China Seas

Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, and Clark Gable

Tay Garnett's China Seas, from 1935, is a raffish and highly entertaining MGM production. The picture is a bit overstuffed for an 87 minute film with elements of adventure, action, romance, melodrama, and comedy. The cast is teeming with talent: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Rosalind Russell, C. Aubrey Smith, Lewis Stone, Hattie McDaniel, Akim Tamiroff, and Robert Benchley. The film is based on a 1930 work by English novelist Crosbie Garshin, his last before his death in a mysterious boating accident. Jules Furthman and James Kevin McGuiness, two screenwriting titans, are credited with the script, but I imagine many more had a hand in the finished product. 

China Seas is one of six films Gable and Harlow appeared in together and seems designed to generate the boffo box office of their first starring vehicle, Red Dust. Like that film, Harlow and Gable are two points of a romantic triangle with Harlow's endearing chippie being counterposed by a more reserved and refined rival, this time being played by relative newcomer Rosalind Russell. The role is a thankless one for Russell who doesn't even get as many romantic clinches with Gable as Mary Astor did in Red Dust. Gable plays a ship captain helming a steamer going from Hong Kong to Singapore. The journey is not a smooth one, of course, with romantic tumult, Malaysian pirates, and a typhoon besetting the crew and passengers.

Garrett handles the action set pieces well. During the typhoon, Gable heroically prevents a grand piano from smooshing the passengers, including a child played by Beery's daughter, Carol Ann. Gable then has to secure a steam roller which has slipped its chains and is wreaking havoc on deck. These scenes are impressive technical achievements for the time and stand up well today. Garnett is also adept at framing the rowdy humor and violence of the film which test the limits of the newly imposed Production Code. Andre Sennewald, in the New York Times, took the film to task for its depiction of violence (Gable is tortured with a "Malay boot" by the pirates and Lewis Stone has his ankle crushed by the same miscreants), but these moments are quite tame by today's standards. The dialogue has the pungent air of pre-Code films. C. Aubrey Smith, at his most droll and relaxed here, describes Gable as a "bull head" who likes to get "sensationally blotto" on shore. We first meet Harlow emerging from Gable's bathroom where she has been "showering the dew drops off the body beautiful."

I detect the touch of Furthman here, a knowing post-modern touch, referring back to Harlow's epochal bathing sequence in Red Dust. Likewise, there is a reference to the recent I Cover the Waterfront. Furthman was one of the first writers to recognize that the audience was willing to accept actors as both playing their character parts and their star persona selves. Furthman would constantly recycle dialogue and situations over the course of his career. Lewis Stone's character, an older officer trying to redeem a previous act of cowardice, is pretty much the same as Richard Barthelmess' in the Furthman scripted Only Angels Have Wings. Harlow, Gable, and Beery are all very comfortable playing their screen personas here. Beery, his star slipping while Harlow and Gable are on the rise, plays a villain in league with the pirates, but is still shown as largely avuncular.

China Seas is a satisfying entertainment, but not a perfect one. The humor is hit and mostly miss. Robert Benchley, a success in short films during the 30s, does his usual schtick as a drunken novelist. I guffawed once or twice, but the picture would not lose much by his absence. Certainly his going overboard twice is one time too many. Similarly, William Henry's role as a callow and nervous sailor is a hackneyed one and his bumbling antics are as funny as a crutch. Still, he carried on in Hollywood and can be seen gracing the background of many a classic film. China Seas suffers from its roots as a British novel. Russell does an OK British accent, but Gable doesn't even try and that was probably for the best. Beery trots out an Irish brogue, but only occasionally.

Adrian's outfits for Ms. Harlow are especially eye-popping. I love the dragon outfit in the scene with Hattie McDaniel above. A sheer outfit that Harlow wears in the typhoon clings to her body in a way that must have made the censors take pause. If anything, I underestimated Ms. Harlow's talents as a performer when I was younger. Now I see that she provided much needed pizazz to a staid studio. Similarly, it is a pity Tay Garnett worked so little for MGM where his boisterousness would have been a tonic. His tracking shots on deck and an effective zoom in on Gable when he realizes his love for Harlow display a firm hand on the wheel. The print of China Seas streaming on Tubi is, for once, first rate.