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Directed by Victor Fleming The
following film notes were prepared for the New York State Writers
Institute by Kevin Jack Hagopian, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies
at Pennsylvania State University: Clara Bow had grown up amid poverty and abuse and Brooklyn. But after a Coney Island beauty contest landed her a small role in 1922's Down to the Sea in Ships, she remade herself as a carefree, adorable, spunky screen character who captured the twenties in cinematic amber. Bow's flapper was the movies' great contribution to the 1920's ideal of the New Woman, effervescent, hoydenish, and ingenious, reinventing herself and improvising her way through one romantic challenge after another a delightfully self-determined character. Yet the movies couldn't shake their debt to conventional ideologies of gender; in few of the flapper movies does hedonism ever lapse into licentiousness, and there are dutiful lessons about family and marriage to be learned in the last reel. Nonetheless, whether as a shop girl or an heiress, in films like The Plastic Age, Get Your Man, Free to Love, and My Lady of Whims, and penultimately, It, Clara Bow offered an image of liberation to women, and intelligent, vibrant sexuality to everyone.. Clara Bow was not the only flapper heroine. There were Colleen Moore, Louise Brooks, and a young Joan Crawford, and a dozen more. In films with titles like Rolled Stockings, Love `Em and Leave `Em, and Our Dancing Daughters, the flapper heroines followed Bow's example of a distinctively modern character. Their brisk, economical acting and modern mores supplanted the palmier, Victorian styles associated with the great D. W. Griffith heroines of the 1920's, Mae Marsh, Blanche Sweet, and the Gish sisters.
By the Depression-ravaged 1930's, Clara Bow suddenly seemed hopelessly out of date. Although she was growing as an actor (1932's Call Her Savage, her next to last film, is one of her strongest performances), she was passe; a new generation of performers, seemingly reared before the microphone, took her spotlight, but Barbara Stanwyck, Irene Dunne, and especially Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow all borrowed, consciously or not, some of Bow's range and sympathy, her sexuality and good humor. When she died, alone and lonely in 1965, Bow was a souvenir of another epoch. Her legacy remained largely taken for granted, until David Stenn's wonderful biography, Runnin' Wild, was published in 1988, and the documentary Clara Bow: Discovering the It Girl, appeared in 1999. Most important, Bow's films have started to become widely available on DVD, and they show a distinctively modern performer, a woman of energy and zest. — Kevin Hagopian, Penn State University For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.
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