The Secret 6 (1931)

When we think of Hollywood gangster movies of the early 1930s we don’t really think of MGM, but in fact MGM made several gangster pictures. The most notable was The Beast of the City (1932) which in my view is the greatest gangster picture of them all. A more unusual MGM gangster movie is The Secret 6, released in 1931. It was directed by George W. Hill.

Louis Scorpio (Wallace Beery) works in the stockyards and is affectionately known as Slaughterhouse. He gets involved in bootlegging in a small way in the town of Centro but when his boss and former pal Johnny Franks (Ralph Bellamy) double-crosses him he decides he’d like to be the boss. He guns down Johnny.

The real boss of this crime organisation is crooked lawyer Richard Newton (Lewis Stone). Being a lawyer as well as a gang boss makes Newton a formidable figure.

Slaughterhouse’s first move after taking over from Johnny Franks is to establish complete political control of the town. He engineers the election of bootlegger and gunman Nick “the Gouger” Mizoski (Paul Hurst) as mayor.

It seems like nothing can stop the rise of Newton and Slaughterhouse and soon they’re in control of crime in the city as well. They rely not just on gunplay but on large-scale bribery. They pay off city officials and also newspapermen, including Hank Rogers (Johnny Mack Brown) and Carl Luckner (Clark Gable).

Anne (Jean Harlow) is one of the gang’s women but she falls for Hank in a big way, which will have consequences.

The authorities may be powerless to stop these gangster but there are those who are determined to put an end to organised crime in the city. These men are the Secret 6, a group of important men who have formed a vigilante organisation. It’s a rather disturbing idea. This has to be one of the earliest Hollywood movies to deal with vigilante justice, but it would not be the last. The Secret 6 all wear masks which gives this movie a bit of a pulp fiction flavour, and also perhaps a slight Edgar Wallace flavour.

It’s interesting that both the notable MGM gangster movies, this one and The Beast of the City, are slightly unusual (although in different ways) with a flavour that differentiates them from Warner Brothers gangster films of the same era.

Slaughterhouse never manages to acquire even a veneer of sophistication. He’s uncouth and maybe not overly bright but he is ruthless and he has Newton’s brains to rely on. You do have to wonder if Slaughterhouse is really smart enough to be a gang boss. Wallace Beery is good as Slaughterhouse but maybe a bit too much of a cheery likeable working-class rough diamond to be really menacing.

Lewis Stone is smooth and sinister as Newton. Ralph Bellamy is excellent.

This was a very early rôle for Jean Harlow (she was nineteen at the time) but she shows definite flashes of the Harlow magic.

It’s also an early rôle for Clark Gable. He was not yet a star but he soon would be. Watching his performance in this movie his star quality is already evident.

This was the movie that convinced MGM that Harlow and Gable were star material and the rest is history.

There’s plenty of violence but it’s nowhere near as graphic as the blood-drenched The Beast of the City.

The ending is a bit contrived and a bit rushed. Frances Marion had a distinguished career as a screenwriter but gangster movies were not her forte and the script doesn’t quite hold together as well as one would like.

Director George W. Hill keeps things moving at a breakneck pace which helps to disguise the weaknesses of the script.

The Secret 6 is an intriguing and entertaining gangland saga and the presence of Harlow and Gable helps enormously. Recommended.

The Warner Archive DVD is of course barebones but provides a very good transfer.

Red-Headed Woman (1932)

Red-Headed Woman, directed by Jack Conway and released by MGM in 1932, is perhaps the most cheerfully amoral of all pre-code movies. In fact it might even be described as cheerfully immoral. It’s huge amounts of fun either way.

It’s one of Jean Harlow’s three greatest movies (the others being Red Dust and Bombshell).

Lil Andrews (Jean Harlow) is a girl on the make. She was born on the wrong side of the tracks but she intends to get herself over onto the right side of the tracks and stay there. She has set her sights on her boss, Bill Legendre Jr (Chester Morris). He’s an up-and coming executive but more importantly his family has pots of money. And respectability. Marrying Bill would be a smart movie for Lil. There are however two minor problems. Bill is already married, and he loves his wife. Lil believes that these are very minor obstacles.

What Lil’s seduction technique lacks in subtlety it makes up for in sheer fanatical determination. She is simply not going to give up.

