She was the biggest international film star in cinema. Pola Negri, who made red-painted toe nails, fur boots and turbans the rage of the fashions designers, brought her European culture over to the United States. But after several movies Paramount Pictures was concerned her Continental luster was wearing thin. Negri's arrival in September 1922 in New York was greeted with a fanfare previously saved for royalty. She was the first overseas performer to be signed by Hollywood studios. Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich among others soon followed.
After some reasonably successful Hollywood movies, Pola Negri fans were becoming bored with her on-screen continental luxurious airs. So Paramount decided to capitalize on this perception by giving her a role where her highfalutin attitude clashed with America's more conservative Midwestern attitudes. Paramount selected a Mack Sennett prodigy, Mal St. Clair, for the director's assignment to give Negri a lesson or two in the comic arena. And he succeeded with the hilarious December 1925 "A Woman of the World."
Negri's films have always been a bit provocative with its sexual innuendoes, especially her European movies. With censorship in America much stricter, Paramount walked a tightrope when it came to her repeated bedroom suggestions. There was no better opportunity for the studio to poke fun at the moralist values of Middle America than to have the actress be placed there. To heighten the hypocrisy of the region's citizens, Negri is put in the middle of a local district attorney's crusade to wipe out the evil the town's leaders feel is running rampant in the area's undisciplined young folk. Women especially were in the crosshairs of the DA (Holmes Herbert). These wild younguns were caught wearing short-hemmed dresses, smoking in public, and cutting their hair short with the radical bobbed style. Such behavior revolted the prudish town's power clique.
Enter Negri, the European countess who's visiting her cousin after she broke up with a cheating boyfriend. The DA first spies her in a taxi with the "Buster Brown" bobbed hair style and smoking a cigarette in public. He goes ballistic. But deep down inside he's rather attracted to her exotic looks and behavior. So begins the cat and mouse game between the two of them, resulting in one of the most famous whipping scenes caught on film.
Despite showing a knack for comedy, Paramount Studios decided to change her on-screen persona in her future films once again by having her appear in period-piece history films or, in an effort to diminish her perceived upper-crust snobbishness, cast her in poor peasant roles. No matter what typecast she played, Negri films overseas were a big hit; in America, not so much. "It is difficult for a foreigner coming to America," Negri later reminisced. "I had been told so much what not to do. It was particularly difficult for me, a Slav. My emotion seemed exaggerated to Americans. I cannot help that I haven't the Anglo-Saxon restraint and tact."
Negri, however, was one of the very few silent movie stars to successfully make the transition to talkies. She was in a string of movies well into the late-1930's, and appeared on screen as late as the 1964 Disney/Haley Mills' "The Moon-Spinners."