for a real relationship, but Carson throws her over when the well-heeled Barbara (Mary Astor) arrives with her naive husband, Gary (Gene Raymond). After Carson nurses Gary through a dangerous fever, he earns the younger man’s fervent admiration, which makes Carson feel guilty for his affair with Barbara. Jealousy erupts into violence as the monsoon season bears down and Gary finally begins to suspect Carson’s designs on his wife.

Red Dust was the second film in which both Gable and Harlow appeared but the first to capitalize on their sex appeal as leads; they work together so well because both have screen personalities that radiate toughness and animal lust. Gable looks like a guy whose idea of romance is a rough and tumble roll in the hay, and Harlow is just the kind of girl to like it that way. The surprise for us - and for Carson and Vantine - is that their attraction to each other becomes something more lasting and substantial. Carson chases Barbara because she appears as a rarity in his world, but it’s clear that she can never belong to it, and Gary’s boyish innocence is too pathetic and pure even for the worldly Carson to destroy. Vantine might be a woman of easy virtue, but she ultimately has more integrity than Barbara; she isn’t the one committing adultery on the heels of her honeymoon, and her lies protect both Gary and Barbara from their own foolishness. Their spontaneous acts of altruism and generosity assure us that Carson and Vantine deserve each other; whatever their faults, they’re better people than even they realize until the moment of truth arrives.

The setting for the story provides arresting images, from the tiger prowling the forest to Harlow naked in a rain barrel, but it also falls back on the usual clichés of lazy coolies and simple-minded house servants. The rubber plantation workers are represented as so much human cattle, with some pointed remarks about their eagerness to rape white women thrown in, but the most grating element for modern viewers is Willie Fung’s idiotic Hoy, who unfortunately gets the movie’s last line. Fung made a career of these kinds of roles, and it’s not his fault that parts for Asian actors were so limited in classic Hollywood, but his Chinese version of Stepin Fetchit is almost impossible to watch. Donald Crisp’s Guidon is an obnoxious drunk, but even he fares better than Hoy, who serves as the butt of a running gag that isn’t funny in the first place.

For more of Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, see Hold Your Man (1933), China Seas (1935), and Harlow’s final film, Saratoga (1937). Victor Fleming, who was uncredited as the director of Red Dust, is best remembered for his work on The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone with the Wind (1939), but he also worked with Harlow on Bombshell (1933). Look for Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). John Ford remade Red Dust as Mogambo in 1953, with Clark Gable starring once more; Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly both earned Oscar nominations for their performances as the female rivals for his love.

Classic Films in Focus: THE PALM BEACH STORY (1942)

Screwball comedy director Preston Sturges offers a frothy concoction in The Palm Beach Story (1942). It's a light, short film, daring for its day in its treatment of the idea that an attractive woman might willingly use her sex appeal to advance her husband's career. The dialogue is witty, and the characters are certainly charming, but those who are bothered by loose ends will have fits over the way in which the movie leaves much unsaid and even more unexplained in its opening and closing scenes.

Our story involves a young married couple, Tom (Joel McCrea) and Gerry (Claudette Colbert), whose marriage isn't going so well because Tom has yet to get his big break and Gerry is tired of being poor. Gerry decides to help Tom out by divorcing him so that she can romance rich lovers and bankroll Tom's idea for a revolutionary airport design. Despite Tom's confusion over how exactly this is supposed to be a swell plan, Gerry takes off for Palm Beach to get a divorce, proving along the way that she can in fact charm men into giving her just about anything she wants. Her most devoted victim is an alarmingly wealthy bachelor named John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee), who falls hard for Gerry in short order. Tom pursues his wife to Florida, where Hackensacker's sister (Mary Astor) promptly conceives a passion for him, and the four besotted characters run around making fools of themselves until everything eventually gets sorted out, thanks to a deus ex machina so wild and so unaccounted for that it will either make you roar with laughter or tear your hair out in frustration.

The cast assembled for this trip to the loony bin is first rate. Colbert is lovely enough to sell the idea that men might fall all over themselves for her benefit, and Joel McCrea excels at comic reaction shots where he gapes open-mouthed in disbelief at the extent of his wife's zany endeavors. Rudy Vallee gets high marks for his amiable blueblood, and Mary Astor is a scream as the loopy sister. Even the secondary players bring plenty of laughs; Robert Dudley gets the movie off to a hilarious start as the generous Wienie King, whose inspection of the couple's apartment sets the plot in motion. Later, we get a whole club car of humorous characters with the Ale and Quail Club, who gallantly give Gerry a ticket so that she can board the train to Palm Beach. William Demarest, Victor Potel, Robert Warwick, Chester Conklin, Arthur Stuart Hull, Sheldon Jett, Dewey Robinson, Jimmy Conlin, Jack Norton, Torben Meyer, Robert Greig, and Roscoe Ates pack the train scenes with their drunken conviviality. A lot of these old character actors were regulars in Preston Sturges' pictures, and the director clearly takes great delight in their antics, literally setting them loose on the unsuspecting passengers and train crew until they eventually end up being set loose in a different way by the conductors.

