An entertaining example of how the implied sex of Pre-code films can sometimes feel more dirty than the in-your-face stuff. The setting is a rubber plantation in Southeast Asia, where the temperatures run hot, the jungles are dangerous and they get some real wrath-of-God rainstorms. Everyone is sweaty. The usual social niceties are relaxed. The alpha male rules and wimps get the hell out of there real quick.
Sounds like a perfect place for hot-blooded lust and bad romances, to me. In this torrid tale, hard, difficult plantation foreman Clark Gable is clearly, obviously planting his flag in two different places: Jean Harlow, as a wisecracking prostitute who somehow drifted over from Saigon, and Mary Astor, a proper lady of polite society who, unlike Harlow, would never bathe nude in a barrel of water in full view of anyone who passes by. Astor also happens to be married to one of Gable’s crewmen (Gene Raymond), which throws a little extra hot sauce into this particular taco.
The result is one mean little soap opera depicted in great 1930s brisk fashion. These characters turn and change and sometimes do things that surprise you, without much explanation other than that they’re human and are, thus, weak and imperfect and sometimes horribly selfish. I can buy that.
Probably my LEAST favorite thing about modern storytelling is this need to explain every fucking thing about everybody via the most cliched horseshit. We need to find out how the bad guy’s father was killed by a truck delivering donuts and that’s why he now has a pathological hatred for anyone who enjoys an eclair, right? Most of the time, it comes off as pure space-filling, rather than something that needed to be told.
This film gives you NONE of that shit. These characters are who they are because that’s who they are. Make up your own backstory.
Directed by Victor Fleming, who later made The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind. Like another Hollywood hit-maker of the time, Cecil B. DeMille, Fleming has an interesting, racy past before all of the epic-production Technicolor stuff kicked in.