CHINA SEAS. MGM, 1935. Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, Rosalind Russell, Dudley Digges, C. Aubrey Smith, Robert Benchley, Hattie McDaniel. Director: Tay Garnett.

   The opening scenes of this film both surprised and pleased me, filled as it is with passengers boarding Captain Alan Gaskell’s South Seas freighter, heading this time out from Hong Kong to Singapore, and those seeing them off, plus a huge contingent of assorted crewmen and hordes and hordes of bustling dock workers.

   The modern touch in which each of the major players is introduced briefly but succinctly is quite a compliment to the director, Tay Garnett, whose career in movies and TV lasted over 50 years.

   Gaskell is played by Clark Gable, and there is no doubt that he is master of his ship, cheery and easy going when he can and tough as nails when he has to be. But when he comes to women, well he’s no master, and doubly so when there are two of them on board, and both with plans of marriage on their minds.

   Jean Harlow is the first of the two we meet, a brassy blonde dish named Dolly Portland (or China Doll), and she and Gaskell seem to have been a pair for quite a while, code or no code.

   The aristocratic Rosalind Russell’s history with ship’s captain goes back many years before and England, where she married someone else — a wedding soon followed by Gaskell’s departure for the Far East. But that someone else has since died, and the new widow has headed straight for the China Seas with but two objectives in mind: to reclaim her former love and bring him back home.

   Do sparks fly? Boy, do they. Add in a slippery character named Jamesy MacArdle (Wallace Beery) who’s also around to comfort Dolly when she gets the blues, which is precisely the same time that Lady Sybil seems to be gaining the upper hand, which is very quickly.

   Rosalind Russell, by the way, could easily be mistaken for Myrna Loy in this movie, and her far too cool beauty is never going to win the day, or so the viewer knows for sure, deep down inside, and from the very first time she appears on the screen.

   Add in some ferocious pirates with a eye on a small fortune in gold hidden somewhere on board, preceded by a typhoon which causes havoc to everyone and everything on board — and all of a sudden the viewer mentioned above has to swallow his or her first inclinations that this movie is little more a mild romantic romp in the park.

   Even so, Robert Benchley as a drunken American author continually supplying wryly appropriate but still nonsensical non sequiturs at every odd moment, certainly does his funny man best, no matter what. (I am a long time Robert Benchley fan.)

   It’s strictly star power that carries the day, as Jean Harlow shows once again that she could hold her own with any actor, even one with the screen presence as large as Clark Gable’s, in a role that’s absolutely perfect for her — and was probably designed that way from the start.