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Lust by any other name, an ironic title for a screen without a dry spot in sight. "Wet field?" "Sloppy. Sticky." Rain season in colonial Indochina, just the playpen for a pre-Code rectangle. The plantation manager is Clark Gable abstracted into sweaty stubble under a pith helmet, the itinerant trollop is Jean Harlow like a monsoon spilling out of a dress, ideal lascivious accomplices. The outsiders are an engineer (Gene Raymond) and his wife (Mary Astor), not exactly at ease in the humid surroundings. "Kind of rustic and pioneering, isn't it?" A tiger prowls in the bush, a parrot cackles from the sidelines, an overseer (Tully Marshall) contemplates the wisecracking blonde and wishes he were a few decades younger. ("If it was the summer of 1894, I'd play games with you, sister.") Scraps from W. Somerset Maugham's wastebasket assembled into a prime bit of hothouse amusement, with Victor Fleming as passable placeholder between Hawks origins and Ford remake. The MGM jungle, where a cyclone will not mess up a movie star's close-up and the nature-civilization divide boils down to Harlow splashing inside a wobbly barrel. "Afraid I'll shock the Duchess? Don't you suppose she's ever seen a French postcard?" The proper lady awakened to the world's sensuality showcases Astor's gift for heated satin, she marvels at the sap oozing from trees and congealed by acetic acid in a neat little documentary on the making of rubber. (Her rival meanwhile hints at the vulnerability behind the hard-boiled front with a sniffle while scraping the bottom of a birdcage.) The upshot finds bluebloods and bawds divided like Kipling's East and West, one half departs still clinging to matrimonial illusions while the other prefers fondling during bedtime stories. "Explain the joke and I'll die laughing." With Donald Crisp, Willie Fung, and Forrester Harvey. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |