Influential pre-Code drama pours on the atmosphere and the sex in a most un-MGM way, and this is the one that made a star out of Jean Harlow. She'd been decorative but not much good in such notable movies as "Hell's Angels" and "Public Enemy," and somehow Victor Fleming turned her into an ace comedienne who could also make you care. Here she's Vantine, a no-better-than-she-should-be spirit who happens upon Clark Gable's Malaysian rubber plantation, just as he's receiving assistant Gene Raymond and his comely wife, Mary Astor. And the battle of the women is on, as Harlow and Astor vie for Gable's attention. He's all man in a way even he seldom achieved, and we understand his surliness even as we admire his competence and efficiency. There's atmosphere galore, including a lengthy sequence on how rubber is made, and everyone's helped immensely by John Mahin's rude, funny, sexy screenplay, which allots ripe ripostes to Gable and Harlow, who reel them off expertly. Astor's gorgeous and womanly as ever, and we believe her conflicting feelings for Gable and Raymond. (In "A Life on Film," she answers the question many asked her, "What was it like to kiss Clark Gable?": what with Victor Fleming yelling and hot lights pouring on them and technicians running around, not much.) You have to put up with the casual racism of "those lying, cheating coolies" and a comic-relief manservant whose function is to laugh idiotically at everything, but accept that and you have a lively, adult, HOT movie that showed what Harlow could really do, and further developed the masculine characteristics that Gable displayed in many, many movies.