Lil achieves her objective but then finds she has some major new problems to deal with. She has made an advantageous marriage but respectable society in Renwood will not have anything to do with her. She is snubbed, in a particularly callous and cruel way. Lil is genuinely hurt and humiliated.

But you can’t keep a bad girl down. No matter how severe the setback Lil will always pick herself up and try again. Or, more usually, she will try a different strategy. She has a pretty clever strategy in mind to deal with this situation and she has prepared the groundwork already.

Lil will have plenty of further ups and downs but she will never admit defeat.

The very pre-code ending is everything one could hope for.

Harlow is in sparkling form. Lil is unscrupulous and dishonest and manipulative but one can’t help admiring her unquenchable spirit. She is also vulgar, trashy and obvious but that’s the secret to her success. Girls who are pretty, sexy and trashy are irresistible to men. And Lil oozes sex. Lil could have been a monster but Harlow manages to get the audience on Lil’s side. She’s just such a cute adorable bad girl.

Harlow of course looks gorgeous. She looks gorgeous in a cheap glitzy trashy sort of way but Harlow could always pull that off with style.

Chester Morris is pretty good as well. Where Lil is concerned Bill is torn between repulsion and attraction and Morris conveys this effectively.

Una Merkel almost steals the picture as Lil’s best friend, the delightfully ditzy Sally. Una Merkel is always fun in pre-code movies.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the screenplay but Irving Thalberg hated it. It lacked the wit and playfulness that Thalberg wanted, so he hired Anita Loos to do a complete rewrite. Loos was the right woman for the job. This is the sort of thing she did supremely well and she produced a sparkling and very playfully naughty script which delighted Thalberg.

It’s that playfulness that incensed the moral watchdogs. It’s bad enough that the movie deals with adultery but to deal with that subject flippantly and with cheerful approval was just too much. This is wickedness played for laughs. 

Even worse, when her men lose patience with her and slap her she enjoys it.

Lil has her share of temporary defeats but at no time does it ever occur to her that she is doing anything morally wrong. When things get tough for her that just means that she needs to readjust her strategy. She has never considered the option of becoming a good girl. She intends to be a rich girl. She was born without any of the advantages that would allow her to be a rich good girl, so she’ll be a rich bad girl. She never has any regrets and she never apologises for being what she is.

And the movie never apologies for being what it is. If you’re thinking that maybe somewhere along the line some hint of moral disapproval, or some hint that sin has to be paid for, will sneak its way into this picture then you’re going to be disappointed. As far as this movie is concerned sin pays.

Red-Headed Woman is one of the great pre-code movies. Very highly recommended.

Red Dust (1932)

Red Dust is a steamy tropical 1932 pre-code adventure/romance from MGM. Jean Harlow and Clark Gable were at this time two of the fastest rising stars in Hollywood and this movie enhanced their star status quite a bit.

Dennis Carson (Gable) is a rubber planter in Cochin-China, the southern part of what is now Vietnam. He’s a bit of a rough diamond. It’s a hard life and it attracts hard men. But it’s the life he’s used to. His life is totally disrupted by the arrival of two women. One woman would have been disturbing enough. Dennis does not approve of women on the plantation.

The first arrival is Vantine (Jean Harlow). She has more or less invited herself. She needs to lie low for a while after a misunderstanding with the police. Vantine is a sweet cheerful high-spirited whore. She makes herself at home.

The second arrival is Barbara Willis (Mary Astor). Her husband Gary (Gene Raymond) has taken up a position as some kind of assistant to Dennis. Dennis had no idea Gary was going to be fool enough to bring his wife with him. A rubber plantation is no place for a woman. Dennis would normally be anxious to get rid of her, except that he finds her very attractive. Of course she’s a married woman but it doesn’t occur to Dennis that that might be a problem.

Dennis had hoped he’d seen the last of Vantine when he shipped her off on the river steamer but the boat ran aground and now Vantine is likely to be staying around for several weeks. Vantine thinks Dennis is rather cute. She’s just a little bit in love with him. Well, maybe more than a little bit. They’ve already slept together.

