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.”
Now Clark was a husky guy and a good sport, but it was not practical for him to be a hero and hold me up for the hour or so the shot would take to line up and shoot. So first of all, a stool had to be found which was the correct height to support most of my weight. Out of sight, of course; they were cutting about elbow high.
A prop man and a carpenter shoved a stool under my bottom as Clark hoisted me up, his right arm supporting me under my knees, his left under my shoulders.
From behind the camera: “Too high! Too high! Her head’s gotta be lower t
han his.” The carpenter started in with a saw on one of the legs.
“Wait a minute! Check it in the finder, first. Let’s see where you’re going to be, kids.”
“Clark, just before you kiss her, swing her an inch or two, so we get your full face.”
We tried it.
Vic said, “Too much, too much—back just a little.” Peering through the camera lens.
Clark said, “It’s uncomfortable. I’ll never hit it right.”
“Yes, you will. Just clear the key light on her neck, see it?”
“Why don’t you move the camera?” asked Clark.
“I don’t want to move the camera. It’s a natural move, Clark.”
“OK, OK.”
. . .
[During a break, while the stand-ins took the set] I had my usual bad-tempered argument with the makeup man about too much makeup. He pursued me, carrying a powder puff like an extension of his arm.
Soothingly he said, “The freckles are coming through on your forehead, Mary. Let me just touch it up with a leetle bit of pancake.”
“OK, but no lipstick, Harry—you know what Mr. Fleming said. All that rain. I’d never have any makeup left.”
“Looks so naked.”
“That’s what he wants.”
. . .
[For the rehearsal] I hoisted myself onto the stool. As Clark took his position he cracked, “Hey, you’ve lost weight!”
The head gaffer, kneeling under the camera, asked Clark, “This gonna be too hot?” Indicating an eyelight.
“Gee-sus it is hot,” Clark replied. “It’ll make me squint, Gus.”
“No it won’t. We really need it.”
“Then it’s not too hot. Whadja ask for?”
The gaffer grinned and said, “Got anything in the fifth on Saturday?”
“Yeah, I gotta honey.”
“Lemme in on it, huh?”
“Sure, later.”
Finally Vic came in from behind the camera so that he could talk to us quietly. And we started to think about the scene. What happened previously, relationships, emotional levels, etc.
“Let’s just move through it once,” Vic says. “The look needn’t be very long, Clark. Mary, keep it simple. Real. Just be there.”
He turned and disappeared behind the lights.
“Let’s make one, okay?” He calls. “Don’t need a rehearsal. Just mean it. Think. Feel.” To the camera crew: “Can we go?”
Hal Rosson didn’t like that. “No rehearsal? Well, let me check their position when they kiss. We could move in, you know.”
Vic said, “I don’t want to move in, goddam it. I don’t want to move the camera. Let the people do it, not the camera.”
Rosson interrupted to say, “Give us a look, people.”
Clark leaned his head close to me and our lips were barely touching. Loudly, he asked, “How’s this?” I jumped a little and he said, “Sorry, baby.”
“No good. We’re just getting the top of your head.”
We maneuvered fractional changes, our noses getting in the way.
“Hold it, hold it! That’s fine, if you raise her just a little—too much, too much. Right there, that’s beautiful, perfect.”
Clark whispered to me, “That’s where we were in the first place.”
The assistant director checked his watch. It was getting close to lunch time. “OK, can we go? Let’s wet ’em down!”
Clark said, “Here we go, baby,” as we unwound and he helped me down from the stool.
We went over and stood just off the set in a shallow bathtub arrangement made of tarpaper and two by fours, and the man in the raincoat turned the hoses on us. After the heat of the lights, the water felt icy and we gasped and yelled as it hit us.
The assistant said, “Let’s go, let’s go! Let’s get ’em while they’re wet!” The makeup man popped in to wipe a drop from the end of my nose. “Git outta there, Harry!”
Now it was quiet. Now we were ready to go. To do what they paid us all that money for. To use our acquired ability to concentrate, to focus all our thoughts and emotions on the scene.
This is what they’ll see up there on the screen in the theaters, although that isn’t what you think of at the time. The best way I can describe what happens is with the phrase, “as though”; we think and act “as though.” As though at that moment we were in the grip of an emotion bringing us violently together in the first taste of lips . . .
Somebody’s laughing. Out there behind the lights.
It was pin-drop silence. Then somebody chuckled from behind the camera. Clark’s head jerked up, shocked, mad. Then the whole crew started laughing into loud guffaws.
Vic said, “Cut it! Cut it!” then came in to us. “It’s a very hot scene, kids, but not that hot! You’re steaming!”
