Hula (Silent) (DVD)

On a remote island in Hawaii ("a land of singing seas and swinging hips") lives "Hula" Calhoun, free-spirited daughter of wealth and privilege. Shucking her responsibilities and obligations, she spends most of her days skinny-dipping and chasing butterflies. That is until she meets Anthony Haldane, a gloomy-browed older man tasked with constructing a dam on her family's property. The serious-minded engineer has no use for Hula until he saves the curvy beauty and her pet dog from drowning. Afterwards invited to a thank-you party at the Calhoun estate, Haldane is driven to distraction by Hula's skimpy dress and wild, erotic dancing. Finally giving in to temptation, the mutual attraction between the two is about to combust when a wild card is thrown into the mix: Haldane's frigid wife, newly arrived for a visit. Hula becomes convinced that the only way she can get Haldane to leave his wife is by sullying his reputation as an engineer - leading to an uproarious climax in which the dam is blown up with dynamite.

The iconic Clara Gordon Bow (1905-1965) was born to a life of humble poverty in Brooklyn, New York. An avid moviegoer in her teens, she entered a movie magazine's "Fame and Fortune" contest in hopes of escaping her dreary home life. Winning through sheer determination, she was soon cast in her first hit, Down to the Sea in Ships (1922). Several more successes followed before Bow starred in her most famous picture, It (1927), in which she played a shop girl turned flapper. (Afterwards, she would be forever known as the "It" Girl.) Hula was one of Paramount's many attempts to capitalize on the popularity of It; these films usually paired Clara with a stoic, emaciated-looking older actor as a contrast to the devil-may-care abandon that was promised by Bow's lopsided smiles and strong curves. In Hula's case the object of her vexation was Clive Brook, the stiff upper-lipped Englishman best known for playing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's great detective in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1929) and Sherlock Holmes (1932) for Paramount and Fox, respectively. Clara's free-spirited voluptuousness is emphasized in Hula's opening scene, in which she swims nude in a stream, a sequence that made even the most timid of moviegoers' pulses race. Like Clara's previous film Mantrap, Hula is directed by Victor Fleming, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker of Red Dust (1932), The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941).

• silent films