Barbara is totally out of place in a jungle plantation. She should be shopping for clothes in Manhattan or taking tea in civilised surroundings. She’s never had any contact with rough uncivilised people. She’s certainly never met a man like Dennis Carson before. He’s so….manly. She starts to feel things she’s never felt before. It excites her.

Dennis would be better off with Vantine. She’s a whore but she’s a good-natured whore. She could handle life on the plantation. And she could handle a man like Dennis.

Dennis however wants Barbara. She’s a lady, and he’s never had a lady before.

Things get pretty tense. Vantine is consumed by jealousy. Dennis plots to get Gary out of the way for a few weeks. Then he decides he’ll have to have it out with Gary. He figures Gary will be a bit upset for a while about having his wife stolen from him but he’ll get over it.

You know how it’s all going to end, or at least you think you do. But this is pre-code Hollywood. The rules of narrative were quite different. Writers not only had more freedom in dealing with sexual subject matter, they had a lot more freedom when it came to plot development and endings. This movie would have ended very very differently once the Production Code came into force.

This movie is not a comedy but it’s not a straight melodrama either. Genre conventions were also different in the pre-code era. Red Dust combines comedy, melodrama and adventure.

Gable and Harlow are unbelievably sexy, and they’re funny. Harlow is dazzling. I’ve always had mixed feelings about Mary Astor but she’s terrific here as a woman who has always been ladylike and totally under control but suddenly finds herself swept away by lust. She’s like a cat on heat.

Being a pre-code movie Red Dust is delightfully open about sex. If the movie hadn’t already made it blindingly obvious that Vantine is a prostitute the point is hammered home when Dennis pays her for her services. We’re also left in no doubt whatever that Dennis and Barbara have not only slept together, they’ve been sleeping together regularly for weeks.

There’s plenty of pre-code risqué dialogue and of course there’s Harlow taking a bath in the drinking water barrel.

This movie was remade in the 50s as Mogambo. Mogambo isn't terrible but compared to Red Dust it's bland and dull and sexless.

Red Dust is overheated and dripping with sweaty eroticism. It’s also funny and charming. One of the great pre-code movies. Very highly recommended.

Red Dust is available on DVD in the Warner Archive series and it looks very very good.

The Beast of the City (1932)

The Beast of the City, released in 1932, was MGM’s attempt at the gangster movie genre. It’s based on a story by W. R. Burnett and was directed by Charles Brabin.

To say that Captain Jim Fitzpatrick (Walter Huston) is a hardboiled cop would be putting it mildly. He’s not just hardboiled, he’s impetuous and obsessive. And he’s obsessed with putting big-time mobster Sam Belmonte (Jean Hersholt) behind bars. Fitzpatrick is honest but he’s prepared to stretch the rules a little to get results.

His attempts to nail Belmonte for the murder of four bootleggers backfire, and Fitzpatrick finds himself transferred to the quietest precinct the Chief of Police can find, where he can’t get himself into hot water.

His brother Ed Fitzpatrick (Wallace Ford) is a cop as well.

Hoping to find even a shred of evidence to use against Belmonte Jim Fitzpatrick has a bunch of blondes brought in for questioning. He hopes that a witness can ID Daisy Stevens (Jean Harlow) for her part in a robbery. Daisy is pretty hardboiled as well and she knows how to handle cops.

Perhaps not altogether wisely Ed Fitzpatrick pays a visit to Daisy’s home. He falls for her considerable and very obvious charms. Given that this is Jean Harlow it would be difficult for any man to resist those charms. Seducing Ed is child’s play.

Jim Fitzpatrick hits the headlines after foiling a bank robbery and the moral reformers push for him to be made Chief of Police. His job is to clean up the town. People are having fun and someone has to put a stop to that.

Ed had hoped that with his brother now Chief of Police he’d get an immediate promotion. It doesn’t happen. Ed is bitter about this and he finds that maintaining a mistress like Daisy is an expensive proposition. He gets drawn into the rackets. In a small way at first, and then in a big way. He tips off Belmonte’s chief henchman about a shipment of bank money. The heist goes badly wrong. Ed ends up facing a murder charge. Jim Fitzpatrick is keen to see his brother go to the electric chair. Jim is not a forgiving kind of guy.

It all leads up to a finale that is one of the most extraordinary you’ll see in any gangster movie. Jim has a plan to nail Belmonte. It’s breathtakingly ruthless. Jim will use any methods, any methods at all, to get the result he wants.

