Jean Harlow in RED DUST presented by Forbidden Hollywood
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Forbidden Hollywood is a monthly series hosted by STL film critic Katie Carter celebrating the Pre-Code films of the early 1930s, when movies were wild, racy, transgressive, and tons of fun.
Among the steamiest of the love-in-the-tropics dramas that were a brief fad during Hollywood’s pre-Code era, Victor Fleming’s Red Dust centers around a love triangle involving macho plantation manager Dennis Carson (Clark Gable), brassy prostitute Vantine (Jean Harlow), and prim Barbara (Mary Astor), an engineer’s wife joining her husband on a job in French Indochina whose arrival quickly explodes Dennis’ personal rule: no women. Red Dust’s frank embrace of extramarital relationships, highlighted by Harlow’s topless rain barrel bath scene and made more pungent by the movie’s sweaty atmosphere, caused little stir with the censors on its release, serving as a sharp indicator of the level of mature content prevalent in films at the time.
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Among the steamiest of the love-in-the-tropics dramas that were a brief fad during Hollywood’s pre-Code era, Victor Fleming’s Red Dust centers around a love triangle involving macho plantation manager Dennis Carson (Clark Gable), brassy prostitute Vantine (Jean Harlow), and prim Barbara (Mary Astor), an engineer’s wife joining her husband on a job in French Indochina whose arrival quickly explodes Dennis’ personal rule: no women. Red Dust’s frank embrace of extramarital relationships, highlighted by Harlow’s topless rain barrel bath scene and made more pungent by the movie’s sweaty atmosphere, caused little stir with the censors on its release, serving as a sharp indicator of the level of mature content prevalent in films at the time.
Get Tickets
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