Hold Your Man (Sam Wood, 1933)

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Hold Your Man

Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Stuart Erwin, Dorothy Burgess, Muriel Kirkland, Garry Owen, Barbara Barondess, Elizabeth Patterson, Blanche Friderici, Theresa Harris, George Reed. Screenplay: Anita Loos, Howard Emmett Rogers. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Merrill Pye. Film editing: Frank Sullivan. 

Part sexy pre-Code romp and part weepie melodrama, Hold Your Man succeeds on both counts. Clark Gable plays small-time con man Eddie Hall, who while fleeing from the cops winds up in the apartment of Ruby Adams (Jean Harlow), while she's taking a bath. He winds up there for good until he slugs an intruder into her apartment, accidentally killing him. He takes it on the lam and she takes the rap, going to a women's prison where she learns that she's carrying his child. The denouement, in which Ruby's fellow inmates help unite her with Eddie, is full of suspense. In a surprisingly almost enlightened twist, the heroine of this section of the movie is a Black prisoner, Lily Mae (Theresa Harris), whose father, a minister (George Reed), just happens to be at the prison for visitors' day, and thus available with a little maneuvering to marry Ruby and Eddie. (I say "almost enlightened" because neither Harris nor Reed gets a screen credit, and an alternate ending was filmed for Southern release, in which the minister was played by Henry B. Walthall.) The switch from hijinks among lowlifes to redemptive love story is a little jarring, but Harlow was never more in her element, and Gable's smirky charm is engaging.  

Red-Headed Woman (Jack Conway, 1932)

Chester Morris and Jean Harlow in Red-Headed Woman

Cast: Jean Harlow, Chester Morris, Lewis Stone, Leila Hyams, Una Merkel, Henry Stephenson, May Robson, Charles Boyer, Harvey Clark. Screenplay: Anita Loos, based on a novel by Katharine Brush. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. 

The Public Enemy (William A. Wellman, 1931)

James Cagney in The Public Enemy

Cast: James Cagney, Edward Woods, Jean Harlow, Joan Blondell, Donald Cook, Leslie Fenton, Beryl Mercer, Robert Emmett O'Connor, Murray Kinnell, Mae Clarke, Mia Marvin. Screenplay: Kubec Glasmon, John Bright, Harvey F. Thew. Cinematography: Devereaux Jennings. Art direction: Max Parker. Film editing: Edward M. McDermott.

James Cagney has always seemed to me the movies' greatest loner, and the film that made him a star bears that out. The scene that brings it home for me is the one in which Cagney's Tom Powers is hiding out from the rival mob, and the woman named Jane (Mia Marvin) who looks after him gets him drunk and seduces him. In the morning, when he remembers that they had sex, he's shocked and slaps her, then storms out of the hideout. It's a less famous scene than the one in which he shoves a grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face, but that's partly because the scene with Jane was cut by the censors after the Production Code went into effect; it was restored only after the movie made it onto video. The two scenes are similar in suggesting that although Cagney's characters aren't exactly chaste, they don't connect with women except for their mothers, like Beryl Mercer's Ma in The Public Enemy or Margaret Wycherly's Ma Jarrett in White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949). Almost every major leading man of the 1930s and 1940s can be identified with his on-screen teamwork with a leading lady (or two): Cary Grant with Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy likewise, James Stewart with Jean Arthur or Margaret Sullavan, Clark Gable with Jean Harlow or Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper with Barbara Stanwyck or Marlene Dietrich, and so on. But Cagney never struck sparks with any of his leading ladies. He seems too coiled and defensive to give up any part of himself to a woman. In The Public Enemy, he's matched with Harlow, who does her best to thaw him out, but their scenes are not particularly memorable. In his private life, Cagney was notable for having married only once and having stayed married from 1922 till his death in 1986, without rumors of extramarital dalliance, something of an anomaly in Hollywood. The Public Enemy uses this enclosed quality of Cagney's to good effect, and it's a tribute to whoever made the decision to give him the lead -- claimants include director William A. Wellman and producer Darryl F. Zanuck -- after initially casting him in the secondary role of Matt Doyle, played by the now mostly forgotten Edward Woods. It's largely thanks to Cagney that The Public Enemy still hold up today, even though it has some of the stiffness and uncertainty of early talkies, especially when it comes to dialogue. Robert Emmett O'Connor, for example, who plays Paddy Ryan, tends to introduce long pauses between sentences when he's delivering his lines, as if afraid that the audience won't keep up with what he's saying.