Wallace Ford is very good as Ed Fitzpatrick but it’s Walter Huston and Jean Harlow who take centre stage. Huston manages to be incredibly intense without resorting to any histrionics. In the same year he played a very similar role as an obsessed lawman in the superb western Law and Order, a movie which has strong thematic affinities with this one.

Harlow is delightful. She does the full-blown sexy bad girl thing and, unconstrained by the Production Code, she sizzles.

There’s some classic pre-code dialogue. Ed grabs Daisy’s arms. She tells him he’s hurting her. He says she doesn’t like being hurt. She replies that sometimes it’s kinda fun, if it’s done in the right spirit.

This is an extremely violent brutal movie but it’s intelligent and provocative as well. Is Sam Belmonte the beast of the city, or is it Jim Fitzpatrick? Jim is entirely humourless and he’s utterly convinced that he is right. He has convinced himself that any methods can be justified, no matter how brutal. It never occurs to him that he may have become an inhuman monster.

Not surprisingly MGM were horrified by this movie when they saw it and made sure it disappeared into obscurity. One of the many things that frightened MGM was the implication that mobsters and the police can end up being almost indistinguishable, and that good men who believe themselves to be right can be horribly dangerous.

This movie is available on DVD in the Warner Archive series, with a very good transfer.

The Beast of the City is one of the most interesting of pre-code gangster films. Had it been made by Warner Brothers it might have been a major hit but MGM was the wrong studio for it. Very highly recommended.

Bombshell (1933)

Bombshell (later retitled Blonde Bombshell) is a 1933 MGM pre-code comedy with Jean Harlow playing a Hollywood star who is a bit like - Jean Harlow. With some hints of other famous (and notorious) female movie stars including fairly obviously Clara Bow. In fact there’s a great deal of Clara Bow in the character played by Harlow. It’s not exactly an exposé of Hollywood sex and sin. It’s more a glorious lighthearted celebration of Hollywood decadence but with plenty of satirical swipes at the hypocrisy, phoneyness and insanity of Tinsel Town.

Harlow plays Lola Burns, currently the biggest star in Hollywood. To say that Lola’s life is crazy would be putting it mildly. Some the craziness is caused by her family - her boozy bombastic father (played by Frank Morgan) and her worthless alcoholic brother Junior (Ted Healy). Some is caused by her constant succession of boyfriends. Her latest paramour is an Italian nobleman, the Marquis Hugo di Binelli di Pisa (Ivan Lebedeff). Hugo is really just a jumped-up penniless gigolo but Lola has fallen for the phoney nobleman schtick. Some of the craziness is engineered by Lola’s publicist E.J. ‘Space’ Hanlon (Lee Tracy). And a lot of the craziness stems from Lola’s bewildering series of enthusiasms.

Lola didn’t get to the top in Hollywood by being an intellectual genius. She’s the archetypal ditzy blonde. But she’s sweet and she’s adorable.

Her current director Jim Brogan (Pat O’Brien) is in love with her and wants to marry her. Space Hanlon is in love with her and wants to marry her. Naturally each of them tries to sabotage the other’s romantic efforts.

Lola resents Space’s efforts to drum up publicity for her. She thinks that it’s always bad publicity. But Space understands that bad publicity is good publicity. That’s a concept Lola has never been able to grasp.

Lola’s latest enthusiasm is babies. She wants a baby. At least she wants to adopt a baby. Or at least she wants to take a baby home from the orphanage on 30 day approval.

Lola will have to be interviewed by two very respectable elderly ladies to determine her suitability as an adoptive mother. While the interview is being conducted her household naturally erupts into total chaos.

Harlow is in dazzling form. She’s sexy and she gets some risqué lines and this being a pre-code movie she doesn’t need to tone down her innate sexiness at all. She’s also extremely funny. This might not be her best movie but it’s definitely her funniest performance. And while Lola Burns is incredibly ditzy we never lose sight of the fact that she’s a nice girl and fundamentally good-natured. We don’t have to feel bad about laughing at her. There’s nothing mean-spirited about the way Lola Burns is portrayed.

We really want Lola to be happy and to find love.

