Friday's Old Fashioned: Hold Your Man (1933)

“Hold Your Man” was the third film featuring Jean Harlow and Clark Gable, the follow-up to 1932’s “Red Dust”, an inconsistent yet nevertheless entirely memorable spate of pre-Hays Code ardor in which the Platinum Blonde spent most of the film aggressively flirting with her male co-star. That they wound up in each other’s arms at the end might have been a nod toward morals, but the overall movie is most remembered for its un-subtle salaciousness. And, for a little while, “Hold Your Man” suggests it might be going down the same road, what with the true enforcement of the Hays Code still a year or so away. Why director Sam Wood goes so far as to sort of re-create “Red Dust’s” most famous shot of Harlow in a tub by placing Gable in a tub instead, though it’s played more for comedy than for, ah, passion. That’s emblematic, however, of the confusion at the heart of “Hold Your Man.” Wood’s film is by far best in its early moments, when small-time thief Eddie Hall (Gable) infiltrates the apartment of Ruby Adams (Harlow) to evade the cops, which might technically be breaking and entering though it’s difficult to quibble on any real-world level in the face of the stars’ emergent magnetism, which appears onscreen like the click of a butane lighter, once Harlow and Gable get a look at one another, with her playing hard to get and him smiling back like he’s willing to play along for the rest of his life. Sigh. If only.

This apartment opening comes on the heels of a set-up with an air of authenticity. A wallet falls on the ground where Eddie and another fella pick it up and fight over the cash contained inside. The whole thing is a con, evoking “The Sting”, but that desire for cash, any cash, taken in conjunction with the conspicuously grim set design where For Rent signs dot the background buildings, is not turning a blind eye to the Depression, which even gets name-checked later. And both Eddie and Ruby, as we see her later working the angles with a guy that she doesn’t really love in an attempt to keep her financially afloat, are characters that have fallen through the cracks in the wake of economic disaster and are fighting to hang on. It might have been an interesting angle to see the whole way through, particularly because the movie does desire to get serious, just that it gets serious in a different way.

“Hold Your Man’s” real turn toward morals comes when Eddie and his partner in crime Slim (Garry Owen) decide to full a fast one on a married drunk with eyes for Ruby, blackmailing him into a payoff, though at the last minute Eddie decides to pull the plug because he can’t bear the thought of it. That leads to him proposing marriage to Ruby in one of those line readings that Gable strips of any romance for pure gruffness instead, which turns it deliriously, delightfully comical, and which Harlow has Ruby meet with that patented stuttering sentimental bamboozlement. But rather than explore these two lovebirds getting hitched, the script takes a turn for dark melodrama, forcing Ruby to take the fall when their would-be mark winds up dead. She is sent away to a woman’s reformatory, and when she is, the movie mostly moves Eddie out of the picture, leaving her on her own.

It might have been a really good idea, and you can see specks of it, where these many women in Ruby’s company seem to have suffered at the hands of men, men who have subsequently abandoned them and left them to rot, and where these no good men, intentionally or not, pit these women against one another as evinced by a past gal of Eddie’s who naturally winds up in the same reformatory as Ruby. This allows Harlow to employ her distinguished aptitude for self-pity, particularly when one of her pre-Eddie beaus turns up pledging to cut a deal to get her released if only she’ll marry him. Harlow lets her body virtually tremble as she listens to this pitch. It’s a moment when you think Ruby might well be about to take possession of herself. But, of course, this is a movie where the heroine can only achieve said status by conforming to the patriarchy, meaning she still has to marry anyway, just to Eddie, who, in essence, busts into prison while on the lam in order to say “I do” to the woman he loves. And even if my modern eyes might have liked to see this movie forge some excitingly unforeseen ending rather than a climactic marriage, well, sometimes the rote is still, on account of the players involved, resplendent.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Wife vs. Secretary (1936)

The stars, the concept, even the poster, all of it would seem readymade to mark Clarence Brown’s “Wife vs. Secretary” as a hijinks-laden love triangle or even an of-the-era advisory of a lasivicious working woman demonstrating that her place is really the hearth and home. And yet.....that "Vs." of the title is so terribly misleading. It's like the film's marketers wanted audiences to assume it was "Bride Wars" 73 years before "Bride Wars" was released. They wanted it to sound like a rom-com styled OK Corral Shootout. "Only ONE woman can wind up in Gable's arms. Who's it gonna be?!" They wanted to emit the air that it was another in an eternal supply of Hollywood confections that employ their brightest and best females as a means to be reductive to women, to put forth the antiquated idea that where there are two women there is bound to be claws and catfights.

