Harlow's trick was to say the vulgar thing first, loudly, and let everyone else catch up. MGM lit her like jewellery and she played against the lighting, which is why the comedies are the ones worth an evening.
Fi1m perspective
In Libeled Lady (1936) Gladys Benton is the only person in a film full of professional liars who says what she thinks, loudly and at once. Norbert Brodine lights her the MGM way, white satin and pale hair against dark rooms, so she looks like something on a jeweller's counter. Then she opens her mouth and sounds like someone who has been kept waiting at the counter for an hour. The studio built the surface. Harlow supplied the noise underneath it, and the noise is what we remember.
She did not start there. She came up as an extra in the late 1920s and in Hal Roach shorts, and Howard Hughes made her a star in Hell's Angels (1930) after replacing the actress he had first cast. The picture gave her the platinum hair and the name that went with it, and little to do beyond stand in the light; the notices at the time were harsh about the acting. The gangster and drama parts that followed, The Public Enemy (1931) among them, asked for a hardness she could only manage as a pose. The turn came at MGM with Red-Headed Woman (1932), when somebody noticed that the vamp was funnier than she was dangerous.
After that the persona became the material. Red Dust (1932) put her opposite Clark Gable, the first of six films together, and the pair talked to each other as equals in a way the studio's tidier couples never managed. Dinner at Eight (1933) set her loose among the MGM company as Kitty Packard, and Bombshell (1933) cast her as a film star called Lola Burns and let her make fun of the whole platinum business from the inside. Victor Fleming directed her twice; William Powell partnered her three times. The part is much the same each time, a gold-digger or a working girl who is quicker than every man in the scene and does not trouble to hide it.
In Libeled Lady her engagement to Spencer Tracy's Haggerty is meant to be the heart of the plot and keeps drifting out of sight, and around the eighty-minute mark we found ourselves waiting for her to come back and mildly cross with the film for keeping her away. She is best in bursts, with faster talkers to bounce off; asked to carry a scene's feeling on her own she tended to go flat. She said as much herself: "I'm not a great actress, and I never thought I was. But I happen to have something the public likes."
She died in 1937, at 26, so there is no late phase to weigh, only a start that promised little and a middle that delivered. Begin with Libeled Lady, where the talk is good and she is well used, and go on to Bombshell if you want to watch her explain the joke. The early dramas are for the curious, and mostly for the hair.
Biography
Jean Harlow, born Harlean Harlow Carpenter, was an American actress. She began her career as an extra and appeared uncredited as Woman in Opera Box in The Love Parade (1929).
Harlow's early roles included parts in Hell's Angels (1930), The Public Enemy (1931), Red Dust (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933) and Libeled Lady (1936). She died on 7 June 1937.