I’ve always felt that a little bit of Lee Tracy goes a long way but surprisingly I really liked him in this movie. Space Hanlon is supposed to be a deplorable human being. Somehow Tracy makes him rather likeable - he has no morals and no ethics but this is Hollywood and he’s no worse than anyone else in that town and he really isn’t malicious. He just wants publicity for Lola, that’s his job and he’s good at it. And I have to admit that in Bombshell he’s funny.

The supporting cast is simply wonderful. Frank Morgan as Lola’s father, Una Merkel as her personal secretary, Louise Beavers as her maid and Leonard Carey as her hapless butler are the standouts but there’s not a bad performance in the film.

This is a very meta movie. At one point Lola is doing reshoots for one of her earlier movies, Red Dust. And Lola is referred to as the It Girl, which was of course the moniker applied to Clara Bow. It’s also very clear that in this movie Jean Harlow is an actress playing the part of an actress whose life is a performance. It gets quite postmodern at times. It’s obvious that Harlow understood all this - her performance is sly and clever.

When the mood switches to romance the romance with wealthy Boston blue-blood Gifford Middleton (Franchot Tone) plays out like a scene from a 1920s Hollywood romantic melodrama with Tone playing his rôle in a deliberately cornball way.

Being a pre-code movie the dialogue gets quite risqué at times. You never doubt for a moment that all these people have sex regularly and regard it as a normal part of life. And marriage is strictly optional. The movie isn’t attacking marriage or love. Lola wants love. And probably marriage. But it certainly doesn’t suggest that that has to mean devoting herself to baking and child-rearing.

The Warner Archive DVD is barebones but it’s a decent transfer. It would of course be nice to see an extras-laden Blu-Ray boxed set of Harlow’s superb pre-code movies but so far there’s no sign of that happening.

Bombshell is a delight from start to finish. It’s a grown-up movie and it’s a feelgood movie and it’s a very funny movie. Very highly recommended.

Hell’s Angels (1930)

Any movies that Howard Hughes was involved with tended to have troubled production histories, and such was the case with his 1930 First World War aerial epic Hell’s Angels.

It wasn’t entirely his fault. He started shooting it as a silent film then when it became obvious that talkies were the wave of the future he reshot it as a sound film. That decision made a very expensive movie even more expensive but money was never a consideration for Hughes. Hughes produced and also got the director’s credit although in fact no less than three directors had a hand in this production, including James Whale (soon to become much better known as the director of Frankenstein.



Hughes wasn’t overly interested in the plot or the characters. For him it was all about the action sequences. Unfortunately far too much time is spent in the first half of the movie on rather aimless scenes that are meant to introduce the characters. The script and the acting are so weak that despite all this effort the characters remain cardboard cut-outs. Once the aerial sequences kick in though the movie goes into high gear.

English brothers Roy and Monte Rutledge and a young German named Karl meet at Oxford shortly before the outbreak of war. They decide to holiday in Germany. Monte, the younger brother, spends most of his time chasing the local female population. Perhaps unwisely he includes among his conquests the wife of a high-ranking Prussian officer. The officer promptly challenges him to a duel. Monte is horrified that there are people who still take adultery so seriously. He has no intention of going through with the duel. He packs his bags and flees back to England, wile Roy fights the duel for him (and surprisingly enough survives).



This sets up the characters of the two brothers. Monte is irresponsible, selfish and cowardly, although also charming. Roy is high-minded, noble and courageous, although he’s also something of a prig. Roy is in love with a girl named Helen (Jean Harlow). He thinks she’s the sweetest and most virtuous girl in existence. Unfortunately his touching faith in her is sadly misplaced. Helen is a good time gal. Once Monte gets to meet her he realises this immediately. She invites him back to her flat, where she delivers her famous line, “Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?” No prizes for guessing what happens next.

War breaks out and of course Roy enlists immediately, in the Royal Flying Corps. Monte has no intention of enlisting but is tricked into it. Meanwhile Karl has been called up for service with the German military.



Karl ends up as an observer in a zeppelin. This is a rather alarming occupation which involves sitting in a small one-man gondola which is lowered from the zeppelin, presumably so the zeppelin can remain above the clouds while the observer aims the bombs from below the cloud cover. This sets up the highlight of the movie - the zeppelin raid. This is a visual tour-de-force. It’s not just stunning by the standards of 1930 - it remains one of the most extraordinary action sequences ever put on film.

