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| Publicity photo of Clara Bow for Argentinean Magazine. (Printed in USA) (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
This film made Clara Bow a household name.
What "it" really meant
Clara Bow was the first Hollywood steamy bombshell. She set the stage for these likes of Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, and Katie Perry; to be the celebrity that embodied the ideal sex appeal. It was the effect that would bring men to their knees and be imitated by every young woman. She had sex appeal long before that term was in common usage. Her agent coined the term “it Girl” at the time when no one dared used the word sex and simply referred to it as, it”. She was the girl who had it all together and was out to get her man.
Clara Bow showed more skin on the screen then the silent film audience was used to seeing
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Clara Bow started life in a way that did not foresee her rise to glamour girl Hollywood fame. She was born in Brooklyn Née in 1905. Her birth took place in a cheap Brooklyn tenement during a heat wave that was breaking temperature records. Later, her mother would tell her that she did not bother to get a birth certificate, because she had assumed the heat would kill her and her infant Clara.
Both Clara‘s mother and grandmother were thought to epileptic at a time when it could not be effectively treated. Uncontrolled seizures were thought to have caused mental problems in both women. Clara mother was mostly emotionally absent from her as a child. Clara father was mostly absent from her childhood. He had moved out of the family apartment shortly before Clara was born.
Clara’s mother had frequent male visitors that were introduced to Clara as uncles. Clara recalled that she would hide in the,”cupboard” when her mother was keeping company with strange men.
Clara Bow was the ideal flapper girl, charming and bold.
To escape her dysfunctional home life Clara would go to movies often Mary Pickford, Mae Murray, and Theca Bara were the most popular actresses of her day. Clara would stand in front of the mirror imitation the different acting styles of these women. Clara wanted to be a Hollywood actress. She was a shy girl with a speech impediment, but since movies were silent she was not deterred from her goal of wanting to be discovered and move to Hollywood. Clara’s mentally unstable mother felt that acting was an ‘evil profession “.
Her mother did everything to discourage her interest in movie acting. Once when up set with Clara from practicing scenes from popular movies in front a mirror, Clara’s mother threatened her with a knife. Hoping to escape poverty and life with a broken family Clara continued to hold on to her dream.
Her natural sex appeal kept her fans coming back for more.
In order to spark the interest of readers movie fan magazines in the late teens and early twenties sponsored various contest to give readers a chance for small walk on roles in silent movies. Many American teenaged girls dreamed of being discovered by a studio and getting a lucrative contract as a result of winning these kinds of contests. Clara was one such twirl she entered as many contests as possible using borrowed money to have a tin type portrait made to enter a beauty photo contest in Motion Picture Magazine. This was the Fame and Fortune Contest of 1921. A young and ecstatic Clara Bow, only sixteen at the time won a screen test. The screen test landed her a trip to Hollywood
The Rise and Fall of the Girl who had "it' all.
Between 1922 and 1929 Clara Bow was Hollywood’s it Girl. She was the ideal flapper girl, independent young women who was charming, witty, and not afraid to flaunt her felinity. She played a variety of working girl roles in her films. She portrayed manicurist, waitresses, and department store clerks. No longer did young girls wait a home to be married, but they had jobs that got them out and about in the world. A girl had a larger choice of professions than young women did in Victorian times... Women cut their hair, dances, drank in speak ease’s, support themselves, and fought for the vote. The Flapper Girl symbolized the new freedom young workmen had and Clara Bow symbolize the Flapper. . In The Plastic Age (Preferred Pictures, 1925) Clara got her first wide spread fan base.
Variety, on July 14, 1926, exclaimed, "Clara Bow! And how! What a 'Mantrap' she is! And how this picture is going to make her! Miss Bow just walks away with the picture from the moment she steps into camera range." The movie Mantrap was Clara Bow’s first mega hit .The movie made Clara a household name and an international star. She went on to make several successful films until 1929. Clara fell out of favor in the Great Depression because Hollywood became to view actresses like Clara as immoral and frivolous. She tried her hand at a couple of talking films but she did not have a voice suited for the new talking motion picture’s Her career ended in 1933 at the ripe old age of 26.
Clara Bow made a total of 56 films during her career. These included silent and the few attempts at making it in the talkies. Only about 36 of these films exist in some form today. About 16 of these films are available on video. The others lie in the Library of Congress waiting for a future generation to rediscover and appreciate the first sex symbol on the silver screen Clara Bow. The films available are the following:
Down to the Sea in Ships (1922)
Capital Punishment (1925)
The Primrose Path (1925)
Free to Love (1925)
The Plastic Age (1925)
My Lady of Whims (1926)
Dancing Mothers (1926)
Mantrap (1926)
Hula (1927)
It! (1927)
Wings (1927)
The Wild Party (1929) - (her first talkie)
Dangerous Curves (1929)
The Saturday Night Kid (1929)
True to the Navy (1930)
No Limit (1931]
Capital Punishment (1925)
The Primrose Path (1925)
Free to Love (1925)
The Plastic Age (1925)
My Lady of Whims (1926)
Dancing Mothers (1926)
Mantrap (1926)
Hula (1927)
It! (1927)
Wings (1927)
The Wild Party (1929) - (her first talkie)
Dangerous Curves (1929)
The Saturday Night Kid (1929)
True to the Navy (1930)
No Limit (1931]
A young retired Clara Bow married a cowboy and settled down on a ranch. Her marriage did not go well and she was haunted by substance abuse problems and frequent mental breakdowns. Clara Bow died in relative obscurity in 1965.
A girl just wants to have some fun! Is all a young women mimicking the flappers on film would say. Even many the films themselves tried to show the moral dangers of becoming a fallen women. By the mid twenties all women had the option of shorter hair
The influence of Flappers on Film
In Midwestern towns across American the films that starlets like Clara Bow did brought the culture of the big city to young women. The movies tried to make light of girls who smoked, drank, and danced as the antics of passionate youth. Yet, a girl who was brave in the world and chose defy the virginal Victorian attitudes of her mother was something to take note of. If young women were free to vote then why not dress as they wished and kiss who they wished.
Most women were not rejecting traditional roles, but allowing themselves to have personal freedom before they married. Women had the vote and the right to some extent goes out in the world as they chose. Women didn’t object to showing off their sexually, just they wanted to be considered ‘nice’ girls as well. The daughters of these women later worked to not be sexually objectified. Midwestern girls in small towns where just for the first time seeing that publically displayed sexual definition could become trendy. Small town girls did not show up in speak easy dancing on tables, but they now could wear lip stick and ride in cars with boys alone if they were home at a decent hour.
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