THE WILD PARTY (1929)

First we hear a theme song: "Wild party girl of mine…/ Let's make whoopie while we may!" Next we find ourselves at the beginning of a new term at a women's college called Winston with a group of roommates who are members of the class of 1930. The most popular girl, Stella, stands around in her scanties as she unpacks her trunk and we meet some of her friends including Helen, a shy and strait-laced girl to whom Stella acts as a sort of protector. Stella tells of accidentally winding up briefly in the berth of a young man on the night train to school. The next day, she discovers that the man is the new and handsome anthropology professor James Gilmore whom the girls all call Gil. In his class, Stella flirts outrageously with him from the front row and he moves her to the back of the room. Later, while the girls are partying at a roadhouse, some drunks try to assault Stella and abduct her. Gil, out for a nighttime walk, saves her and subjects her to a tirade about how she and her friends have tried to turn the college into their own country club: "You jazz around glorying in sham freedom; life is just one wild party." Then he kisses her. A while later, Stella takes Helen to a fraternity party and Helen gets a little wild, snuggling on the beach with a frat boy until 4 in the morning. Stella finds out that Gil has been shot at and wounded by one of the drunk assaulters from the other night and he leaves school for a month to recuperate. When he returns, he and Stella start to carry on; he entertains her in his rooms and calls her a "little savage" as he kisses her. But soon both Stella and Helen are in trouble: Helen because love letters from her frat boy are discovered, Stella because a snitch named Eva saw her in Gil's room and found her shoe buckle outside of his window. [Spoilers:] Helen’s scholarship is in jeopardy but Stella sacrifices her own reputation and says the letters are hers. The movie ends with Stella getting on the train to leave college for good; Gil, who has found out what she did, has also left the school, joins her on the train, tells her he's taking her to Malaya on a scientific expedition, calls her “my savage” and kisses her.

To get the title out of the way, it's not a reference to any one party, but to Gil's accusatory rant about how Stella looks at life. (It's also no relation to a notorious narrative poem from 1927 called The Wild Party which itself was adapted later as a movie and a Broadway musical.) The tone of the film shifts at times from comedy to romance to melodrama and back. In some ways, it feels like an early version of the 1960s teen campus romances like GET YOURSELF A COLLEGE GIRL. In her first talkie, Clara Bow, known in silent movies for her sex appeal, plays Stella. She apparently had great anxiety about the microphones and some critics say it shows, but I found her, for the most part, fairly natural, perhaps in a slightly exaggerated way if that makes sense. She certainly gives the best performance among the college women. Fredric March, young and handsome, is very good as Gil; his gradual attraction to Stella feels right. Marceline Day is Faith, a sympathetic authority figure; Shirley O'Hara is the innocent Helen; Jack Luden is Helen's frat boy, sweet rather than being an obnoxious stereotype; Jack Oakie, later a famous comic actor, has a small part as a drunken frat boy who enters his scene sliding down a banister. Some critics describe the film as snappy, and that's a good word for it. Even when it threatens to bog down in fairly contrived drama, it recovers and remains light. The vulnerability of young women remains an issue; at one point early on, a student remarks that "a girl's gotta be an athlete these days to hold her own," and though the line is delivered as a joke, we see its truth play out. Directed, fairly flatly, by Dorothy Arzner. Interesting, even if only as a historical relic, though it's fizzier than the word 'relic' might indicate. Pictured are March and Bow. [YouTube]