Ah, but "Wife vs. Secretary", bless its forward-thinking soul, knows all this and subverts it, skillfully and successfully. Why it even goes one further and how asks how we look at others and what we see when we look at them and how quick we are to not only judge but to be influenced by scattershot opinions of the masses.

As the film opens, all seems tranquil with the principal trio. Van (Clark Gable) and Linda (Myrna Loy) are happily married and Van's magazine publishing company is running smoothly due in large part to the eternal efforts of his secretary, the unfortunately named Whitey (Jean Harlow). Really, truly, utterly, it's all hunky dory. But then "Wife vs. Secretary" conforms to the wicked stepmother stereotype as Van's mom (May Robson) points out to Linda, as if she hadn't noticed before, the natural effervescent attractiveness of her spouse's secretary. And later at a company party, so many wives of so many employees of Van tell Linda the same damn thing. They basically make Whitey out to be a strumpet because she's blonde and voluptuous and looks like Jean Harlow.

For the remainder of the film, Linda's viewpoint of Whitey is tainted by these baseless accusations. What she sees suggests nothing is amiss, but what she sees seems less than paramount to what she's been told, and so what she's been told becomes what she sees, not that a human being would ever fall prey to such an epistemological crisis. Ha! Take Whitey's boyfriend, this knucklehead named Dave (Jimmy Stewart). He doesn't think it's "natural" for a woman to be working. Natural! "Not made or caused by humankind." Like, on the ninth day God said, "The womenfolk don't work." And when Dave proposes to Whitey, partially out of love but partially out of "Because once you're wearing my ring I'll decree that you don't work no more", she rejects him.

Everything comes to a front at a conference in Havana that Van and Whitey attend as boss & secretary. Linda calls her husband's room only to have, sure enough, Whitey answer. Nothing was happening, but the instant Linda hears that nasally tart voice on the other end of the line every one of her misplaced suspicions comes true. And it's in the moments that follow when "Wife vs. Secretary" soars, putting Van and Whitey into the position where fulfilling carnal desire would be the obvious thing.

In my ongoing effort to watch every Harlow film, I dare say never has Harlean Carpenter been better. She sits on the end of Gable's bed, where his character sits drunkenly, with an impassive expression that still conveys a rolodex of emotion. It's as if every opinion everyone has ever formed of her, whether true or untrue, has been made to bear, dropped on her at once, and the toll the age-old weapon of innuendo can take is palpable. Yet in spite of the slander, she maintains her virtue, and perhaps "Wife vs. Secretary" would have done best to end right there even if various entanglements would have gone unresolved. Instead a little phony baloney is tossed on top, including Whitey getting back together with that tweedle-dum Dave and her awesome integrity is idiotically compromised. The film was smart enough to subvert sexual politics of the day, yet stupid enough to still fall prey to them.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Red Dust (1932)

Per TCM, "Red Dust" was banned from showing in Berlin, "deemed too hot for Nazified Germany." Well, you can certainly see what must have left Hitler in such a dither. This was 1932, two years into the Hays Code, but two years before the Hays Code was genuinely enforced, and the sexuality of "Red Dust" is so overt that had the MPAA been around (imagine the MPAA and Will Hays uniting! Egads!) this whole glorious cinematic kerfuffle would have been hit with an NC-17 broadside.

