Jean Harlow was the discovery of billionaire filmmaker Howard Hughes. He spotted her while she was still doing extra work at a time when the film industry was making its transition from silent to sound at the end of the 1920s. Hughes snatched Harlow up and gave her a top role in
Hell's Angels, his aviation picture he was filming as one of the talking cinema's first big-budget epics. It was a commercial hit in 1930, even though the critics gave less-than-favorable reviews to Jean's performance. One newspaper went as far as calling her "just plain awful". She worked with Hughes for the next year or so, appearing in such films as
The Secret Six and
Platinum Blonde (both 1931), the latter which underwent a title change specifically to highlight Harlow's unique hair color, which Hughes' publicists called platinum. She was also James Cagney's side girl in the classic gangster movie
The Public Enemy that same year.
Jean signed a deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1932. Her first assignment was dying her hair red for the title role in
Red-Headed Woman, which brought her introduction as a mainstream star. She was a great gem of Pre-Code Hollywood, providing her own brand of sexiness through a small-framed body topped by a toss of white-colored hair, brought together with a voice she seems to have stolen from a waitress in Arkansas.
Dinner at Eight, the 1933 comedy-drama featuring Harlow with an ensemble cast, might very well have been the pinnacle of her career before the Hays Code took over entirely. She is all the lovelier as Wallace Beery's social-climbing and adulterous wife, and spits wisecracks and venom right back to the bulky Beery with a surprising ease. It's a delicious film throughout, an outcome Harlow certainly had her hand in presenting.
The Production Code (also known as the Hays Code, the Hays Office, or simply the censorship bureau) was officially enforced in early July 1934. Without getting into all the details, the basic objective of the Code was to clean-up Hollywood films and the movie stars in them. I recollect hearing one tidbit where an executive of the Code said the "cheap and tawdry" were out. Good people, as they saw it, had no desire to watch movies cluttered with such vulgarity.
This sent several studios into quite a panic over what to do with their stars known for risque behavior, and MGM was certainly aware of their issue with Jean Harlow. What could they do with her? She was a steadily rising powerhouse at the box office, as her pictures were making the studio millions, but she would have to be rebranded in order to survive and make the cut in this now active post-Code environment. Her 1934 comedy
The Girl from Missouri had been originally called
Never Been Kissed, but the censors objected to the title without even reading the script. Surprisingly, the film manages to keep a little of pre-Code spice, coupled with reformed watered down cheesiness. The result is a genuinely amusing experience, but on an uneven slope.
Jean was still her platinum-haired self for her two 1935 releases, namely
Reckless and
China Seas. The former cast her as a stage star caught in the middle of a real life melodrama when her husband commits suicide. While the film itself is quite reasonable enough, the dubbing of Harlow's singing voice is noticeable and tosses the story off-balance. The latter paired her with Clark Gable for the fourth time as his sassy good-time girl, who manages to snatch a ticket to be a passenger on the ship he captains. These films offer what remained of Jean's pre-Code sexiness and colorful on-screen personality.
It was 1936 that MGM really kicked it into high gear to rebrand Jean Harlow. Naturally, one of the first things to adjust was Jean's platinum hair color, which had always been one of her defining trademarks. Her hues were darkened to what the studio's publicity department called "brownette". I'm guessing they felt brunette was too drastic a description, so they came up with their own adjective to coin the change in Harlow's outward appearance. The movie
Riffraff (1936), in which she played a tuna cannery worker, marked Harlow's first appearance as a "brownette" in the movies.
I think many fans and historians think that after the Production Code came into effect that many stars just
weren't the same, and by not being the same, they quite simply weren't as good anymore. Taking someone like Mae West, for example, the censors clipped out almost all of her racy dialogue and she definitely wasn't the same in her late-1930s films as she was in those earlier in the decade. On the other hand, Harlow seemed to make a smooth transition from pre to post-Code films. The differentiating factor in someone like Mae West and Jean Harlow is that Harlow seemed quite willing to glide right on with the changes the movie business was making, while West seemed trapped in a stereotype that she herself feared was her only claim to stardom.
Harlow persevered with the changes MGM was doing to her persona, and came out victorious as being more popular than ever. Still young, her star only continued to rise, while the popularity of other MGM actresses, such as Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, and Joan Crawford, steadily waned. Jean was groomed to headline the screwball comedy
Libeled Lady (1936), and even received top billing over William Powell, Myrna Loy, and Spencer Tracy. It was a massive hit, and did nothing but fuel Harlow's stardust. In shot, what I'm trying to convey is that Harlow's persona, while ever-changing, was never bad nor distasteful to the movie-going public.
A prime example of the changes in Harlow's on-screen image comes in comparing a couple of her film roles. In the movie
Red-Headed Woman in 1932, she plays a sultry secretary whose sole objective is to win her married boss, while in the film
Wife vs. Secretary, from 1936, she also plays a secretary that is wrongly accused of doing the exact same thing.
