Poster from original release. In the title credits, Constance Bennett gets first billing. She was the highest paid woman in Hollywood at the time.

“After Office Hours” (Metro, 1935), an extremely appealing lightweight comedy, is little known today, but it’s hard to know why. It’s a cheerful mess, written by Herman J. Mankiewicz, and it has his fingerprints all over it: it’s funny, irreverent, illogical, smart, cynical, sloppy, slapdash and fast. The guys who drink too much are the guys we root for, and only saps make a habit of telling the truth. Mank (as he was known) was generally regarded as being much smarter, funnier and more talented than his younger brother Joe, who would later go on to win four back-to-back Oscars (two for “A Letter to Three Wives”; two for “All About Eve”), but Mank’s drinking made him totally unreliable. Legend has it that Orson Welles had to lock him up for two months in a safehouse in Victorville, California, in order to get him to finish the screenplay for “Citizen Kane.” (It’s hard to know how much to credit this or indeed any story about Welles, because Welles rarely opened his mouth except to tell another pack of lies.)

The stories of Mank’s boozing and gambling are countless, but I believe my favorite story about him is one told by his friend and fellow screenwriter, Irving Brecher, which, surprisingly, involves neither boozing nor gambling, but another vice altogether. According to Brecher, he and Mank were eating at the Metro commissary one day when Elizabeth Taylor’s mother stopped by their table to say that she had a meeting with Mr Mayer, and asked if they’d be willing to let Elizabeth sit with them while they ate their lunch. She’d only be gone for a few minutes. Of course, of course! Who wouldn’t want to spend time with a gorgeous little girl like the twelve year-old Elizabeth? In those days, she had a pet chipmunk that she took with her wherever she went. The little chipmunk would run up her arm, then disappear under her blouse and a moment later poke his head out from her sleeve, then run up her other arm, disappear down her blouse again and eventually reappear somewhere else; he frisked about like a furry electron orbiting an Elizabeth Taylor nucleus. The little girl chatted with the two writers while they ate, and all the while, the chipmunk was zipping round her torso like crazy; Brecher says she hardly seemed to notice. At length the mother returned, thanked the gentlemen and took Elizabeth away with her. As the two writers watched them walk out of the lunchroom, Mank leant over to Brecher, and, shaking his head appreciatively, murmured, “Gee, I wish I was a chipmunk!” Hmm . . . Herman Humbert.

Elizabeth Taylor and friend.

I was gratified to read in Pauline Kael’s “For Keeps” that Mank had written “about forty of the films I remember best from the twenties and thirties. I hadn’t realized how extensive his career was . . . [I]t’s apparent that he was a key linking figure in just the kind of movies my friends and I loved best. These were the hardest-headed periods of American movies . . . [and] the writers . . . in little more than a decade, gave American talkies their character.” Nunnally Johnson said the two most brilliant men he ever knew were George S. Kaufman and Herman Mankiewicz, and that Mankiewicz was the more brilliant of the two, and (Kael again), “spearheaded the movement of that whole Broadway style of wisecracking, fast-talking, cynical-sentimental entertainment onto the national scene.” I would like to offer “After Office Hours” as a prime example of what Kael was talking about.

Boy Meets Girl, Boy Fires Girl

Clark Gable plays Jim Branch, the hard-bitten, cagey editor of a daily newspaper. He’s on the trail of a high society scandal that he knows is about to break. But his boss, the newspaper’s publisher, orders him to drop the story because it may possibly involve a personal friend whom he hopes will be elected as a state senator in the upcoming election. This first clip takes place right after Gable storms out of the publisher’s office. Notice how long the takes are. Robert Z. Leonard points the camera at his two stars and lets them get on with it. It helps that most of their patter is so good, and it helps that they both handle the material so energetically.

I love the way Constance Bennett delivers the line, “I haven’t so far.” For my money, she is the best of all the glamorous comediennes of the thirties. She’s as beautiful as any of them, including Harlow and Lombard, but I find her wittier and more pleasant to listen to. A big part of Harlow’s appeal was the appalling foghorn squawk that emanated from her throat, but I have to be in the mood to listen to her. Lombard’s voice tended to be shrill and unpleasant. Claudette Colbert was as chic and high-tone as Bennett, and had a beautiful voice, but I find her attractive without being sexy. But Constance Bennett is chic and sexy and obviously very shrewd. She was, in fact, known to be one of the best female card players in America. She was the only woman with a standing invitation to play high stakes poker with the studio heads, and she usually won. When she was married to Gilbert Roland, he once lost fifty grand in a poker game, and didn’t have the ducats to cover it — nowhere near. So it fell to Connie to pony up her hard-earned dough, which she did, saying: “Oh, the fucking I’m getting for the fucking I’m getting.” (The marriage didn’t last.)

