Red Dust

Dennis Carson runs a rubber plantation in Cochinchina, and the business is barely holding together. He has brought in a surveyor to help drain the swamps on the property, and the man arrives with his wife, Barbara, a refined woman whose presence immediately unsettles Dennis. Complicating matters further is Vantine, a woman who has come to the plantation after leaving Saigon to avoid the police. As the rainy season sets in, the isolation of the plantation and the proximity of these three people produce a tense romantic triangle, with Dennis drawn away from Vantine and toward the married Barbara.

Victor Fleming directed the film, which was adapted for the screen by John Lee Mahin and produced by Irving Thalberg, Fleming and Hunt Stromberg for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Clark Gable leads as Dennis, with Jean Harlow as Vantine, Mary Astor as Barbara and Gene Raymond as her husband, Gary. Supporting roles include Donald Crisp as Guidon and Tully Marshall as McQuarg.

Red Dust was released in October 1932 and runs 83 minutes. It sits second in the chronological list of Fleming's directed features, between Anna Ascends and Treasure Island, well before Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. On IMDb it holds a 7.2 rating from around 5,300 votes, while on TMDB it has a 6.9 from a much smaller pool of 77 votes. A critics' rating of 7.5 from 11 reviews places it above both audience scores. Its worldwide box office of about 1 million dollars was a solid return for the period.