In that she was the original Hollywood platinum-haired bombshell, it is a surprise that in the first movie Jean Harlow carried she was "The Red-Headed Woman." This 1932 movie, in which she plays a gold-digger who gets what she wants (men and money) and "Red Dust" also released in 1932 in which Harlow played a happy, likeable prostitute are two of the movies that outraged moralists who soon (mid-1934) were able to prevent any pictures in which "vice" was not punished from being made (let alone exhibited in what bills itself as "the land of the free" but is still dominated by the allegedly "Christian" right).
The contrived script for "The Red-Headed Woman." was written by Anita Loos, most famous for writing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (which had already been filmed once, in 1928 as a silent movie), and who wrote another tale of gold-digger success (post-censorship, as a professional virgin) for Harlow, the 1934 "The Girl from Missouri."
Lil, the red-headed woman, is totally calculating about sleeping her way to the top, discarding one besotted male when one with more money and status appears. The men are such fools that they don't garner much sympathy for being seduced, bilked, and then abandoned. Lil starts in the secretarial pool and goes after her boss Bill Legrande (Chester Morris), son of the company's owner. That Bill is (1) married and (2) genuinely in love with his wife Irene (Lelia Hymans) matter not in the least to Lil (/Loos).
Irene divorces her philandering husband and Lil gets Bill to marry her, but is infuriated that his social set went with the wife and will have nothing to do with her. She proceeds to ensnare an old family friend (Henry Stephenson) to help her gain social acceptance. He fails locally and Lil decides to pursue him to New York. He proposed marriage, but Bill shows him pictures of his chauffeur (a very young Charles Boyer) and Lil has to settle for a small payoff. At the end, she is continuing to separate rich old men from some of their money in Paris, being driven by the same chauffeur who is presumably still her lover.
Watching what seems like a sort of "Reefer Madness" with Harlow playing the weed, I'm not sure how much of what is funny was intended to be funny. That the screenplay was written by Loos suggests that what might seem to be creaky melodrama was intended to be funny. Harlow seductive and Harlow vexed are both so over-the-top that I had to laugh at them and at the stupidity of the men who go ga-ga for her (and are far more vicious than she could be).
As amazing as Harlow's brassy vamping is here, I think she was funnier in the even more contrived "The Girl from Missouri" in which she fiercely guards her virginity (though as a means to achieving the same end as seducing men in "Red-Headed" was). And funniest of all in "Bombshell" as the exploited movie star Lola Burns...
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On the unpunished open sexuality of women on screen before the Production Code was enforced, see Mick LaSalle's book Complicated Women (and a TCM documentary based on it). Mae West was another of the openly sexual women in comedies that outraged the puritains in such films as I'm No Angel, though the dramas and melodramas with women as sexually independent seem to have alarmed the moral entrepreneurs more than Harlow and West manipulating and marrying rich male quarries.
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