Bowed and Marching: Anthropology of Talkies 101

“The Wild Party” is somewhat surprisingly decent—and I don’t mean that in the sense of some old-fashioned notion of propriety. I mean, it’s not a bad film at all for an early talkie, one of the first (although not the first, as sometimes misreported (see "Interference" (1928))) from the then-biggest movie studio in the world, Paramount, and starring the then-biggest movie star in the world, Clara Bow. Despite such impressive résumés, the studio and its star were forced back to school for the transition from silent films to talking pictures. Quite literally, Bow was singled out for special treatment in receiving a couple-weeks crash course in learning to talk for the camera, and Paramount and other studios for the past couple years had conspired to study the situation before consolidating and while allowing Warner Bros. Vitagraph shorts and increasingly-talky features and Fox Movietone newsreels to do the innovating. At last, here, a stop is put to “The Plastic Age” (1925) shenanigans, both studio and star needing to buckle down and study to pass this test. Stage-trained professor Fredrich March comes in to teach the pantomime artists how to act properly. The end of the flapper was before them, and the stock market hadn’t even crashed yet.

Thus, there’s a reflexive quality to Bow’s character’s college-student, party-girl angst beyond that tired battle-of-the-sexes drama. It’s more so a battle between two styles of performance. Even the repeated rape attempts of the narrative may be read as representing the bodily threat of the talkies to the silent film star’s dignity and livelihood. Or the blackmailing gossip as the critical gaze of the movie-goer fan. The all-girls dormitory, of Bow and other scantily-clad young women under the gaze of lesbian director Dorothy Arzner, is also open to queer readings, such as that by Susan Potter. As she points out, when Bow and her cohorts dress up erotically and repetitiously like Tiller Girls, it’s first seen by their “Little Bo Peep” shepherdess as a danger in its influence on the other female students at an all-girl costume ball. Besides, there’s the variety this gendered and situational transitioning afforded Bow’s performative education, including modulating her voice (and movements and appearance, down to that removable mouche) by the demands of the company she keeps. Even biographer David Stenn’s somewhat otherwise dismissive assessment of the film compliments Bow’s vocal range and counters the myth that her talkie debut was a “disaster” in any sense. “The Wild Party” also benefits from the introduction, for its exceptionally-kinetic star and credited to Arzner, of the boom mic, a relatively brisk pacing (an average shot length of little more than seven seconds—quite quick for an early talkie—according to counts on the Cinemetrics website), and insertions of “silent” reaction shots.

Most surprising, though, may be just how well Bow and March work together. Beyond the taboo student–teacher love affair (and overlaying a more subtle allusion to lesbian dormmates), it’s an effective union of acting styles. Having heard how much of a supposedly rushed and thoughtless exercise in transitioning to talkies this production was, it’s a relief to see, instead, that “the It girl” finally worked with a co-star who could adroitly play off of her and vice versa—a battle between passionate pantomime and rigid restraint, skittish gossip and over-enunciation. And, to go along with what’s left of their other pairing of “Get Your Man” (1927), where Bow silently simulated the sounds of sex, it seems clear Arzner was among Bow’s best directors (and would become one of March’s) and well understood the sex appeal of “it,” beginning with Bow backing into the frame—making her butt the joke rather than her the butt of it.

That entire opening sequence of feminine chattering is some impressive verbal and visual choreography, and Luke Aspell has written on the acoustic dimensions overall of the picture’s sexual fluidity, while Kendahl Cruver for the same website alluded to the homosocial parallels in production and narrative. I’d love to see a cleaned-up professional home-video release rather than the bootlegs and low-res rips of the old TCM screening in obscure circulation now. Maybe watching it once through with subtitles would help to overcome the technological limitations of the day. If the silent version still existed, that’d be a nice extra, as well.

Sure, it’s creaky, the vestigial title cards cover over some poor plotting, and after Bow’s student is complimented by March’s anthropology professor for not crying, she subsequently goes on to cry throughout much of the rest of the picture, but in the important ways, this is subtly studious. Reminds me a bit of my own college experiences more than some classless fantasy such as “The Plastic Age” ever could—seeing the patheticness and danger of seemingly entitled students drinking and partying their tuition away, never learning how to correctly integrate research into their papers, hardly ever taking learning seriously. I have a similar reaction watching many early talkies, of childish and drunken waste. Pay attention, though; this time the studying paid off.

Works Cited
Aspell, Luke. “The Wild Party (Dorothy Arzner, 1929).” Senses of Cinema 82 (2017). www.sensesofcinema.com/2017/cteq/the-wild-party/#fnref-29698-1.

Cinemetrics website database. www.cinemetrics.lv/.

Cruver, Kendahl. “The Wild Party.” Senses of Cinema 34 (2004). www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/wild_party/.

Potter, Susa. “Mobilizing Genre: The Wild Party’s Sexual Kinesthetics.” In Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema,” 80-98. University of Illinois Press, 2019.

Stenn, David. Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild. Doubleday, 1988.