China Seas (Tay Garnett, 1935)

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in China Seas

Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Rosalind Russell, Lewis Stone, C. Aubrey Smith, Dudley Digges, Robert Benchley, William Henry, Hattie McDaniel, Liev De Maigret, Lilian Bond, Edward Brophy, Soo Yong, Akim Tamiroff, Ivan Lebedeff. Screenplay: Jules Furthman, James Kevin McGuinness, based on a novel by Crosbie Garstin. Cinematography: Ray June. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: William LeVanway. Music: Herbert Stothart.

China Seas is a pretty good romantic adventure that seems to have been pieced together from better movies. Its romantic triangle of Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Rosalind Russell mimics that of Gable, Harlow, and Mary Astor in Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932). Harlow and Wallace Beery have a relationship that echoes the one their characters had in Dinner at Eight (George Cukor, 1933). And the byplay between Harlow's character and her maid (Hattie McDaniel, of course) is a lot like the banter between Mae West and her maids in She Done Him Wrong (Lowell Sherman, 1933) and I'm No Angel (Wesley Ruggles, 1933). China Seas has a few standout moments of its own: There's a terrific typhoon sequence involving a runaway steamroller on the deck of the tramp steamer captained by Gable's Alan Gaskell, and Robert Benchley has some funny bits as an alcoholic writer who's usually too drunk to know where he is or to respond to other people with anything more than non sequiturs. There's a kind of uptightness to the movie that reminds us that the Production Code censors were breathing down people's necks, whereas all of those better movies mentioned above were pre-Code. But Gable and Harlow are in fine form. She's Dolly Portland, aka "China Doll," the shady lady (sometimes introduced as "an entertainer") who used to be involved with Capt. Gaskell and has now booked passage on his steamer from Hong Kong to Singapore in an effort to win him back. Russell plays Sybil Barclay, a high-class English lady who also has a past with the captain and nearly does succeed in recapturing him. Russell seems to be trying too hard at the role, slipping into stiff-upper-lip mannerisms and becoming rather arch, so there's no real heat between her character and Gable's. Another old flame of Dolly's, Jamesy McArdle (Beery), is also on board, and he's in cahoots with Malaysian pirates to board the ship and steal the gold it's carrying. Rejected by the captain, who decides to marry Sybil, Dolly joins forces with McArdle, though she doesn't really mean to. You've seen this sort of thing before, so there are no surprises, but relax and be entertained.

Red Dust (Victor Fleming, 1932)

Victor Fleming is the credited director on two of the most beloved films in Hollywood history: Gone With the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939). I say "credited director" because it's widely known that many other directorial hands were involved in both movies. Fleming took over the former only after George Cukor had been fired from it (reportedly on the insistence of Clark Gable). Some of Cukor's scenes remain in the film, and others were reportedly directed by Sam Wood and King Vidor, but GWTW is mostly the product of its obsessive, micromanaging producer, David O. Selznick. The Wizard, too, was primarily the work of its producers, Mervyn LeRoy and Arthur Freed; once again a director, Richard Thorpe, was fired from the film before Fleming was brought on, LeRoy directed some of the scenes, as did Cukor and Norman Taurog, and the Kansas scenes are well-known as having been directed by Vidor after Fleming went to work on GWTW.  So was Fleming more than just a replacement director or a fixer of movies gone astray? The best evidence that Fleming was a pretty good director on his own is Red Dust, a funny, sexy adventure romance that established Gable, especially when he was teamed with Jean Harlow, as a top box-office draw. Fleming demonstrates a sure hand with the material, keeping it from bogging down in melodramatic mush in the scenes between Gable and Mary Astor. The action is set in Hollywood's idea of a rubber plantation in French Indochina -- what Vietnam was called back when Americans were pronouncing Saigon as "SAY-gone," if the movie is to be trusted. Dennis Carson (Gable) manages the plantation when he is not being distracted by the arrival first of Vantine (Harlow), a shady lady, and then of Barbara Willis (Astor) and her husband, Gary (Gene Raymond), an engineer who has been sent to survey an expansion of the plantation. Carson and Vantine have been spending several weeks of unwedded bliss before the Willises arrive, but pretty soon he is making a play for Mrs. Willis, using the old trick of sending the husband off to survey the swamps while she remains behind. All of this is handled with delicious innuendo, possible only because the Production Code had not yet gone into effect: for example, the scene in which Vantine rinses off in a rain barrel while Carson looks on (and in), or the fact that Carson and Mrs. Willis's adultery goes unpunished except for a flesh wound. Both Harlow and Astor sashay around in improbable barely-there finery by Adrian. Fleming went on to make another pre-Code delight with Harlow, the screwball comedy Bombshell (1933), which alludes to the Hays Office's concerns about Red Dust. John Lee Mahin was screenwriter on both films, though some of the better lines in Red Dust were contributed by the uncredited Donald Ogden Stewart. The movie is marred only for today's viewers by some period racism: the colonialist attitude toward the native laborers as "lazy" and the giggling Chinese houseboy played by Willie Fung.

