Riffraff

Riffraff (1936)

When a red-headed woman meets a red-headed man!

Fisherman Dutch marries cannery worker Hattie. After he is kicked out of his union and fired from his job he leaves Hattie who steals money for him and goes to jail. He gets a new job, foils a plot to dynamite the ship, and promises to wait for Hattie.

Date of release
1936-01-03
TMDB
5.4 / 10 (18)
Runtime
1h 34m
Genres
Crime, Drama
Director
J. Walter Ruben

Casting

Interesting facts

Riffraff is a 1936 American drama film directed by J. Walter Ruben and starring Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy and Una Merkel. The screenplay was written by Frances Marion, Anita Loos and H. W. Hannaford.

Production

The film was developed from an original story by Frances Marion as a dramatic vehicle for Jean Harlow. David Lewis had just joined MGM and was assigned to be associate producer. He wrote "the principal problem with Frances was that her dialogue was insipid: the tough guy talked tough and the girls talked like ingenues." Work was done on the script by H.W. Hanemann and Jack Ruben, then Anita Loos did a polish.

Lewis said "Although I didn’t realize it at the time, Riffraff was so right wing, so anti-union, that later I was astonished."

On the night of October 30, 1935, 40 female extras on the set, many of them elderly or in frail health, were filmed in a simulated rain sequence that included the use of a sprinkler rig, fire hoses and wind machines. Multiple extras sustained bruises, temporary blindness, and loss of consciousness, with many suffering from pneumonia as a result.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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