In 1933, Clara Bow was a little bit better off than she had been in 1931 -- when anxiety over a couple of failed attempts at parlaying her massive silent picture stardom into talkies pushed her into a minor nervous breakdown -- but only marginally so. After a convalescence, she had signed a two picture deal with Fox which guaranteed a salary of $250,000 a year, and had launched straight into production on
Call Me Savage, a typical pre-code farce which required the former
It girl to play an heiress-turned-hooker who, at one point, finds occasion to become suspiciously intimate with her dog. Though the film did well at the box office, critics generally slammed it for being the salacious bit of pre-Codespolitation that it was, and Bow, sufficiently soured at the age of 26, was reluctant to make another picture for the studio. Still, it *was* the Depression, and Bow figured she'd rush through production on one last pic, and then retire once and for all.
When presented with the script for
Hoopla, a remake of a 1928 Douglas Fairbanks vehicle called
The Parker, Bow was less than enthused: "I don't like remakes," she said. "I tried to get out of doing it, but no go."
Thankfully, she had little choice.
Hoopla ended up being Bow's last film, but what a way to go out. The plot is mostly vintage pre-Code farce: Bow plays a carnival dancer/glorified stripper who seduces the teenage son of the carnival's barker on a bet. The dancer and the young, wannabe lawyer end up falling in love and, much to his father's chagrin, elope and run off to (of all places) Chicago. The stripper gets a job dancing at the World Fair so that the kid can re-enroll in school; she then arranges for his dad, who is apparently the world's best carnival barker, to come work at the fair so that he can see that the tramp his son married actually has a heart of gold. Cue the ususal bawdy, boozed-up antics.
But despite its conventional storyline,
Hoopla feels somewhat more sophisticated than your average 1930s look-what-we-can-get-away-with, tagline-first-script-second, sex comedy. Director Frank Lloyd, a silent era veteran whose Oscar win in 1929 for
The Painted Lady caused some controversy (it's the only picture in Oscar history to win Best Director without even getting nominated for Best Picture), shows incredible visual style, most notably in a scene in which a fight over Bow's character incites the entire carnival to explode into a riot. Rather than play the scene straight for slapstick laughs, Lloyd lets it go on for what seems like forever, largely using super wide shots, in which the roiling of the violent mob is shown to echo the mechanical swirl of the ferris wheel and the tilt-a-whirl. Its hard not to see it as a forebear of the famous carnival scene in
Some Came Running -- Vincente Minnelli just brought the Technicolor and the melodrama. Lloyd is also surprisingly adept at creating depth in characters that could have easily remained one-dimensional, especially in the case of the barker, played by Preston Foster (Richard Cromwell, who plays the kid, does not acquit himself as admirably).
The problem with most films like this -- pre- and post-Code -- in which a promiscuous woman (post-Code, sexual independence is usually switched out for financial and/or ideological independence, but all varieties carry the same stigma) "goes straight" in the name of love, is that the heroine's reformation/crisis of consciousness/sudden attack of morals feels false. Even in good films, like
Baby Face, for example, or even
Blonde Venus, the magic of the picture for the first 90 minutes resides in the heroine's ability to indulge "bad" impulses, and still maintain the total sympathy of the viewer. The turn towards respectability, in either case, feels tacked on, and entirely out of character. In her study of mid-century female viewership,
A Woman's View, Jeanine Basinger noted that female viewers learned to mentally "delete" the final scenes of films (in which female characters often gave up any attempt at living an independent life and dove back into the embrace of patriarchy), and replaced them with their own fantasies as to how Stanwyck or Kay Francis of Joan Crawford might *really* handle such a decision. It's easy to imagine an alternate-universe version of
Baby Face, for example, in which Barbara Stanwyck keeps George Brent's briefcase of jewels, dumps the stiff and runs off with Chico (her faithful maid/sidekick). And who really believes Marlene Dietrich would go back to poor, sickly Herbert Marshall, when a globetrotting life with (apparently crooked, but oh-so dashing) politician Cary Grant awaits?
Hoopla may be hokey, but I bought Clara Bow's "transformation." In large part,
Hoopla works because she is not really required to transform at all -- it's the men who have to come around and see her for who she really is, and to accept the fact that she can sell her sexuality for a living without losing her soul -- or even weakening her marriage. She's able to restore a broken family, financially support higher education AND keep the entire Chicago Worlds Fair afloat -- all by belly dancing in pasties and panties (yes, seriously). In the second-to-last shot, her father-in-law announces to the entire Fair what a swell person she is. Cut to Clara Bow's face lighting up in happiness, as she throws her arms up in the air and grinds her moneymaker into the fadeout.
Hoopla screened yesterday at Film Forum's
Fox Before the Code series.
Call Her Savage screens December 10-11. The image and some info above came from
ClaraBow.net.
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The National Film Registry has announced their 2006 list of inductees, and whilst Dave Kehr can't resist turning up his nose at the body's annual, token appeals to populism ("Now remind me: what was the historic importance of Blazing Saddles? The first fart joke in a major studio film?"), I find the list to be, once again, the most fascinatingly schizophrenic document of film historiography since ... um ... last year's list, I guess.