I also like Clark Gable’s bawling-into-the-hidden-microphone style of acting. It’s artificial, but in a way that suits the material. The dialogue is presentational: these characters are cartoon cut-outs: if we took them seriously, their constant double-crosses would make them unbearable.

Boy Loses Girl

Look at the beautiful way she dismisses Gable just before she turns her back on him. It’s the most elegant brush off ever. There’s the tiniest flicker of her eyes at the end of it and bang go the shutters and down comes the gate. And it’s important to remember, when this picture was made, Gable was King of Hollywood.

Boy Meets Mother, Rehires Girl

In this scene, which takes place a few minutes after the previous clip, we meet Billie Burke in one of her most typical performances. I must say I find her brand of silliness endlessly amusing and occasionally dazzling. I don’t know how anyone could keep a straight face when she turned her dithering up to full intensity. She’s the Human Hummingbird.

Look at Connie slink! It takes a good deal of presence to keep the sublime Billie Burke from stealing the scene completely with her bottomless bag of tics. You will note that Miss Burke prolongs her exit by fingering the draperies as she passes through the archway. She wasn’t Mrs Florenz Ziegfeld for nothing: she knew how to pull focus when she wanted to.

I fear that Gable hadn’t yet shed the Blue Plate Special corniness he picked up from Frank Capra’s overemphatic seltzer-in-yer-pants kind of comic hijinx in the previous year’s “It Happened One Night.” Capra’s Common Man, when merry (his natural state), invariably becomes brainless at the top of his lungs. I hear more Capra than Mankiewicz in Gable’s reading of “Nooo, nooo! Only in months with AARRR in ’em!” He lands on the antic dopiness so hard that any stray champagne bubbles of wit are flattened beneath the weight: it’s Bambi Meets Godzilla. On the other hand, we’re to understand that everyone has been drinking all night, that Jim Branch is an excitable man and that he is working extra hard to amuse this elegant woman, of whom he hopes to take advantage in as many ways as he possibly can. The corniness of that one line reading actually serves a useful purpose: it gives the scene a jolt of energy at exactly the moment more energy is wanted. I don’t like it, but I admire how well it works. Moreover, Gable has the magnetism and virility to ride the phony zaniness the way a surfer rides the crest of a wave: the difference is Gable has to create the wave all by himself. When Connie Bennett begins to laugh, her amusement is genuine enough to justify the Capra-corn. It’s infinitely less irritating than the lunkheaded lecture Gable delivers on the fine art of dunking a sinker in “It Happened One Night.”

Capra Shakes Hands with Wit: an Allegory.

Boy Gets, Loses Girl

This is my favorite scene in the picture. I love the deco set design: that backdrop of the 59th Street Bridge is in just about every Metro picture that takes place in Manhattan. In Louis B. Mayer’s New York, everyone lives and plays in and around Sutton Place. I love the surprise appearance of Margaret Dumont as Mrs Murchison (this picture came out the same year as “A Night at the Opera”). In her brief moments onscreen, she looks more like a Helen Hokinson cartoon than ever. But most of all, I love the chemistry between Bennett and Gable and the snappy patter that Mank has written for them.

“You say awfully nice things Mr B!” She speaks that line so charmingly that I almost forget the sound of Shirley Booth as the irrepressible, horrible busybody maid, Hazel, in the early sixties TV sitcom of the same name. Unfortunate readers will remember that Hazel always addressed her employer as “Mr B,” and always sounded as if she were speaking with her mouth full of crumb cake and cottage cheese.

Separated at Birth? Helen Hokinson Clubwomen, Margaret Dumont.

He Who Gets Slapped

I’m fond of this scene for a lot of reasons, but chiefly because of the public service performed by Mary MacLaren at about 2:28. The fellow who claims to be the coroner’s assistant is actually Jim Branch’s lead photographer. The actor is Stuart Erwin.

I have occasionally watched that slap ten times in a row just because it makes me so happy. Every time William Demerest shows up in any one of the more than one hundred and sixty pictures he appeared in, I feel like slapping him.

Mank Speaks!

Herman J. Mankiewicz, apparently pretty sober.

Herman J. Mankiewicz, looking unusually sober.