Hughes follows this up with another extended action sequence that is just as impressive as Roy and Monte volunteer to fly a captured German bomber to bomb a munitions dump. This represents the only way to to give a forthcoming British attack any chance of success. The downside is, once they’ve bombed the target every German fighter aircraft on the front will be after them, and if they’re captured they will be shot as spies (and quite rightly so - it would have been a very dishonourable action indeed, something the movie glosses over rather glibly). Their own fighters will try to protect them, and the resulting aerial battle scenes are spectacular. Three men were killed during the filming of these scenes.



This movie has many problems. The pacing for the first hour is glacial. The script is weak. The characters ate stereotypes, and they’re not colourful stereotypes they’re dull stereotypes. The acting is atrocious. James Hall as Roy and Ben Lyon as Monte are truly awful. Jean Harlow would become a wonderful actress but this was her first significant role. She was still a teenager and her inexperience is all too obvious. On the other hand she is certainly sexy. Her performance is very uneven and at times rather bad there are occasional flashes of the brilliance that was to come.

The movie features a ten-minute sequence filmed in the early two-strip Technicolor process. As was always the case with this early version of Technicolor the colours don’t look quite right. In a movie like Mystery of the Wax Museum this was an asset, adding an eerie atmosphere. It’s less successful here, but it is the only chance you’ll ever have to see Jean Harlow in colour.



There are several other scenes (including the zeppelin raid) that are tinted, a practice that was common in the silent era but very unusual in a sound picture.

There are some pre-code moments although the movie’s pre-code status is indicated mostly in the fairly graphic nature of some of the aerial combat scenes. It’s often forgotten that the Code cracked down just as hard on graphic violence as it did on sexual content.

The Region 4 DVD from Bounty is the print restored by UCLA Film School and it looks splendid.

All in all this movie is a very mixed bag. In many ways it’s a very bad movie. On the other hand if you love aircraft, zeppelins and Jean Harlow then it’s definitely worth a look. And what right-thinking person doesn’t love aircraft, zeppelins and Jean Harlow?

Harlow (1965)

They just don’t make movie trash the way they used to. Hollywood still makes bad movies but today they make boring bad movies. In the 50s and 60s they made gloriously entertaining trash epics like Harlow (1965).

It’s supposed to be a biopic about Jean Harlow. In fact it’s mostly fiction. I presume they were worried about being sued and so the names of just about everything have been changed. Not just the people, but even the names of the studios and the movies she made. The manner of her death has been changed and in the movie she has one disastrous marriage. In real life she was married three times.

So it’s best to simply accept the movie as fiction, as a movie about a star like Jean Harlow. The movie’s approach to the material is sensationalistic, lurid and breathless. And vehemently high camp. Not that I have a problem with any of those things. Fortunately it doesn’t take half measures. It goes wildly over-the-top and succeeds through sheer excess and bad taste.

Carroll Baker plays Harlow and she’s the movie’s single biggest strength. Baker is sexy enough and outrageous enough in her own right to get away with the role. I’ve never understood why Baker didn’t have a more successful career in Hollywood. She’s a whirlwind of misdirected sexual energy, and rather like other notable roles Baker played (such as the title role in Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll) she’s a delirious mixture of innocence and wantonness.

Mike Connors is better than you might expect as a male star who pends most of the movie trying to persuade Harlow to marry him. Red Buttons can be an annoying actor but as her devoted agent he’s well cast. Angela Lansbury and Raf Vallone overact amusingly as her appalling parents. As depicted in this movie her mother is a sex-crazed matron who has married a reckless but good-looking gigolo.

The key character is Paul Bern, played by Peter Lawford. In this biopic Paul Bern is the first husband of a virginal Harlow. In reality he was her second husband but the marriage was every bit as catastrophic, culminating in Bern’s suicide shortly afterwards, presumably unable to deal with his inability to consummate the marriage. For the movie version of Paul Bern the shame of being married to Hollywood’s number one sex goddess and being unable to perform in bed is too much.

And it’s just too much for Harlow, in this movie presented as a woman who has saved herself for marriage and then realises she might as well have not bothered.

