Riffraff
Directed by J. Walter RubenDutch (Spencer Tracy) is a sardine fisherman and small-time schemer working the San Pedro waterfront, convinced that one sharp deal will lift him clear of the life he has. Hattie (Jean Harlow) is a cannery worker with sharper instincts than Dutch allows himself to notice – she sees through his bluster but falls for the man beneath it anyway. Their courtship is conducted in the register of argument, each one measuring the other for weakness.
When Dutch gets tangled with Nick (Joseph Calleia), a syndicate figure operating along the docks, the film's center of gravity shifts from romance to ruin. A labor dispute, a bad investment, and a string of poor judgments push Dutch toward a kind of moral free fall, while Hattie – more pragmatic, more clear-eyed – is left to reckon with what loyalty to a man like Dutch actually costs. The supporting figures, including the weary Lil (Una Merkel) and the watchful Flytrap (Victor Kilian), sketch a community in which everyone is one bad season from the edge.
Riffraff sits at the boundary between the pre-Code working-class melodrama and the harder-edged crime pictures that would follow in the late 1930s. It lacks the cynical economy of true noir, but its portrait of economic precarity, compromised men, and women who absorb the consequences of masculine failure gives it a persistent undertow. The waterfront setting and the syndicate pressures place it in recognizable noir territory, even if MGM's instinct for resolution softens what darker studios might have left unresolved.
