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Clara Bow in Mantrap

Clara Bow, the legendary "It Girl" of the Roaring Twenties, is an unforgettable erotic force unleashed
in this sizzling 1926 comedy about a big city gal longing to escape her small town marriage

Mantrap (1926), Released in 1926, smack in the middle of the Jazz Agethe time of Bohemian free love and high-living, high-society flappers, of Bessie Smith's earthy blues artistry, and the popular embrace of female suffrageMantrap celebrates woman's sexuality as a life force. It also established its star Clara Bow as a sizzling embodiment of the Zeitgeist. Mantrap is named for a frontier town on the Mantrap River in Canada. The heroine is also a mantrapthe kind of woman who drives men crazymostly in a good way. As shaped by legendary director Victor Fleming (The Wizard of Oz, Gone With The Wind, Red Dust) who was in the middle of a torrid 720x500affair with Bow, the film doesn't punish the character for her sexual independence. It salutes her for it. Bow stars as Alverna, a vivacious Minneapolis manicurist, who marries a backwoods trader, Joe Easter (Ernest Torrence), and moves with him to frontier Canada. Ralph Prescott (Percy Marmont), a New York City divorce lawyer, shows up with Easter at his Mantrap River Trading Co. just when Alverna has come to realize that she misses the city lights. Prescott seeks a nonsexual retreat; he gets anything but. Mantrap is as buoyant and seductive as Roaring '20s jazz. Michael Sragow

USA, 1926, 86 min., b/w, 35mm print courtesy of the Library of Congress | Director: Victor Fleming | Writers: Adelaide Heilbron and Ethel Doherty, based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis | Cast: Clara Bow, Percy Marmont, Ernest Torrence, Eugene Pallette