If you get FoxMovies (and you might and not even know you do, so it’s worth checkin’) you should keep a Tivo button open for CALL HER SAVAGE which plays this Thursday at 6 AM eastern standard time. Then you should burn it to a DVD-R and dress it up pretty and wear it out slowly over years of extended play.
I don’t have my law books handy but I’ve a feeling this was one of the films that really burnt Joseph Breen up good and got the code going; next to Mae West there was no one so daringly sexual in cinema, more beguiling, crazy and wild as a hatter, than Clara Bow. If you’re not one for silent films (most of Bow’s output), CALL HER SAVAGE is your chance to really understand what “it’s” all about; it’s in sound. Touching on all the “woman’s picture” issues as if running around the bases to home plate, the film starts out with Clara’s grandfather, a wildcat mountain man who sleeps with a load of lassies as he leads a wagon train west through Indian-covered Texas. Then one of his ill-begotten daughters grows up and gets left behind too often by her traveling rancher husband and gets “comforted” by a stoic Native American with whom she doth beget Clara Bow. The rancher, ever so dour, doesn’t realize that’s why a daughter presumably from his own boring loins could ever be so wild. And wild? She goes around acting like John Belushi–she can smash a good guitar–in Animal House, but even sexier! Just seeing her wrestle with a big dog is amazing or whip a half-breed, but when she tussles with Thelma Todd? You will want to gouge out your eyes and keep them on the mantle just as they are, that image still burnt in the retina, cuz you know it will never be that good again.
The weird trippy energy of Bow makes her ahead of her time even then — she moves from emotion to emotion in the same “totally there” way as someone would on psychedelics, but she’s like that all the time. She’s one of those in-the-moment bad influence trouble girls who you meet for five minutes and throw your small town home life away to follow her penniless and barefoot into the desert, and come weeks back later broke, drug addicted and insane from syphlis and announce: “I regret nothing!” Don’t you regret either, pilgrim! SAVAGE isn’t out on DVD and never was on VHS. This is your chance. Wait, before you blame me if you don’t like it: it’s not THAT good. It’s not very good at all really, but it’s fuckin’ great.
I love Clara Bow… have not seen in many years and would like to see if she is as wonderful as i remember from my childhood. Where do i find any of her movies?
Saw the above, and other Clara Bow films at the Theater 80 St. Marks, NYC, in the ’70s. She had that certain something — nobody today is even within shouting distance.
The other Bow worthy of attention is NO LIMIT ['30 Paramount] with Norman Foster and *Thelma Todd*—needs to be seen in a theater, on as big a screen as possible to get the goodness.
NOTE: Theater 80 showed beaucoup pre-code films, especially those of PARAMOUNT, which last were beautiful 35mm prints, not crumb-bum 16mm knock-offs. I asked the Manager what the deal was, and he told me that though Paramount had sold TV rights to its pre-48 films to MCA/Universal, it retained THEATRICAL rights to the films, and had most at their *original* storage facility in New Jersey [Fort Lee ?]. I observed that these prints were not more than FOUR generations away from “camera original” negative [ I worked in a lab/edit house in the late '60s, so I could tell]. He said, “That’s about right.”
Among the pristine gems I saw at Theater 80 were early-sound gems STREET OF CHANCE['29] and THUNDERBOLT [’28, director von Sternberg: He recalls it with affection in his memoirs, one of the few so recalls.
Golden days, gone forever.
Cheers !
Matthew H. Davidson
mhantholz@gmail.com