Dynamic Dames

Clara Bow

AS “ALVERNA”

mantrap (1926)

In 1932, Clara Bow caused a stir in the risqué cult classic Call Her Savage, her pre-Code comeback about a scandalous Texas heiress who resorts to prostitution, among other eyebrow-raising exploits. But Bow had risen to stardom in silent films. In the Roaring Twenties, before the movies learned to talk, she had pulled herself out of the Brooklyn slums to become the patron saint of uninhibited young flappers everywhere. Of the fifty-plus films she made before retiring from Hollywood at age twenty-eight, her personal favorite was Victor Fleming’s 1926 comedy Mantrap. When you watch the movie, it’s easy to see why. Though not technically pre-Code, this late-era silent gives Bow a starring role that predicts the dynamic ladies of the pre-Code era.

From the moment she steps on the scene as Alverna, a bubbly, spit-curled Kewpie doll of a manicurist with a severe flirting addiction, Clara “just walks away with the picture,” to quote Variety. “Every minute she’s in it,” the critic wrote, “she steals it.” For some reason, the lovely Alverna falls for the ungainly Joe (Ernest Torrence), a simple backwoodsman who makes her his bride and snatches her away to his cabin in the rustic Canadian town of Mantrap. Take Alverna’s boredom and flirting problem, add in Ralph (Percy Marmont), a New York divorce lawyer running away from loose city women, and you have more than a love triangle; you have two fellas caught in the ultimate mantrap.

Aided by master cinematographer James Wong Howe and screenwriters Adelaide Heilbron and Ethel Doherty (adapting the novel by Sinclair Lewis), Clara Bow really shines. Heilbron and Doherty took significant liberties with Lewis’s story, making Alverna more likable and heroic. The role encapsulates everything the public loved about Clara: Alverna was good-hearted, fun-loving, and just a little bit naughty. Back when screen women were sharply divided into two categories—virgin or vamp—Clara managed to carve out her own distinctive niche right in the middle.

In the scene where she feeds Joe and Ralph chocolates and bops around to a jazz record, Clara displays her trademark manic energy. According to Paramount chief Adolph Zukor, “She danced even when her feet were not moving. Some part of her was in motion in all her waking moments—if only her great rolling eyes.” Clara was animator Max Fleischer’s inspiration for Betty Boop, and, in Mantrap, her resemblance to the famous cartoon character is remarkable. But there’s a tough, independent streak beneath the adorable exterior. When Joe and Ralph join forces against her on a camping trip, Alverna tells them off, hijacks their only boat, and ditches them both. Joe shouts after her, “Remember, you still bear my name,” to which she retorts, “So does your old man!” Giggling, she sails off into the sunset, leaving the two men stranded in the wilderness. This is Alverna’s big moment—funny, sassy, and triumphant. At the end of the picture, she returns to Joe, but it’s clear that he will have to accept her as she is. Flirting, for her, is as natural as breathing.

The success of Mantrap led Clara to her most iconic role in It (1927), the movie that would make her known everywhere as “The It Girl.” She was on top of the world—until sound replaced silents. Early sound technology often required actors to stand still and speak into hidden microphones (see Singin’ in the Rain [1952] for a comical take on the talkie revolution), which deflated the magical spontaneity of stars like Clara Bow. Her career took a nosedive, and she left the movies at age twenty-five.

But Clara had the final word. She returned to the screen in grand style when Fox offered her a quarter-million-dollar deal that included creative control of her films. She starred in Call Her Savage and the carnival romance Hoopla (1933), her celluloid swan song. After that, she retired, had children with her husband (cowboy star Rex Bell), and quietly became a legend—an unforgettable symbol of everything that was fun and untamed about the Jazz Age.