I’ve always had a special fondness for funny drunks. I’ve known more than my fair share of turbulent tipplers, and I almost always come to regret, or at least rue, my association with them. By definition, they are unreliable, self-pitying, self-destructive, exasperating, boring, embarrassing and eventually pathetic. But I find the funny ones hard to resist. The really heavy drinkers don’t last long, so to befriend one of them is like finding yourself in charge of a short-lived breed of dog who bites people. You love him, but he’s a handful; when he dies you miss him, but can’t help feeling relief that he’s gone. Had I been around when Mank was still alive, I make no doubt I would have loved him: he strikes me as George S. Kaufman with a bun on. (They were friends: Kaufman gave him a job at the New York Times; Mank left Kaufman high and dry by going out to Hollywood.) Of course, there’s a good chance he’d have had no use for me whatsoever. Still, I’ve known a great many drunks because I usually get along well with them. Anyhow, I don’t know when I’ll be returning to the subject of Herman J. Mankiewicz, and feel I owe it to the old soak to finish this piece with a few examples of the sort of hilarious things he said before he died of uremic poisoning on April 5, 1953.

Mank sent the following telegram to Ben Hecht (the last sentence is particularly in character): Will you accept 300 per week to work for Paramount? All expenses paid. 300 is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.

This is Mank on his favorite actress, and his dream of domestic bliss (again, his last sentence is the most characteristic): Barbara Stanwyck is my favorite. My God, I could just sit and dream of being married to her, having a little cottage out in the hills, vines around the door. I’d come home from the office tired and weary, and I’d be met by Barbara, walking through the door holding an apple pie she had cooked herself. And wearing no drawers.

Barbara Stanwyck: Apple pie and no drawers

Barbara Stanwyck: One Eve with a lid on, hold the drawers!

Upon seeing Orson Welles: There, but for the grace of God, goes God.

On Production Code morality: In a novel the hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for the finish. In a movie this is not allowed. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the servants. But you have to shoot him in the end. When he falls with a bullet in his forehead, it is advisable that he clutch at the Gobelin tapestry on the wall and bring it down over his head like a symbolic shroud. Also, covered by such a tapestry, the actor does not have to to hold his breath while being photographed as a dead man.

Finally, on Louis B. Mayer (the past tense is amusing, since Mayer outlived Mank by two years): He had the memory of an elephant and the hide of an elephant. The only difference is that elephants are vegetarians and Mayer’s diet was his fellow man.

Original poster.

One of the real treasures from the Pre-Code Era, “Red Dust” (Metro, 1932), is quite possibly the raciest picture Metro ever released during the twenty-seven years that Louis B. Mayer ran the place — I can’t think of another that even comes close. Clark Gable plays Dennis “Fred” Carson, the hard-driving, hard-drinking, womanizing overseer on a rubber plantation in Indochina. Harlow plays an on-the-lam whore named Vantine, who fetches up at the plantation one night. Here’s how they meet.

The passed-out drunk is Donald Crisp, cast against type: in this one, he’s a thoroughgoing swine. He’s not very good in the part, but it’s a relief to see him do something different from the insufferably dignified gentlemen he usually played. Gable’s partner, McQuarg, is played a fine old character actor named Tully Marshall.

Before I saw “Red Dust” for the first time, I never really understood Harlow’s appeal. In “Dinner at Eight,” for instance, the dumb broad she plays is so spoilt and bad-tempered and shrill, I find her far more irritating than amusing. (It doesn’t help that most of her scenes are with horrible Wallace Beery.) But she’s tremendously appealing and funny in “Red Dust,” and she steals every scene she’s in. In his own quiet way, however, Tully Marshall in this next scene gives her a run for her money. (Willie Fung is the racist cartoon of a houseboy. The ugly Asian stereotypes in “Red Dust” are pretty breathtaking by today’s standards.)

Whenever I’m in a bad mood, Tully Marshall’s performance — especially his reading of “If it was the summer of eighteen hundred and ninety-four, I’d play games with you, sister” — is always enough to chase the blues away. Marshall is the sort of old pro that makes me love old movies. Two years before he made this picture, he appeared with John Wayne in Raoul Walsh’s “The Big Trail,” which was shot in Mexico. During the shoot, Wayne was afflicted with a dose of la turista so terrible that he lost eighteen pounds in a single week; for the rest of his life, the memory of that awful week made him shudder involuntarily. When he was well enough to return to work, the first scene he shot involved Tully Marshall and a big jug of liquor. He entered with Marshall slung over his shoulder. According to Wayne, “I set him down and we have a drink with another guy. They passed the jug to me first, and I dug back into it. It was straight rotgut bootleg whiskey. I’d been puking and crapping blood for a week and now I just poured that raw stuff right down my throat. After the scene, you can bet I called him every kind of an old bastard.” Despite his notoriety as a world-class booze-hound, Marshall was in constant demand; he appeared in almost two hundred pictures, including “Ball of Fire” and “Grand Hotel.” Every time I see him, I think of how the old soak and his jug of San Juan possum juice almost turned “The Big Trail” into “The Last Run” for young Duke Wayne. Over the past year, it has become abundantly clear to me that good supporting performances like Tully Marshall’s are very often what I like best about the pictures that give me the most pleasure.

