Characters in popular art who make fun of sex, of their own sexuality, while still being deeply and powerfully sexy strike me as peculiarly American — I can't think of any examples that originated in other countries.

The English music hall created a kind of ditzy sexpot, best exemplified by Beatrice Lillie (above), but the ditzy sexpot had a very restricted erotic appeal — she tried to appear accidentally sexy, and was never sexually threatening in any way.  That was her charm.  The “naughty schoolgirl” figure crosses cultures, too, but her mask of good-natured innocence is just that — a mask, behind which to deliver erotic innuendo.

You can see traces of this attitude  in the great female blues singers of the early 20th Century, like Bessie Smith, but Smith knew that she was being bad — her tossed-off double-entendres had a leering quality, suggesting a down and dirty smirk.

Bow had none of this — to her there was nothing down and dirty about sex at all.  It was just about having fun, and if it was the most important thing in life, that was only because having fun was the most important thing in life.  Her overt but always skillful and imaginative flirtatiousness honored the game of flirtation, accepted it for what it was — if men didn't understand it, or know how to play it well, that was their problem.  It gave her an advantage which she cheerfully exploited.

Bow was different from the wise-cracking females in screwball comedies, who played the game with an edge of cynicism, somewhat resenting men for their dull-wittedness, even if they ultimately forgave them for it.  Stanwyck's character in The Lady Eve (above) is the paradigm for this type.

Bow's true successors in American culture were Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, who were sexy, knew they were sexy, laughed at their own sexiness while flaunting it without shame, in a state of paradoxically pure innocence about it.

They could be ironic but never, ever cynical.

The film features a lot of cameo appearances by real Hollywood stars and directors of the time.  One of them is especially poignant.  We get a glimpse of Erich Von Stroheim at work on a set for Greed.  We know now that he was creating one of the greatest works in the history of American art, but the cameo was filmed when the production still belonged to Sam Goldwyn's company.  Before Greed was completed, that company was sold to Metro and the production thus came under the control of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, who, in an act of unspeakable thuggishness, decided to mutilate Von Stroheim's masterpiece, to send a message to the rest of Hollywood's talent — you are no longer in control here . . . the industry you built now belongs to thugs like us.

In Souls For Sale you can see what was lost in that transfer of power — the giddy excitement of a new art form still in the hands of the artists who created it — just as in Sunset Boulevard you can see the rot and decay of that erstwhile Eden under the influence of the thugs.  It's no accident that Louis B. Mayer was outraged by Sunset Boulevard.  It was an epitaph for everything he personally destroyed.

The giddiness of that time before the thugs took control informs every moment of Souls For Sale.  It's a thoroughly self-reflexive work of art, which pretends to examine how the dream world of the movies is constructed while itself infected with the very dreams it pretends to examine.  This tension in its point of view is quite deliberate and often played for laughs, though it more often results in a kind of surreal poetry.

The story opens on a train racing through the desert on its way to Los Angeles.  A young bride on her wedding night has suddenly become revulsed by the man she's married and jumps off the train at a remote watering station.  She wanders hopelessly through the desert until she comes upon . . . an Arab sheik on a camel, who rescues her from death.  He's an actor on location with a film crew, making a movie.

So we have moved with the mad logic of a dream from melodrama to costume drama to comedy.  The whole film navigates a similar dream landscape — it's a hall of mirrors from which we never emerge.  At the climax, an intertitle informs us that a real hurricane is threatening to wreck the artificial storm set up for the climax of the film within the film — and we proceed to watch the “real” artificial storm ruin the “fake” artificial storm.

If Jorge Luis Borges had ever made a movie, I suspect it would bear an uncanny resemblance to Souls For Sale.