And we were, literally. The hot lights had vaporized the water on our clothes and skin, and it was rising in waves.
After the laughter and kidding and the joke was over, the problem remained. Everybody made a suggestion to solve it.
Then there was the question of lunch time. After lunch we were scheduled to move to another set—a “dry” scene. During lunch time I was to have my hair set and a new makeup. If we waited until after lunch to get this sequence shot, the production would be held up for at least an hour for the hairset and makeup renewal. And time was valuable.
The problem was solved. The water had to be heated. Since the source for the hoses couldn’t be heated, we simply stayed in position with the lights on until we stopped steaming. To prevent our drying out, [the propman Harry Edwards] kept us wet by pouring teakettles of warm water over our heads and shoulders.
To the assistant director [Hugh Boswell], who must keep things on schedule, it’s all very hurry-up, very urgent. But the situation has given the rest of us the sillies. Somebody says, “Clark, wanna deck of cards? You and Mary could play a hand of gin rummy while you’re waiting!”
And all the time the assistant director is chanting, “Can we go? Can we go, fellas?”
There’s a muscle in my shoulder that’s beginning to complain. “Can I stand up a minute?” I ask.
“No, Mary,” Vic says. “We’re all set. Don’t move out of it. Wet ’em down a little more.” The warm water dribbles on our hair. Clark says, “What, no soap?”
“Okay, roll ’em!”
And the scene was shot . . . And it was a print. “Lunch everybody. One hour! Crew back in a half hour.”
The weird part of it all is that it never occurred to anyone, including Clark and me, that all this might have had a bad effect on the mood, or on our ability to play a love scene convincingly. But that’s the way it was. The way it always is. The way it is today, on any movie set.
Under Fleming’s guidance, Gable and Astor did manage to conjure a suitable romantic cataclysm for Dennis and Barbara—and after it, for a while, Vantine hovers around the edges. Harlow, though, earns her star billing as Vantine deftly deflates the lovers’ high-flown image of themselves. She’s a marvelous clown, slapping around naked in the plantation’s big water barrel. Carried away with good humor and exuberance, the nude Harlow shot up on her feet in the rain barrel and proclaimed, “Something for the boys in the lab!” Knowing that the footage would get around, Fleming jerked the film right out of the camera. It was one of those times when the assistant director Willard Sheldon saw two facets of Fleming at once: “Very hard-nosed, yet he had this sensitive side which always surprised me.” He helped Harlow imbue Vantine with an understated poignancy, especially when Dennis offhandedly treats her like a whore. The wardrobe man Ted Tetrick said, “I felt he pulled things out of people based on what he wanted. Never above, never below.”
When her partners praised Harlow’s timing, they weren’t merely talking about her ability to put over Mahin’s crackling innuendos and euphemisms, such as Vantine scraping the bottom of a parrot’s cage and asking, “What have you been eating, cement?” Harlow’s Vantine is magnetic when Dennis puts her down and s
he struggles to show him that she could be the right gal for him—without airs and ambitions, she can buck him up as he does his duty. Dennis has built his authority by displaying strength and loyalty in an unforgiving land; he comes to realize that he can be honorable with the whore, not with the pedigreed married woman. And that comprehension hurts. The jolly ending carries a tinge of pathos. Dennis looks happy with Vantine; still, when he fleetingly recalls Barbara, he looks wounded.
If the stars were “playing themselves,” Harlow would have been the wounded one. Midway through filming, on Labor Day 1932, her husband committed suicide, when she was in their house and would find his body. Just two months before, Harlow had married Paul Bern, a literate MGM executive and Thalberg’s dearest friend. On paper, he seemed a good prospect to provide a stable family life. Bern, though, was deeply troubled and impotent. As Harlow’s biographer David Stenn uncovered in his analysis of this tragic scandal, the MGM damage-control machine, normally so reliable at protecting the studio’s human assets, delayed the arrival of police and raised suspicions of a cover-up. It would take weeks to deflate the suspicion that Harlow drove her husband to suicide. Production resumed two days later, as Fleming shot around Harlow and staged scenes with Gable, Astor, and Raymond. It was possible that Harlow would be replaced and her scenes reshot. Mayer offered her role to Tallulah Bankhead, who called his doing so “one of the shabbiest acts of all time.” But during the week, emerging details of Bern’s life before Harlow, such as his previous, common-law marriage to a woman who was obsessed with him, began to swing public feeling Harlow’s way. On Monday, September 12, Harlow returned to the set.
Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Screen Classics) Page 24