It is difficult to say much about the beginning and ending of the movie without spoiling it, but it doesn't take two minutes to figure out that The Palm Beach Story opens with a scene from a completely different tale, one that won't be addressed in the scenes that follow. Who is the woman tied up in the closet? Why are both the bride and groom late for the wedding? What the heck is going on? I don't think Sturges means to torture his audience with these mystifying bookends to the main plot; I think that the title's wording is supposed to suggest that this is merely yet another story in the lives of these wild characters, and the beginning and ending show that the Palm Beach adventure is neither the first nor the last time that Tom and Gerry will find themselves doing crazy things. Like the television series Friends, where every episode is titled, "The One...," The Palm Beach Story is one story among many stories for our protagonists, with the only problem being that the other stories never actually get told. Personally, I would have liked to see the story that led up to the film's opening scenes; the comedic possibilities suggested there are marvelous.

If you enjoy The Palm Beach Story, you should certainly try out other Preston Sturges films, especially The Lady Eve (1941), Sullivan's Travels (1941), and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944). For more comedy with Claudette Colbert, try It Happened One Night (1934), Midnight (1939),  and The Egg and I (1947). See Joel McCrea in The Most Dangerous Game (1932), The More the Merrier (1943), and Ride the High Country (1962). Mary Astor is best remembered today as the femme fatale in The Maltese Falcon (1941), but you'll also find her in The Great Lie (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). See more of Rudy Vallee in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947) and Sturges' darker comedy, Unfaithfully Yours (1948).

An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Examiner.com. The author retains all rights to this content.

Classic Films in Focus: THE MALTESE FALCON (1941)

Few classic films are more iconic than The Maltese Falcon (1941). It occupies the same rarefied space reserved for The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), and Casablanca (1942), yet its mood and style set it apart from the lavish spectacles created by the first two films, while its razor sharp nastiness makes it a different picture entirely from the third, even though they share several of the same stars. The Maltese Falcon is also unique in its role as the first appearance of a wholly new kind of American film, the noir picture, even though its roots lie in the gangster movies and European expressionist films of the 1930s. As lean and wolfish as Sam Spade himself, The Maltese Falcon remains one of the most famous of all movies because each of its many parts works so perfectly that the whole does indeed become the stuff that dreams are made of.

Based very closely on the novel by Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon presents the story of Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), a private detective in San Francisco who finds his latest case more trouble than he expected when his partner, Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan), turns up dead. His attractive client (Mary Astor) offers Spade so many different names and half truths that getting to the bottom of Miles' murder requires getting involved with the mysterious lady's affairs right up to Spade's frequently imperiled neck. The whole seedy business boils down to a pack of thieves and a near mythical statue that all of them are willing to kill to possess.

Director John Huston penned the screenplay himself, and he wisely retained Hammett's grimly humorous lines and almost the entire plot of the original novel; this is really one of the most faithful adaptations of a literary work ever filmed for the big screen, and it says something about the slim elegance of Hammett's prose that such fidelity is even possible, even more that a faithful adaptation can simultaneously make for such outstanding cinema. Hammett's brilliant, jaded dialogue would come to epitomize noir cool, with lines like "Mrs. Spade didn't raise any children dippy enough to make guesses in front of a district attorney, an assistant district attorney, and a stenographer" and "When you're slapped, you'll take it and like it." Naturally, there are a few changes. A subplot involving a girl in Gutman's retinue gets dropped, and the end of the film differs in some subtle but important ways. Oddly enough, Huston's ending is actually a little nicer than Hammett's, if one can call either ending "nice" at all.

Hammett had described his protagonist as "rather pleasantly like a blond Satan" in the novel, and of course Bogart is not blond, but he captures perfectly the balance of light and dark that make up Sam Spade's character. Spade is no hero, although he eventually tells Brigid O'Shaughnessy that he isn't as crooked as she might think, that being morally ambiguous is part of the job of being a private detective. He catches Miles' killer not because he liked Miles (he didn't), but because it's bad for business to let a job like that get by right under the detective's own nose. Spade lives a rough life and likes it that way as long as it pays well enough, and Bogart's devilish grin conveys his control over every ugly situation, particularly when he needles the tightly wound Wilmer (Elisha Cook, Jr.) and dances his way around the questions of the local cops.

The rest of the cast give the performances of their careers here. Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Mary Astor, and Elisha Cook, Jr. make for as faithless and dishonorable a den of thieves as one could hope for; their chemistry as a group crackles with equal parts menace and humor. As the effeminate Joel Cairo, Lorre walks a very fine line, suggesting the sexual attraction Cairo feels for Wilmer but keeping it subtle enough to get by the censors. Hammett had been able to get away with more of that aspect of the character in the novel, but it takes a character actor as brilliant as Lorre to make it work on screen without tempting the fate of the censors' morally anxious editors. Effie Perine, played beautifully by Lee Patrick, might be the only really lovable character in the whole thing, which is precisely why Spade won't give her the time of day. Astor, Patrick, and Gladys George as Iva Archer make a fascinating trinity of the feminine types that populate the noir world, and it's no surprise that the bad girls outnumber the good ones two to one.