But in this particular case, it’s Harlow who owns the picture. Her combination of vulgarity, street smarts and sunny good-nature has never been surpassed. Like so many movie stars of the Studio Era (and unlike so many of today’s stars), her voice is as unmistakable as her face, but it’s also notable — especially for that era — for its foghorn ugliness. The advent of talking pictures ruined the careers of so many Silent Era glamour queens, yet Harlow’s career didn’t really take off until audiences got a load of the strident clamor that issued from her milk white throat. She rarely sounds perfectly natural — overemphasis and sing-song are two hallmarks of her vocal style — but her commitment to the material is absolute; her facial expressions and body language are so spontaneous and lively that her overtly artificial vocal mannerisms work in her favor (at least, they do in “Red Dust”). In her scenes with Gable, she’s clearly acting — putting on a show — but she’s not acting for us: she’s showing off for the guy she’s trying to hook. Look at how deftly she warms him up and wins him over in this next scene. He’s irritable and she’s exhausted, but she’s so attracted to him that she can’t stop flirting. The more she chatters, the madder he gets, but the more violently he tells her to shut up, the hornier she becomes — she’s impossible to insult. His steely hostility hasn’t a chance against her saucy vivaciousness. She and Gable make a brilliant team, but she’s the one who drives the scene, and she does it with great wit and verve.

This next clip is the best-known scene in the picture: Harlow takes a bath in a rain barrel. She did it topless. We don’t get a peek, but Gable sure did. At one point between takes, she stood up, gave the crew below a good look and said, “This is for the boys in the lab!” The film never left the set, however: Victor Fleming had it removed from the camera. He didn’t want it to turn up on the black market.

“Red Dust” certainly looks like a Metro high-gloss picture of the era: the glamorous lighting for Gable and Harlow, the familiar indoor jungle settings and the backlot shores of Metro’s Lot One Lake (where the early Tarzan pictures were shot) — everything about its look is unmistakably Metro. But it sure doesn’t act or think like a high-gloss Metro picture. The randy banter between Gable and Harlow is breezy and fun-loving, not passionate and earnest — and their complacence about sex is completely at odds with Metro’s fastidious primness. In fact, I can’t think of another American picture of its era in which adult sexuality, promiscuity and marital infidelity are treated with such buoyant nonchalance. Before the picture’s over, jealousy will lead to gunfire, but nobody gets killed or is even seriously hurt. The whole point of view is radically different from Metro’s strict moral code. In this picture, Gable has sex with Harlow the day they first meet; he carries on with her for a month, and when he’s ready to try a new flavor, he gives her a big wad of cash, slaps her on the ass and puts her on the boat back to Saigon. Then he promptly forgets about her — until her boat runs aground and she comes back for more. But when Harlow returns, Gable’s already busy seducing his new employee’s wife (Mary Astor), and treats Harlow badly. Gable carries on with Astor until he discovers that her husband (Gene Raymond) is a decent guy. Angry with himself and disgusted with her, he sends her back to her husband and tells them both to get lost: “You two pack your tennis racquets and go back where ya belong.” It’s hardly what one expects from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. And through it all, we root for Gable. It’s not only the sexiest picture Metro ever made, it’s also the most subversive.

There’s something else that sets the sexuality in “Red Dust” far apart from other pictures of its era: sex looks like a lot of fun. Garbo, John Gilbert, Joan Crawford, Jack Barrymore and all the other famous screen lovers of the era made lust look horrible and serious — their idea of wantonness looks like my idea of a hanging judge as he pronounces sentence. But there’s nothing brooding or terrifying about the sexiness in “Red Dust”: it’s happy and fun; it’s a romp. Lust doesn’t make Gable, Harlow and Astor frown and smolder, it makes them light of heart and full of laughs. Me too.

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‘After Office Hours’: A Forgotten Comedy Classic