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The Crimson Playgoer

Famous It-Girl's Pulchritude Falls to Redeem Hollywood Brainwork - In Film at University

Heretofore Hollywood has used uncommonly good judgment in casting Clara Bow. She has had scenarios written for her which called for an alternation of negligee and evening clothes in swift succession, allowing Clara to display her own particular charms in her own inimitable manner; the situation has not been clouded with acting and plot and all that. However, in "Call Her Savage," now at the University, Hollywood has gypped the customers. Not that Clara doesn't get plenty of chances to display those well-known charms; she does, much. But there is so much unadulterated tripe in the way of scenaric pathos and bathos on the menu that the delectable morsel of Clara's face and figure is insufficient to prevent acute disorders in the customer's digestion.

The plot is utterly stupid. It carries Nasa Springer, a wild little Texas ranch girl, from flirtation with a handsome half-breed in a sylvan glen to fortune and notoriety in the big city, and then back again to the sylvan glen and the knowledge that she loves the half-breed after all. In the course of her adventures she runs the gamut of engagement, marriage, separation, motherhood, prostitution for her baby's sake, divorce, and gigolo-hiring, before she at last finds true love in the arms of good old Moonglow, the Indian. Not content with this, the scenario writers estranged her father, burned up her baby, and put her mother on a most touching death-bed, all to give little Nasa the chance to ask overwhelming questions about Life and the Why Of It All. There are, of course, no answers.

In the other feature, "Little Orphan Annie," the ordinarily hard-to-bear Mitzi Green is absolutely insufferable. Those who follow the comic strip assidously will be grievously disappointed to see Sandy a German shepherd and Daddy Warbucks an insignificant little fat man whose only qualification for the part is a completely bald head. May Robson, in the part of one of Annie's numerous sponsors, is the only redeeming feature. And those who are touched by sweet and sentimental little children may be able to squeeze a bit of eye-moisture out of Buster Phelps saying his prayers at Grandma's knee. But the show as a whole is criminally dull.

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