Dinner at Eight (George Cukor, 1933)

It has always struck me as odd that Grand Hotel (Edmund Goulding, 1932) won the 1931-32 best picture Oscar, when Dinner at Eight, a similarly constructed all-star affair, was shut out of the nominations for the 1932-33 awards. Dinner at Eight is much the better picture, with a tighter, wittier script (by Frances Marion and Herman J. Mankiewicz, with additional dialogue by Donald Ogden Stewart) and a cast that includes three of the Grand Hotel stars: John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, and Jean Hersholt. Granted, it doesn't have Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford, but it has Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler at their best, and a director who knows how to keep things perking. (Cukor was, at least, nominated for Little Women instead.) It also has one of the great concluding scenes in movies, when everyone goes in to dinner and Kitty (Harlow) tells Carlotta (Dressler) that she's been reading a book, bringing the formidable bulk of Dressler to a lurching halt. (You've seen it a dozen times in clip shows of great movie moments. If not, go watch the movie.) Granted, too, that Dinner at Eight is not quite sure whether it's a comic melodrama or a melodramatic comedy, dealing as it does with the effects of the Depression on the rich and famous, with marital infidelity and suicide (both of them in ways that the Production Code would soon preclude -- as it would Harlow's barely there Adrian gowns). And there's some over-the-top hamming from both Barrymores. In fact, the performances in general are pitched a little too high, a sign that Cukor hadn't quite yet left his career as a stage director behind and discovered that a little less can be a lot more in movies. Nevertheless, it's a more-than-tolerable movie, and a damn sight better than the year's best picture winner, the almost unwatchable Cavalcade (Frank Lloyd).

Bombshell (Victor Fleming, 1933)

This giddy screwball comedy is one of the earliest examples of the genre, with a screenplay by John Lee Mahin and Jules Furthman that's wall-to-wall wisecracks and frantic antics. It also has more sexual innuendo than later examples of the genre, since it was released a year before the Production Code began to be enforced by the notoriously blue-nosed Joseph Breen. There's even a joke about the censors in the script, in which the movie star played by Jean Harlow is being called on for retakes on Red Dust (1932), because of objections from the Hays Office, the code's precursors. (Mahin wrote the screenplay for Red Dust and Fleming directed it.) The cast is peerless: Harlow plays Lola Burns, a star said to be modeled on Clara Bow, and Lee Tracy is her hyperactive press agent "Space" Hanlon. Tracy has a way of exploding into rooms that reminds me of Kramer on Seinfeld. Fleming was probably not the ideal director for this fast-paced nonsense, which deserves a looser, lighter touch like that of Ernst Lubitsch or Howard Hawks, but he gives his cast freedom and they're equal to the challenge. Watch the ensemble, for example, demonstrate perfect comic timing in some of the scenes that Fleming films in long takes. Even Franchot Tone, one of the more forgettable leading men of the 1930s, demonstrates unexpected comic skill in the scene in which, as the phony Boston socialite Gifford Middleton, he woos Lola with lines like "I'd like to run barefoot through your hair." Also on hand is Louise Beavers, playing a maid of course, in an exchange that wouldn't get by Breen a year later: When Harlow asks what happened to the negligee she gave her, Beavers replies that "it got all tore up night before last." Harlow observes, "Your day off is sure brutal on your lingerie."