The Maltese Falcon earned three Oscar nominations in 1942, although it won nothing, and How Green Was My Valley (1941) carried away all of the honors instead. In retrospect, Huston couldn't have felt too bad about that, since the other film that lost to the sentimental family drama that year was Citizen Kane (1941). For more of Bogart's best films, see The Big Sleep (1946), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), and The African Queen (1951), the last two of which were also directed by Huston. Look for Mary Astor in The Great Lie (1941), for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and in The Palm Beach Story (1942) and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). Don't miss Peter Lorre in M (1931) and Mad Love (1935), two early roles that helped to define the course of his macabre career. Elisha Cook Jr. turns up in all sorts of places, from Shane (1953) to Rosemary's Baby (1968), but he's great fun to watch in House on Haunted Hill (1959). You'll find Sydney Greenstreet in Christmas in Connecticut (1945) and The Woman in White (1948), but The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca are certainly his most memorable appearances on film.

An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Examiner.com. The author retains all rights to this content.

Classic Films in Focus: HUSH... HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (1964)

Southern Gothic is all about collapse, moral, physical, and psychological, but it clings to its faded charms. It's a painted blush on a corpse's cheek, a courtly bow from the Grim Reaper, a wrinkled hag in a debutante gown. We understand the connection between decadence and decay in this sort of tale, dripping with Spanish moss and smiling cruelty. In Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), director Robert Aldrich brings all of these elements into play to create an intelligent horror movie for adults, those who can understand that the real terror lies as much in the sagging lines of Bette Davis' aging face as it does in the gruesome shadows of the summer house.

Davis plays Charlotte Hollis, the last remnant of a wealthy Louisiana family, who is stubbornly rotting away in her ancestral mansion, despite the fact that the government is about to tear the house down in order to build a bridge. She has her own reasons for clinging to her home, all stemming from the brutal murder of her lover (Bruce Dern) that took place there nearly forty years before. Everyone in town thinks that Charlotte did it, but of course there's a lot more to the story than that, and all of the long hidden details begin to seep out with the arrival of Charlotte's cousin, Miriam Deering (Olivia de Havilland). Soon the house is full of strange sights and sounds. Is Charlotte finally losing her mind, or is something sinister at work in the dark rooms of Hollis House?

The film brings Bette Davis full circle from Jezebel (1938), an idea hinted at in the portrait of a young Davis that decorates Hollis House in the later film. It is actually a painting of the star in her earlier role as Julie Marsden, and, indeed, Charlotte is a lot like what Julie might have become, brittle, stormy and willful, a difficult woman aging badly and at war with the world. The movie was meant to capitalize on the success of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) by reuniting stars Davis and Joan Crawford, but Crawford left just a few days into filming and was eventually replaced by Olivia de Havilland. The change was a boon to the film, since de Havilland makes for a much more interesting counterpoint to Davis, and it makes a wonderful ironic statement to have the angelic martyr of Gone with the Wind (1939) play Jezebel's duplicitous foil.

The other players hold their own against the two leading ladies. We get Joseph Cotten drawling away as the scheming Drew Bayliss, Agnes Moorehead feisty and hard-faced as Velma, Mary Astor as the dying Jewel Mayhew, and Cecil Kellaway as the kindly insurance agent, Harry. Bruce Dern looks suitably tragic and troubled as Charlotte's lover, John Mayhew, and Victor Buono is terrific as her overbearing father, Big Sam. Moorehead won a Golden Globe and was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her part. Watch the studied lethargy she adopts whenever prying outsiders come around, the way she shifts her body language and facial expression between secret humane energy and assumed assumed insolent sloth.

Stunning visual compositions make full use of the black and white medium and suggest the themes and subtexts of the narrative. We see many instances of characters looking through windows or framed by windows and doors; the camera also emphasizes the opening and closing of doors in several key scenes. These images remind us how trapped Charlotte feels in Hollis House, but they also symbolize her imprisonment within her own mind; her antagonists make use of both of her prisons in their efforts to destroy her. Charlotte wanders through the faded rooms of the house at night, calling out for her murdered lover, herself a mere specter of the tragic girlish heroine she once had been. This house is definitely haunted, and the camera work builds our sense of dread beautifully, until we are fully prepared to be drawn into Charlotte's dreamlike vision of the ghostly party, where faceless revelers await the lovers' dance.

Nominated for seven Academy Awards, Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte is a rarity among horror films, although it has its peers in the likes of Gaslight (1944), Dragonwyck (1946), and The Night of the Hunter (1955). All of these Gothic thrillers have more in common with early horror than they do with the genre's modern incarnation. If you like goosebumps without gore, then these are the films for you. Try the sadly overlooked Lady in White (1988) for a modern revival of the classic Gothic style.

An earlier version of this review originally appeared on Examiner.com. The author retains all rights to this content.