Norma Shearer

AS “JERRY MARTIN”

The Divorcée (1930)

Think Sharon Stone caused a sensation by uncrossing her legs in Basic Instinct (1992)? That’s nothing compared to the furor Norma Shearer unleashed when she played a wife who has an affair with her husband’s best friend in The Divorcée. A woman cheating on her husband was nothing new, even in 1930. What made Shearer’s Jerry Martin different was the absolution of sin. This was no dime-store floozy. This was an educated, virtuous lady who convinced the audience that her adultery was perfectly justified. As a woman hell-bent on sexual equality with men, Shearer lit a fuse that set Hollywood on fire and incinerated any lingering traces of Victorian oppression. She shocked the movie-going public, ignited the pre-Code sexual revolution, and even altered society’s definition of “that kind of woman.”

Jerry is an ultra-modern female who wears slinky gowns without underwear and warns her fiancé, Ted (Chester Morris), that she won’t wait long to marry him because she’s “human.” Ted compliments Jerry on her “man’s point of view” and agrees to an equal marriage. That is, until he cheats on her and she “balances their accounts” by sleeping with Ted’s pal, the eternally inebriated but gorgeous Don (Robert Montgomery). When Ted finds out, suddenly he’s not so cool with equality; the union ends in divorce, and Jerry embarks on an international spree of romantic liaisons with attractive males across the globe. Its star made headlines for her daring depiction of a lady liberated by divorce.

“Norma Shearer has crusaded for women,” reporter Gladys Hall declared in a 1932 article in Motion Picture magazine. By starring in The Divorcée and its equally provocative follow-up, A Free Soul (1931), Shearer, Hall wrote, “has killed our grandmothers. I mean, she has killed what they stood for.… She has cremated the myth that men will never marry ‘that kind of woman.’” What Hall was saying is that, in a time when “good” women were expected to be virgins, Shearer made it acceptable for women to have premarital sex and affairs, just as men do. She evened the playing field.

Stricken with remorse (or maybe just exhausted from her many amorous escapades), Jerry reunites with Ted at the close of the picture. But she’s not begging for forgiveness because she has done wrong; instead, she’s realized that a dozen men can’t replace the one she truly loves. So it’s a win-win for Jerry: she gets even with Ted’s fling, leaves him to enjoy the company of who-knows-how-many lovers, then is allowed to return to her beloved ex-husband in the end. She has an extraordinary amount of personal freedom, rarely matched on the screen since.

Ex-Wife, the source novel for The Divorcée, was so scandalous that it was initially published anonymously. Its author, Ursula Parrott (born Katherine Ursula Towle), is sadly forgotten today, though she penned four screenplays, fifty short stories, and twenty-two novels. Boasting friends and colleagues like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Zane Grey, with whom she collaborated on The Woman Accused (1933), Parrott lived as large as one of her heroines, marrying four different men and raking in royalties from her popular fiction yarns.

Shearer, too, is unjustly overlooked these days, despite her enormous fame in the 1930s. Ever ambitious, Edith Norma Shearer scrapped her way to stardom in silent pictures, overcoming a lazy right eye, a slightly pudgy figure, and a disastrous first screen test the actress herself described as “hideous.” But Norma had a few aces up her sleeve: luminous alabaster skin, a mane of bobbed brunette waves that could be boyishly sleek when pushed behind her ears or wild when tousled and tumbling over one eye, and a smooth, cultured speaking voice that helped propel her to the big leagues when sound came along. Her 1927 marriage to MGM’s production manager Irving Thalberg didn’t hurt either.

Thalberg purchased the rights to Ex-Wife with plans to cast Joan Crawford in the lead, doubtful that his wife was sexy enough to pull it off. Waging a no-holds-barred campaign for the role, Norma sat for a seductive portrait with glamour photographer George Hurrell to prove she had the right stuff. She not only nabbed the to-die-for part, but also took home the Academy Award for Best Actress, inspiring the industry to follow her example and produce a wave of earthy movies about boundary-pushing broads. You go, Norma.

