China Seas (1935)

China Seas
Directed by Tay Garnett
1935/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing

Jamesy MacArdle: Lovin’ you is the only decent thing I ever did in my entire life. And even that was a mistake.

Gable and Harlow reunite in another love-triangle story following their success in Red Dust (1932).  Clark Gable plays the skipper of a cruise liner/freighter on the China Sea.  The vessle is carrying a hidden gold shipment.  His girl Dolly “China Doll” Portland (Jean Harlow) has tagged along, mostly to stay in his hair it seems.  At the last minute, Sybil (Rosalind Russell) an old love of the captain’s from his days in England, now widowed, boards the ship.  The final main character is Jamesy MacArdle (Wallace Beery), whom we soon learn is the leader of a gang of modern-day Malaysian pirates.  When Gable starts paying attention to Sybil, China Doll first acts up and then gets revenge.  With Lewis Stone as a cowardly officer, C. Aubrey Smith as a ship’s company executive, and Robert Benchley as a drunk.

I thought this was entertaining though I wasn’t blown away or anything.  The movie has plenty of action including a convincing typhoon (two stuntmen were nearly killed as they were washed away by 50 tons of water in the studio) and the pirate attack.  Gable, Harlow, and Beery give good solid performances.  If I had not known that the actress playing Sybil was Rosalind Russell, I might not have known her.  She puts on an English accent (the only one of the American to do so, though I think all were supposed to be English) and her face looks somehow different.  Maybe it was the makeup.

I will use this as the opportunity to give my rant on “comic drunks.”  I find them terribly annoying.  This film has Robert Benchley staggering across the screen and slurring a line or two at least every five minutes.  Nothing he does advances the plot in any way.  I find constantly inebriated people more to be pitied than laughed at, and this stuff just makes me mad.  I have a similar reaction to “humor” that relies on a “comic stutterer”.  It was surely a different time.

Clip – Gable and Harlow