Director Gordon Douglas had an interesting career and handles his task pretty well. Apart from Carroll Baker the movie’s other big asset is its visual style. Everything is too bright, too colourful, too garish, too brightly lit, too glossy and too shiny and in thoroughly deplorable taste. This is total kitsch overload. And it works perfectly. It’s Hollywood given the full Hollywood treatment. The sets are like temples dedicated to the gods of camp.

Olive Films have gained the right to release quite a few previously unavailable Paramount movies like this one. There are no extras whatsoever but the transfer is superb.

If you can’t disregard the fact that the movie gets just about everything about Harlow’s life wrong you’re probably well advised to skip this one. But if you can, and if you’re in the mood for trash on the epic scale just lie back and enjoy. Harlow is very highly recommended.

China Seas (1935)

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow were always a good combination and as a bonus MGM’s 1935 China Seas adds Wallace Beery, who had some wonderful comic chemistry with Harlow in Dinner At Eight. The result is one of Harlow’s most interesting movies.

Gable is the captain of a merchant ship plying its trade in the South China Sea in the 1930s. He’s ex-Royal Navy officer Alan Gaskell and he has a reputation as a bit of a martinet. OK, Gable as an Englishman is a bit of a stretch but this is Hollywood so it doesn’t really matter. Gable wisely makes no attempt at an English accent.

As his ship is about to leave Hong Kong he finds himself having to take on one last passenger, the notorious China Doll (Harlow). China Doll (her real name is Dolly Portland) and Captain Gaskell have been a bit of an item for quite some time. She’s crazy about him but she’s not exactly the sort of woman that a man in a respectable position would marry. This is post-Production Code so we’re not told how she earns her living but we’re certainly left to assume that she might well be a lady of easy virtue.

The captain’s position is complicated by the presence of another passenger, Sybil Barclay (Rosalind Russell). Many years earlier Sybil had been the great love of Gaskell’s life but she married another man. Now her husband is dead and she is keen to rekindle her old romance with Gaskell. In fact she intends to finally marry him and he’s pretty sold on the idea as well.

As you might expect Dolly is not thrilled by this development and being of a somewhat excitable nature (to put things mildly) it’s obvious there’s going to be fireworks. Disreputable businessman Jamesy MacArdle has been pursuing Dolly for years and now that she’s been jilted by Gaskell she’s willing to give him a little encouragement. What she doesn’t yet know but is about to find out is that MacArdle is in league with pirates, they know the ship is carrying a large shipment of gold bullion and they have plans to get that gold.

The plot is by no means as unlikely as it sounds.The South China Sea really was infested by pirates in the 1930s, and in fact piracy was still rife in this region in more recent times.

This is a movie that combines the romantic comedy you expect in a Gable-Harlow vehicle with plenty of action and excitement. As well as the attack by pirates Captain Gaskell’s ship has to survive a typhoon. It also has some surprisingly dark moments. There’s a subplot involving another captain (played by Lewis Stone) who has been relieved of his command for cowardice and has signed on as third officer with the intention of seeking redemption. There’s also a rather graphic torture scene - I’m not sure how MGM got that one past the Production Code Authority.

Director Tay Garnett makes this combination of comedy, romance, drama, action and adventure work extremely well. The exotic atmosphere of intrigue and danger in the Mysterious East is captured superbly. It might be a Hollywood version of the East but it’s undeniably glamorous and exciting.

And there’s plenty of the famous MGM gloss in evidence. Harlow’s dresses are a highlight, blending glamour, exoticism and tackiness in equal measures. The strong cast certainly helps. Gable is more a conventional hero than in most of his 1930s roles but with enough of his trademark loveable rogue image to make the character interesting. Wallace Beery is in fine fettle and even Lewis Stone and C. Aubrey Smith (actors with a strong tendency towards pomposity) are entertaining in this movie. And Harlow gets to play a bad girl, always a bonus. She’s not quite a bad girl with a heart of gold, but she’s a sympathetic bad girl and she’s terrific.

I saw this one on TCM (and their print is truly excellent) but it’s available on DVD. It’s really a must-see movie if you’re a Harlow fan. Or a Gable fan. Actually it’s a must-see movie for anyone who likes Hollywood movies of the 30s. A hugely enjoyable movie that delivers the goods in every area.