Bette Davis

AS “HELEN BAUER”

Ex-Lady (1933)

“I don’t want to be like my mother, the yes-woman for some man. I want to be a person of my own,” declares modern young career gal Helen to her fiancé, Don, played by the hunky blond Gene Raymond. Though Don begs—and though her parents are outraged at their living arrangement—she refuses to marry him, preferring instead to live together in an equal partnership. She just knows that the instant they make it legal she’ll be demoted from lover to subservient spouse. She’ll be expected to give up her job as an in-demand magazine illustrator to stay at home and take care of Don. In short, he will have the right to tell her what to do. “No one,” she warns Don, “has any rights about me except me.”

Ex-Lady was a racy pre-Code gem from Warner Bros. that gave the incomparable Bette Davis her first top-billed role. While the title suggests that Bette has a tarnished reputation, the movie takes her side. No accusations, no judgments. Her character is allowed to be as bad as she wants to be. And, as ads for Beyond the Forest (1949) would assert years later, “Nobody’s as good as Bette when she’s bad.” Davis would cement her image as a force to be reckoned with as she matured. By the time she costarred with Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) at age fifty-four, Bette was a legend in her own time. Her reported feud with Crawford was legendary as well and would later be fictionalized in the 2017 miniseries Feud: Bette and Joan.

Even in her early days, Bette earned a reputation as a bold babe with no fear of speaking her mind or bucking the system. Ruth Elizabeth Davis was on the cusp of twenty-five when she starred as Helen Bauer, and was three years away from her first Best Actress Academy Award, for Dangerous in 1936. That was the same year she played hooky from Warner Bros., first breaching her contract, then accusing the studio of “slavery” by forcing her into “mediocre pictures.” Bette lost the court case, but she won Warners’ eventual respect and meatier roles. In 1939, she would score a second Oscar for donning a scandalously sexy red dress as the town trollop in Jezebel.

With smart, stylish direction by B-movie maestro Robert Florey, Ex-Lady is a highly polished remake of the 1931 film Illicit, starring Barbara Stanwyck. Both movies were based on a 1930 play by Edith Fitzgerald and her then boyfriend Robert Riskin, an unmarried couple writing a taboo-shattering comparison of wedded versus unwedded bliss.

Marriage, Helen says, would make her boring before her time. “It’s dull!” she wails. As embodied by a lissome, platinum-blonde Bette in gowns by Orry-Kelly, Helen is an elegantly dressed firecracker. She wants to be with Don exclusively, but they argue over the double standards applied to women in marriage. Finally, Helen turns the tables and proposes to Don. Following a sultry Havana honeymoon, just as she predicted, the couple settles into a dull routine; before long, they grow restless. Don and Helen both indulge in short-lived affairs with others. But after a trial separation, they realize they’re better together than apart. The union of marriage “may not be perfect,” Helen admits, “but this way it hurts less.”

In the end, she agrees to remain Don’s wife, but it’s her choice. She commits to the arrangement because they love each other and want to be together, and the only socially acceptable way to accomplish that is with wedding rings. But being a Mrs. doesn’t define her; she gets to keep her career and her man. And her headstrong personality suggests that she’ll never be completely tamed. Helen Bauer, like Bette Davis, was a forward-thinking lady in a movie decades ahead of its time.

Barbara Stanwyck

AS “LILY POWERS”

Baby Face (1933)

Though she took up less space in the gossip columns, Barbara Stanwyck did just as much to define twentieth-century American womanhood as her contemporaries Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Over the course of a career spanning nearly sixty years, Babs played women who were very good, women who were very bad, and every shade of gray in between—and she played the hell out of them. In her pre-Code days, she embodied the Depression-hardened dame, the kind of broad who was just as likely to slug a guy in the jaw as kiss him.

One of Stanwyck’s most remarkable roles is in Baby Face, a movie so outrageously risqué that it was censored even in 1933, when the atmosphere was as loose as the ladies on the screen. Censors and critics alike lambasted the film for its “gaudiness” and, as the Los Angeles Times