Better known than the rest of the silents this week, Mantrap is such a gem of comic satire that it demands revival. It transcends Paramount's sorrows-of-the-flirt genre through its casting of the irrepressible Clara Bow and by moving the upper-crust milieu to the Canadian backwoods. Ernest Torrence, who runs a trading post in "Mantrap," is "sick of this he-man country. My last thrill was in 1906-when I seen a girl's ankle in Minneapolis," and so he determines to bring city-girl Bow back as his wife. Meanwhile, a New York divorce lawyer, soured by women, escapes with hosiery salesman Eugene Pallette for a camping holiday. The lawyer's get-up may make him "look more Western than the hind end of a covered wagon," but he's an abysmal outdoorsman, soon sheltered at Torrence's outpost. Clara Bow has too much spirit for the both of them, making for a ridiculously lopsided love triangle. She's sexy and comically provocative (much more so than in the celebrated It), especially next to the prissy Percy Marmont, as the lawyer, and the lunkish Torrence. Of all Bow's surviving films, this one shows what made her a star. Throughout, Mantrap is perfectly acted, and directed with surprising flair by Victor Fleming, who never elsewhere revealed such a talent for comedy. Scott Simmon