Some movie lovers carry around actual lists of films they haven't yet seen, to remind themselves of what's to come. I don't take any such list, but if I did, one picture on it would be 1927's Children of Divorce. This standard love-triangle weepie was first shot by studio man Frank Lloyd, then shelved by Paramount Pictures for existence as smooth as its title.
Then, a stroke of luck: the studio ordered the picture to be half re-shot by its assistant director, none other than 33-year old Josef von Sternberg, who was shortly to introduce his most creative years. Sternberg is said to have relished the chance to experiment, deluging the picture with his trademark light-and-shadow-play, tossing out static long-shots in favour of intrusive close-ups, and otherwise taking full reward of the haunting, teardrop face of 22-year old Clara Bow, who played the film's heroine, Kitty. Sternberg is likewise said to have supervised a thrilling finale, in which Kitty learns that the plot's romantic knots can only untie with her death.
The actress is supposedly seen scrawling a suicide letter, then sealing it with her own tears, before embarking on a ghostly walk through several open doors, in a variety of expressionist gallows procession. It sends shivers to conceive how well Sternberg's direction may have lighted on Bow, whose primary gift was to establish the almost hopeless melodrama like a lightning rod through the sheer shock of genuine tears, which she could get at a finger-snap. Born to a whore and a sot in the slums of turn-of-the-century Brooklyn, Bow certainly learned all about weeping before she got into the film business, and picked up more lessons afterwards. Although she would eventually do her employers proud with a profitable string of near-identical flapper fantasies, including Rough House Rosie, Mantrap, and Fleet's In, she would be forever raked over hot coals by those same employers for her moderately rowdy personal life. It was a lifetime they profited off of greatly, playing up Bow's hot-jazz-baby image to the hilt for the scandal rags of the day.
Bow's second-to-last film, before departing Hollywood for just at age 26, was Call Her Savage, recently screened as partly of Film Forum's Before the Code festival. Based on this film, she clearly got out but in time. The movie is either a cruel flagellation or an abortive effort at self-mockery - take your pick. Bow plays Nasa 'Dynamite' Springer, a spoiled heiress from an unhappy home who is too 'wild,' meaning she's retained most mental features of puerility into her twenties. She's prone to pound her fists on the land and waa-waa'ing like a baby. She's as capricious as a cartoon character, giving no idea at all to laying something across the skull of anyone who annoys her. At one point, a Mariachi who doesn't heed her warning to silence his guitar is quickly tiring it. She gets giggles out of lashing people with a whip. She's unimpressed by sexual danger: the other scenes feature her palling around with a male friend who nearly salivates over her exposed legs and the possibilities of exploiting her tomboy physicality.
Anyone who's seen the film wouldn't want to be told that director John Francis Dillon came of age in the silent era -- Call Her Savage feels like stylistic afterbirth, with the story floating forward aimlessly from one free-standing vignette to the future in a way that's almost needful of intertitles. It's a movie where the index of deduction rules - when Nasa is childless in one shot and keeping a child in the next, we must conclude that we've leaped ahead in time. As the narrative moves along, a glut of lovers and husbands bounce in and out of the frame as casually as dance partners, a few of them even managing to provide with their skulls unbroken. Strangely unaffected by them all, Nasa is prone to balling up her secret thoughts and then expelling them in the flesh of unanswerable questions like "Why is there ever a battle going on within me?" Her constant references to an internal motor that propels her actions but of which she has no control makes her go like a schizophrenic.
As mentioned prior, Nasa does eventually manage to consider a baby with one man or another. There may be a missing scene somewhere of her lashing at the doctors in the delivery room with her whip. Totally unfit for motherhood, she soon ends up leaving the baby alone in her apartment to go and galavant around the city. During one of these galavanting sessions, the film produces an unexpected eye-opener for a 1932 film - a shot at an unmistakably gay bar in Greenwich Village. While Nasa is out, the apartment burns down with the baby inside it, an issue which the film treats as merely another cloud-nine interlude, free of consequence. It's not a traumatic occurrence in the slightest. It does zero to slow Nasa down and goes farther than any other scene to suggest that Call Her Savage's estimate of 'violence' is based around some recognizable form of psychosis - anti-social personality disorder? - in which actions and people will no real imprint on the psychotic's personality. No matter what, they keep floating onward.
The film wraps where it started, with Nasa happy and 'free' back at her ranch. She has learned, through a serial of contrivances, that - wait for it - she is really not white, as she has always thought, but half-white, half-Indian. "I'm glad!" she says with relief. In that revelation lies the breakup of her societal responsibilities, which is what she has craved. Every destroyed ballroom, every hair-pulling catfight, every suit-jacketed man with a roll of spaghetti turned upside down on his head that's left in her wake is now excused. Nasa is wild. She's now free to spoil her 'savage' nature. I trust that, having relayed all that, I don't give to head out that the picture is defiantly pre-Ethan in its racial assumptions, and cannot survive any analysis whatsoever on that level. Whatever dart you make will be a direct hit. Call Her Savage is a weirdly personal little hit-job of a film. It asks a talented actress to use those talents to give screaming, crying life to a script seemingly made up of every rumor ever whispered near her, and so some.
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