Another Kind Of Distance: A Time Travel, Twin Peaks, Film, Doom Patrol And Nostalgia Podcast

In this week's Clara Bow Acteurist Oeuvre-view episode, we're finally there: Clara's first two sound films, both from 1929. First, we engage in an extensive analysis of Dorothy Arzner's The Wild Party, Clara's talkie debut. The star plays a college girl rebelling against the Victorian strictures on campus sexuality, but yearning for the loftier aims of her studious roommate and the handsome new anthropology professor (played by Fredric March). One of 1929's great films, The Wild Party is a winning mixture of Austenesque coming-of-age moral trajectory and polymorphously perverse sensuality that only Bow and Arzner could pull off. But then, we get something much odder: Lothar Mendes' Dangerous Curves takes two tendencies of the Bow persona, her active heroism and her comic pathos, to their logical extremes. The result this produces at the movie's climax has to be seen to be believed. (Hint: it involves risking death in a clown suit.) But is Mendes crazy enough to pull off this crazy plot? And can the leads form