CALL HER SAVAGE starring Clara Bow presented by Forbidden Hollywood
Schedule
Mon Jul 01 2024 at 07:00 pm
UTC-05:00Location
Arkadin Cinema & Bar | Southhampton, MO
Between 1927 and 1930, Clara Bow— the silent film icon who earned the nickname the “It Girl”— was one of the top-grossing stars in Hollywood. When she starred in 1932’s CALL HER SAVAGE she had been off-screen for a year following a nervous breakdown. Fox Film granted Bow an unprecedented amount of creative control for her comeback movie, an adaptation of Tiffany Thayer’s controversial novel in which she plays the temperamental Nasa Springer. The result is a bizarre genre-mixer that changes shape every few minutes, from western to fallen woman melodrama to social comedy to poignant tear-jerker, with loads of Code-challenging content smashed in between: gratuitous lingerie, catfights, Nasa whipping a snake, Nasa whipping a man, infidelity, rape, a gay bar, syphilis-induced bouts of insanity, drunkenness, and miscegenation.The latter leads into some ugly racial politics that comprise the core of the film and Nasa’s character (it’s implied that her violent temper is the result of her half-Native American heritage), but the loose morals on display throughout “Call Her Savage” still make for some unbridled and unhinged entertainment. Her return unfortunately ended up being her penultimate film, but Bow has arguably never been more impressive that she is here, in a role that required her to play just about every type of character displayed throughout the sex pictures that were popular among women during the Pre-Code era in one and, according to The Film Daily, “pretty near run the gamut of feminine moods and modes.”
