It's hard to know where to begin with this film, but no discussion is going to be complete without talking about its racism. It's pretty insidious stuff too, because aside from the depiction of Native Americans as savages bent on massacring white folks in the first five minutes, something pretty common out of Hollywood in this period and for decades afterwards, the film equates having "Indian blood" in descendants with impulse and anger issues. It essentially says that such blood will taint the pure white blood it's mixed with, and the person carrying it will have a diluted form of all that savage behavior we saw early on in the ol' west. To top it off, the film brings the Old Testament into play, promising that a vengeful God will "visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation," the sins in question being adultery, and more significantly, a relationship across racial lines. I don't think you can craft more racist subtext.
Like a tonic though, Clara Bow arrives riding a horse with great spirit, and from that moment on, she's simply fantastic, lighting up the screen in every scene she's in. Bow certainly has considerable charm but her acting is also top-notch, and she conveys a wide range of emotions very well. It's something the role allows, you see, because while it doesn't tell us this explicitly until much later, you'd have to be pretty dense not to know she's the daughter of an illicit union (among other things her name is a shortened form of a Native American's we see).
There are scenes where Bow whips snakes and a man, wrestles braless with a Great Dane, smashes a guitar over a guy's head, brawls with another woman at a society party, fights like a wildcat in fending off a man who tries to rape her, throws plates back at someone who chucked a bottle at her in a subterranean nightclub, punches several men in the ensuing melee (quite a right hook she had!), and soundly slaps a would-be suitor for insulting her, prompting him to say "You savage!" Through it all she flaunts her body in gorgeous evening gowns and silky lingerie, always seems to have the perfect comeback line with bantering with men or women, and is obviously ready to stand up for herself, with her fists if necessary. In other words, despite the repugnant subtext, her character is fascinating, and she's wonderful playing it. I loved seeing her fight off her rapist, even if the film gives her that power because she's half Native American.
The film gets very melodramatic as it plays all this out, as she marries a cad, is left with a child, turns to prostitution, loses her child, gets an inheritance, and is then wooed by a rich man. It's all over the place, and along the way we see everything from the sordid streets, to elegant parties, to a couple of openly gay guys performing in a nightclub. It's all pretty scandalous stuff, but not very artistically done. However to see Clara Bow in her penultimate film at just 27, and to perform so well, I guess I didn't care. She's certainly what pulled my review score up out of the gutter, even if it is a contradiction to how I've viewed other old movies disparaging Native Americans.