Set in a rubber plantation on Indochina, the film offers an early shot of a tiger, lurking in the jungle, striding right into the camera, told to be preying on the plantation's workers, but mostly just hanging out on the periphery of the film to function as a growling symbol of the animalistic nature of sex and love (or is it just sex and not the other?). But that tiger, in spite of being an actual tiger, feels less palpable than the "Life of Pi"-esque CGI carnivore manifestation. This is specifically because the real tiger in "Red Dust" is Jean Harlow, ribald and grinning and having the time of her life.

The famous scene - re-created in her pre-eminent "Bombshell" - features Harlow in a rain barrel. According to legend, Harlow was naked for realsies and demonstrated this fact by briefly flaunting her unadorned chest region for the pleasure of the hard-working crew. Director Victor Fleming quickly evaced this no doubt striking footage for understandable reasons, yet more or less serves the same shot earlier when Harlow bends down and allows her cleavage to roll around in full view for whole the viewing audience. My apologies to all if that sounds crass, but the shot is the shot. Fact.

The first time we meet Harlow as the woman of the night Vantine, she more or less emerges from the indoor equivalent of the mist - her voice heard off screen, her figure shrouded in darkness, and a light going on to reveal her perched in bed in a kind of nightgown that seems more appropriate for a suite at the Plaza then at a plantation in Indochina. Which is where she is. Why she's there escapes me. It was mentioned, I merely fail to recall. Of course, the "why" is not as crucial to the story as the why, which is that she needs to provide counterbalance and temptation to the plantation owner.

He is Dennis Carson, a character whom I really feel like could have used a more baroque name, played by Clark Gable without the mustache and, in one scene, without an undershirt, which was the 1932 equivalent of Kevin Bacon momentarily going sans towel in "Wild Things." He is immediately at odds with Vantine, perhaps because her take-no-shit attitude is too reminiscent of his own. He wants her gone, but the boat meant to carry her downriver to Singapore is in need of repairs. (And you can't tell me Vantine didn't employ her feminine wiles to ensure the boat needed repairs.)

The plot thickens when Dennis's new surveyor, Gary Willis (Gene Raymond) arrives with his bride Barbara (Mary Astor), not cut out for the monsoon lifestyle. Quite quickly the differences between the effete and societal Barbara and the uncouth and sassy Vantine become apparent, and an obligatory sexual push/pull emerges. Barbara finds herself swept up into the arms of Dennis when a storm materializes out of nowhere, and with it goes any sense of her decorum. He unlocks something within her. Thus, she throws herself at him, and he sends her husband off to do work deep in the jungle to provide a clear runway to a classic case of plantation adultery. And Vantine watches from the sideline.

 
It might be fashionable to say that Vantine is the devil on Dennis’s right shoulder and Barbara is the angel on Dennis’s left shoulder, but that is not quite right. Rather Vantine is the devil on Dennis’s shoulder and Dennis is the devil on Barbara’s shoulder and Barbara is the angel wracked with insecurity. In real life, Harlow was wracked by insecurity, and from the numerous films of hers I watched this past year, that insecurity is often on display. And while in “Red Dust” her character looks at Barbara with both envious and jealous eyes, Barbara is truly the one suffering from a crisis of identity, repressed until now.

Why else would she fall into an affair at a clap of thunder? Raymond does not present much competition to Gable – Barbara actually calls him “helpless” – but then this is not so much about a love triangle about competition as it is about self-recognition (or the opposite). Barbara is made to realize that she truly has no sense of her self, and while her spouse sort of mans up at the end, it's really more of a faux-manning up, perpetrated by Dennis and Vantine as much as himself. No, it's difficult not to see Barbara slinking off to an everlasting marriage of misery. But hey, at least now she won't be denying it.

Dennis, meanwhile, is made to recognize he is where he belongs, a grimy plantation owner keeping time with the lowest common demoninator. Vantine is the only one who seems able to recognize her life's position from the get-go, even if she thinks of herself as no good. You get what you think you deserve.

Friday's Old Fashioned: China Seas (1935)

Alan Gaskell (Clark Gable) is set to pilot his steamship from Hong Kong to Singapore, though the China Seas, a dastardly mass of water if there ever was one, what with the looming threat of piracy and potential typhoons. It’s enough to drive a captain to drink during his stopover onshore, which is precisely what Gaskell has been doing, which is why he appears worse for wear as he navigates the swarming docks to where his ship awaits. But soon enough we see what’s really weighing on Gaskell. Hey, pirates are ornery and storms are volatile, but neither can compare to the combative winds of Jean Harlow.

