The film was "Call Her Savage," a 1932 Fox Film (three years before the 20th Century merger) production that represented something of a comeback attempt for silent star Clara Bow, whose career had risen in the late 1920's with the Paramount production "It" only to fall with the rise of the talkies, Bow's own mental problems and a lot of sleazy rumors about her. According to her Wikipedia page Bow wasn't interested in a comeback — even though she was getting offers from MGM (who wanted her for "Red-Headed Woman," which instead became Jean Harlow's star-making film), RKO (who wanted her for "What Price Hollywood?", eventually filmed with Constance Bennett) and Howard Hughes as well as Fox. She was willing to make a couple more films because she and her husband, Western star Rex Bell, needed the money to maintain his ranch in Nevada, but she didn't want to be tied down to a long-term contract and she apparently picked Fox because they only wanted her for two movies, this one and "Hoop-La" from 1933. I was interested in "Call Her Savage," which TCM was showing as part of their Friday festivals of so-called "pre-Code" productions, partly as a late Clara Bow vehicle and partly because Vito Russo's book "The Celluloid Closet" said it was the first film in history to depict a Gay bar.
"Call Her Savage" had all the earmarks of an interesting but not particularly good movie — a faded star trying at once to live down a scandalous reputation while playing a "bad girl" role that capitalized on it; a story by a racy novelist, Tiffany Thayer, whose reputation was for writing as close to porn as could be got into mainstream print in 1932; and a studio that already had the reputation of being a place where careers went to die. Well, surprise! "Call Her Savage" turned out to be a masterpiece, one of the glittering gems of the "pre-Code" era alongside "Love Me Tonight," "I'm No Angel," "Safe in Hell," "Sensation Hunters," "Three Wise Girls," "Virtue" and several others, one which used the relative freedom of loose Production Code enforcement to create an artistically and emotionally intense world in which people's sexual drives are depicted as integral parts of their nature and characters fall in and out of love (or in and out of bed) with each other for reasons similar to those that obtain in the real world. John Francis Dillon, a director I've never thought much of (mainly because the most prestigious film I've seen of his before this one is "Sally," the 1929 filmization of Marilyn Miller's hit musical, done as dully and in the same stage-bound manner of most pre-Berkeley musicals), turns in a magnificent job here, using oblique angles and surprisingly noir-ish lighting; aided by the superb cinematographer Lee Garmes, he throws together a dazzling array of different visual "looks" to bring home the point of each scene. I suspect only his early death at age 49 in 1934 prevented Dillon, who'd worked himself up from Mack Sennett comedies to silent features, from remaining a major director well into the talkie era.
The screenplay is by Edwin J. Burke, who managed a tough assignment — bringing a Tiffany Thayer novel to the screen and making it both cinematically coherent and agreeable to the Hays Office, enforcement arm of the Production Code (and anyone who reads the American Film Institute Catalog entry on "Call Her Savage" will quickly be disabused of the notion that the 1930-34 era in American movie was truly "pre-Code"! Fox went through several drafts and several writers before Will Hays' enforcer, Col. Jason S. Joy, finally reluctantly gave his O.K.) — and came up with a script full of both wisecracks and surprisingly emotional situations to show Bow's emotional range as an actress. And Bow's emotional range as an actress is probably the biggest surprise about this movie; there are sequences in which she's the uncontrollable flibbertigibbet she'd been in her silent films, but also scenes, especially when her character is suffering, in which she is almost Garbo-esque in her non-acting, her refusal to "milk it," her somber, serious mien. After seeing a bunch of films both old ("Something for the Boys," "Doll Face") and new (the most recent "Godzilla") that fell far short of their potentials, it was refreshing to watch a movie like "Call Her Savage" where everyone concerned got it right and nailed every aspect of their story they were aiming for: Dillon's assured direction, Garmes' deep cinematography (the "down" parts of the story in which Nasa is suffering were obviously inspired by the "street" films about urban poverty that had been the rage in Germany in the 1920's, and Garmes copied the shadowy chiaroscuro look that in the 1930's would have been called "the German look" and nowadays is known as film noir), Burke's mordant script and, most important, the surprisingly nuanced and multidimensional acting of Bow combine to create one of the finest films of its era.
