China Seas Reviews

In this rousing actioner, Clark Gable is the rough-and-tumble captain of a tramp steamer who is en route to Singapore from Hong Kong with a load of gold. He has already discovered pirates sneaking aboard and fears that he will be attacked at any moment. On the ship are his ex-mistress, Jean Harlow, and his one-time lover, Rosalind Russell, who left him for another man, married, and was then widowed. Russell is taking a trip around the world, and her cultured bearing angers Harlow, who is still crazy about Gable. Harlow commits one social error after another until she humiliates herself, openly bragging about her brief relationship with Gable. To drown her sorrows, Harlow gets drunk with Wallace Beery, a conniving merchant who is daffy over her. They play cards and she wins, noticing Chinese symbols on some of Beery's currency. She knows that pirates use these to communicate with their front men, so she realizes that Beery is in league with the pirates. She goes to Gable, but he refuses to talk to her. Embittered, Harlow agrees to help Beery, stealing the key to the ship's armory, allowing him to arm his cohorts. The pirates attack but find no gold; the shrewd Gable has moved it elsewhere. In the midst of the fracas, Lewis Stone, a mate who has been branded a coward for previous misconduct, is vindicated when he leaps into the Chinese junk with grenades, killing both the pirates and himself. Rather than face prison, Beery poisons himself, and, when the ship reaches Singapore, Harlow is arrested for aiding the culprits. Gable makes a play for his old girl friend Russell, but he is forced to agree when she tells him that he would be happier as a skipper sailing the China Seas with Harlow at his side. He then goes to Harlow and promises that, after he sees her through her trial, they will be married. Tay Garnett directed this film, jam-packing it with action, particularly in the brawling battle scenes between the ship's crew and the pirates. Ray June's photography is splendid and sharp, and the script by Jules Furthman and James McGuinness is both witty and inventive. Furthman modeled Harlow's role after Shanghai Lily of SHANGHAI EXPRESS, another of his films. Some of the scenes are also heavily dependent upon the sea tales of Joseph Conrad, particularly "Nigger of the Narcissus." This was Harlow's fourth movie with Gable, and its plot was also borrowed to some extent from RED DUST in which the pair were also cast as at-odds lovers. MGM's head of production, Irving Thalberg, personally selected CHINA SEAS for the studio's leading box office stars. He had earlier been involved in high-class literary productions that yielded little income, but he vowed that this film would be different. In fact, he was so anxious for this film to be a hit that he imperiously stepped onto the set and coached the actors for their scenes, going behind Garnett's back. The director was dumfounded in viewing the rushes to see actors doing bits that he had not wanted. When he found out that the boy genius had been interfering, he threatened to quit. Thalberg relented, promising that he would not involve himself further with the production; he appeared a few more times on the set but only to visit and encourage his stars. CHINA SEAS cost more than $1 million, an expensive MGM epic for the time, but the public loved it and the studio more than made its money back. Gable is superb as the resolute but noble captain; Harlow delights us as the tropical trollop mouthing fractured English; Beery is at once sinister and humorous, frightening and fascinating. To an extent, Gable's captain is a comic-book hero, and he plays it to the hilt. At one point he manages to steer his ship through a raging typhoon while still saving a young passenger from being crushed by a sliding piano. (The girl was Beery's real-life adopted daughter, Carol Ann.) When pirates begin to torture Gable so that he will reveal the whereabouts of the gold--they apply the iron boot which causes him to pass out several times--he shows his mettle, refusing to tell them anything. In some ways the character which Gable portrays is rather like Gable himself. In a scene in which a two-ton steamroller becomes loose on deck, threatening to crush some coolies, Gable's stand-in was ordered to rush forward and secure the heavy equipment. The actor brushed aside the stunt man and went forward, telling the startled director he would do it himself. (This penchant for doing his own strenuous stunts was eventually to contribute to Gable's death when he insisted on breaking the wild horse in THE MISFITS.) The action in this film is so wild that the doubles for Beery and Harlow, Chick Collins and Loretta Rush, were almost killed when fifty tons of water accidentally hit them broadside and carried them to a concrete soundstage floor twenty feet below the ship's deck. They fortunately fell onto watersoaked cables which broke their fall.