Clara Bow’s Tabloid Past

Knowing that Call Her Savage was a Pre-Code movie, I sat down to watch it expecting the usual hints at immoral sexuality that would be forbidden once the Production Code started being rigorously enforced in 1934.  For example, at one point the movie features a nightclub for gays and lesbians, for we see a man with his arm around another man, and a woman with her arm around another woman.  The entertainment consists of a performance by a couple of effeminate waiters, singing something about a sailor in his pajamas, and how they would like to be chambermaids on a big battleship.

Earlier in the movie, however, there is a scene where Clara Bow starts playing with her Great Dane, at one point even getting underneath him.  I was ashamed of myself for the thought that popped into my head. I told myself that if I revealed what I was imagining here, people would think I was some kind of twisted pervert.  And so it was that I intended skip over this part.  But then I thought, it wouldn’t hurt just to Google it.  It was then that I found that others had had a similar reaction, that there was a hint of bestiality in that scene.

The internet is one thing, and respectable film criticism is something else again.  With that in mind, I turned to the last word on the subject, Thomas Doherty’s Pre-Code Hollywood:  Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934.  On page 104, he lists, among the many violations of the Hayes Code in Call Her Savage, Clara Bow’s “erotic frolicking with a Great Dane.”

In the same paragraph, moreover, Doherty says that Bow’s life was full of scandal. Rather than retire from public view, Call Her Savage was a comeback vehicle for her, one in which she flaunted the features of her lurid life. “Making the best of the tabloid headlines,” Doherty says, “Call Her Savage invited audiences to link the affairs of the actress with the antics of the lusty hellion she played on the screen.” It would be like Fatty Arbuckle making a movie in which he tells a woman at a party, “Things go better with Coke.”

We always knew in general that life reflects art, and art reflects life, but that is especially so in this movie. I normally have little interest in the personal lives of actors, caring only about what I see on the big screen, but I made an exception in this case, looking into her biography.  And yes, there were tabloid stories of Bow having sex with her dog.

This reminded me of the movie The Scarlet Empress (1934), in which Marlene Dietrich plays Princess Sophia in her eventual rise to power as Catherine the Great.  There is the story, possibly apocryphal, that she died while having sex with her horse.  The harness holding up the horse broke, and she was crushed to death when it fell on top of her.  It’s easier for a man.  All he has to do is get his horse stump broke. But then, when it comes to sex, things are often easier for men.  In any event, at the end of the movie, Catherine the Great is seen standing next to a mighty steed, thereby hinting at the scurrilous rumor concerning the death of this historical figure.

The First Generation

When Call Her Savage begins, we see a wagon train crossing the state of Texas, being led by a man named Silas.  Everyone knows that Silas is committing adultery with a woman in the last covered wagon.

Two old men are talking about it.  We never learn the name of one of the men, but he is played by Russell Simpson and will be referred to as such.  The other man is Mort, and he says, “No good will come of it. You’ll see.  He’ll bring down the wrath of God on all of us.”

Let’s stop for a moment to consider this.  The question is not, what are we to make of this?  For that answer will vary, depending on one’s religious nature, ranging from Christian fundamentalist to atheist. Rather, the question is, what does the movie want us to make of this?  As a general rule, movies do not expect the audience to agree with an old coot like Mort, with his talk of the wrath of God, an Old Testament God that will punish an entire community for the sins of just one man. Therefore, even though Indians appear on the horizon right after he says that, we would normally be expected to regard it as mere coincidence.

The Indians fail in their attack on the wagon train, and they ride off.  The few settlers that were killed are buried, and Silas leads a prayer for them, while we hear “Abide with Me” in the background: “And we ask God, in His infinite mercy, to take them to His bosom, that they might dwell in the Kingdom of Heaven, forever and ever.  Amen.”

This is the kind of God that movies usually approve of, although it also makes sense that a sinner like Silas would prefer a loving and forgiving God to the wrathful Deity that Mort was invoking.

Anyway, Silas walks over to Mort, who is lying on the ground, slowly dying. Mort rises up a bit, accusing Silas and that woman he was with, whom he refers to as a Jezebel and a harlot, of being responsible for the communal punishment God has inflicted on those they just buried.  Silas puts his foot on Mort’s neck, forcing him to the ground, crushing his windpipe.

Simpson comes up to Silas, saying it’s against God what he’s been doing.  Silas says it doesn’t matter because Mort would have been dead by sundown anyway. Simpson says he’s not worried about Mort. Rather, he is talking about Silas’s daughter Ruth.  “A man passes his nature on to his children, Silas, and your nature is bad.  The good book says the sins of the father will be passed on to his children, even unto the third and the fourth generation.”

The reference is to Exodus 20:5, where God is giving Moses the Ten Commandments.  It is not clear to me whether that passage means it is the sins of the father or the guilt of the father that is passed on. Simpson seems to be saying the former, in which case, Silas’s children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren will also be sinful.  However, it might mean that even if the father’s progeny are themselves innocent, they have inherited his guilt and will therefore be punished.

I take it to mean the latter.  For example, as told in 2 Samuel 11-12, David and Bathsheba commit adultery, and then David has her husband Uriah murdered to get him out of the way.  For that reason, God kills their baby.  The doctrine of original sin aside, the baby was clearly innocent, certainly as innocent as any other baby that gets born every day, except for the fact that it had inherited David’s guilt and therefore deserved punishment.

Nevertheless, I think that when Simpson says what he does to Silas, he means that Silas’s sinful nature will be passed on to his daughter Ruth.  In either event, the idea in the Bible seems to be that the method of transmission is supernatural, that God has ordained this inheritance.