Harlow was beautiful, of course, but what truly made her a star’s star was the attitude. She was a blonde fireball as much as a bombshell, able to go toe-to-toe with any gruff male, as she does repeatedly with Gable in “China Seas.” Yet, at the same time, we sense a second layer beneath all that feistiness, as she convincingly demonstrates a vulnerability covered up with sassy retorts. Per TCM, Irving Thalberg, producing boy wonder, supposedly said of the film: “To hell with art this time.” He merely wanted a box office bonanza, an action-adventure on the high seas, rollicking stunt work on a display in a studio-made monsoon, and that’s all there to fine effect, sure, but there is also emotional oomph for a garnish.

As the unfortunately named China Doll, Harlow is the main squeeze of Gable’s Captain. Or so she thinks. Because when the Captain enters his quarters who comes traipsing outta the powder room but China Doll. He was set to set sail without her, see, and then tries to escort her back to dry land, but, nuh uh, she’s staying put. Alas, when an old lost love of Gaskell, the elegant and refined (she’s English!!!) Sybil (Rosalind Russell), comes aboard and makes eyes at Gaskell and he makes eyes at her, poor China Doll’s whole life plan is on the verge of going overboard.

Here, we might expect a screwball scheme to emerge as China Doll attempts to re-woo Gaskell and slander Sybil. Not quite. Rather during dinner at the Captain’s table, China Doll cozies up to the Jamesy McArdle (Wallace Beery), a hard-drinking lout, cut of the same uncultured cloth. In the process, China Doll quite obviously makes a fool of herself, talking loud and saying a lot of nasty stuff, apparently assuming that misplaced bravado will fool people into thinking this is her brave face. Sybil sees right through it and calls her out. And though you feel bad for Sybil and everyone else at the table, Harlow lets you feel her hurt too.

She loves Gaskell, she does, and fears it’s her down by the boondocks countenance that has caused him to seek solace in the arms of high society. Thus, when she discovers that McArdle, posing as Gaskell’s ally, has hatched a scheme to allow pirates onboard, arm them and steal all the gold squired away in the safe so that he can get a cut, she is torn. Torn by love, torn by anger, torn by jealousy. That sounds dark, but it is handled more in the manner of the yarn the title suggests.

Action scenes abound, including the obligatory typhoon that swoops in and sends waves crashing across the deck which, in turn, allow for bouts of both heroism and cowardice. Pirates attack and shots are fired and they seek the gold in the safe as Jamesy subtly plays both sides. And these effects, I must admit, remind me how much I prefer manmade wind and rain to computer made wind and rain. The computer stuff looks real. The manmade stuff feels real. Not that it matters so much since the effects are merely filler between the Harlow and Gable and Beery banter. Harlow and Gable and Beery banter, as we know, trump any tempest.

And Harlow, as we know, must trump Russell. Which Russell found, per TCM, “patently absurd.” She may have got along winningly with Harlow the person, but the character Harlow was playing? “How can you spend time with her?” Russell theoretically wondered of Gable. “She’s rather vulgar, isn’t she?” Maybe. But maybe one woman’s vulgar is another man’s lively.

On the surface, “China Seas” might appear undone by a classic Idiot Plot development, in so much as China Doll goes to Gaskell’s cabin to warn him of McArdle’s behind-the-scenes nefariousness. Gaskell keeps stopping her warning short, telling her off, sending her away, wanting nothing to do with her. It could be argued as an Idiot Plot because if China Doll simply were to shout “McArdle and a bunch of pirates are going to steal the gold!”, the remainder of the film would cease to exist. That she chooses to refrain from shouting it out is not on account of her being idiot, far from it. Rather she is demonstrating who rules the roost.

If her behavior puts all the other passengers in peril, well, so be it. Harlow is the queen, the ship is her castle, and all the rest are merely her subjects.