When Mort spoke of the wrath of God being visited upon them, he struck us as one of those fanatical religious types that the movies always portray in a bad light. But Simpson impresses us as being more level-headed, so we begin to wonder if the movie wants us to take this stuff seriously.

The Second Generation

Just before the Indians attacked the wagon train, we saw two children playing, Silas’s daughter Ruth and a boy named Pete, who was pretending to be an Indian, threatening to scalp Ruth.  Eighteen years later, Pete and Ruth have grown up and gotten married. But he neglects her.  Sitting in a wagon, about to go on a trip, he yells to Ruth to say goodbye to him.  She is bathing, but she wraps a towel around her and comes to the window.  After he leaves, she lies on the bed naked, except for the towel. No question about it, she is unfulfilled. Rising to the occasion is Ronasa, Ruth’s Indian servant. He has the love she needs. However, he tells her he must leave her because his father wants him to marry some squaw that he cares nothing about.  Before he departs, he and Ruth have desperate sex out in the woods, which we know is hot and passionate because Ronasa is an Indian. As a result of their union, Ruth gives birth to Nasa.

At this point, we again get the quotation about visiting the iniquity of the father on his progeny, adding the introductory phrase, “For I am a jealous God,” which is also part of Exodus 20:5.  This time, however, it is not uttered by any character in the movie, but rather is written as an intertitle, with two tablets behind it of the sort on which the Ten Commandments were written. This makes it clear that we are supposed to regard this as literally true.  In addition, the movie probably wants us to believe that Mort was right after all, that God had the Indians attack the wagon train because Silas was committing adultery.

The Third Generation

Clara Bow plays Nasa when she grows up.  We know, as she does not, that her biological father was Ronasa.  After lashing her half-breed friend Moonglow (Gilbert Roland) forty times with her whip, while he just stands there and takes it because he loves her, she says she doesn’t understand herself, why she is so wild and angry all the time.  Her savage nature cannot be blamed solely on her being a half-breed because Moonglow is also a half-breed, and he is not wild and angry at all. It must be that, in addition, she has inherited the sins of Silas.

In an effort to tame her, Pete, her (legal) father, sends her to a girls’ school in Chicago, but that only gives her more opportunity to express her sinful nature. Then Pete tries to make her marry a man she doesn’t love.  When she refuses, he says he never wants to see her again.

The man she does end up marrying is Lawrence Crosby.  He marries her only because he wants to make his mistress jealous.  That mistress is Sunny De Lane (Thelma Todd), whom he broke up with because she had been “weekending” him.  But she is the one he really wants because she is willing to cater to his “peculiarities.”  We subsequently get an idea about one of those peculiarities.  While talking to Nasa at a party, he sees Sunny arrive.  After telling Nasa who she is, he makes a Freudian slip.  While looking directly at Sunny, he says, “Mother.”

Crosby leaves Nasa after one night of marriage, telling her she will have credit at either of his banks. Months later, a lawyer tells her Crosby is dying, and that it would be wise to visit him so that she can continue to get her allowance. During her visit, he tries to rape her.  His doctor says his mind is infected. That sounds like syphilis to me.  However, the doctor says he can be cured with the proper care, presumably with Salvarsan and bismuth.

The Fourth Generation

The next month, Nasa has a baby.  Oddly enough for a Pre-Code movie, her baby is legitimate. She expresses concern as to whether the baby is all right, which suggests apprehension about syphilis again. That would be one way of passing down the sins of the father, but I believe only supernatural transmission is what the Bible had in mind.

Because Crosby cuts off her allowance, we slowly see the effect of her impoverishment, as she loses her fancy clothes and starts living in a cheap hotel. She looks at a prescription for the baby: ephedrine sulphate and chlorotone, drugs that might be used to treat the side effects of Salvarsan and bismuth.

Of course, if the baby had syphilis, then so too would Nasa.  Later in the movie, Crosby appears, completely cured and paired up with Sunny again, so I guess we can imagine Nasa taking the cure too.  I know it’s not terribly realistic.  The treatment we are talking about took years, but I still think that was supposed to be the idea.  An even more unrealistic example occurs in The Road to Ruin (1934).  In that movie, a woman is given the Wassermann test, and the result is positive.  In what appears to be a week or two later, she is cured.

Alone with a sick baby to take care of, and no money to pay for its medicine, she turns to prostitution. The first two men who approach her on the street for sex completely disgust her, but she is able to tolerate the third one.  She has sex with him and then uses the money he gave her to buy the medicine. By the time she returns to her apartment, however, there has been a fire, and her baby has suffocated.   After all, the baby was the fourth generation of Silas and had inherited his sins.  Therefore, it was deserving of God’s wrath.

Soon after, she finds out that Silas has died and left her $100,000.  (Adjusted for inflation, that would be just over $2,000,000 today.)  She says, “I’ll get even with life.”  At first, I wondered why she didn’t say she was going to get even with men, given the way she had been treated by Pete and Crosby, in addition to the disgust she felt when men approached her on the street for sex.

I think the reason for her turn of phrase, “get even with life” instead of “get even with men,” goes back to Bow’s reason for making this movie.  Scandals about her had caused her to have a nervous breakdown, and now, with this movie, she was getting even, after a fashion, by defiantly putting her sordid sexuality on the screen.  Nevertheless, she does seem to have it in for men, hiring a gigolo so she can treat him like dirt.

In the end, Nasa receives a letter from her mother Ruth that she is dying.  She returns home to Texas.  In her dying moments, Ruth gives Nasa just enough information for her to figure out that Ronasa was her real father.  Nasa tells Moonglow that she is a half-breed like him, so they can get married and live happily ever after.  I don’t know if God is all through punishing the generations of Silas, however, so maybe they shouldn’t have children, just in case.