Clara Bow (1905-65),

Clara Bow

b. Brooklyn, New York Silent cinema pushed emotional character to extremes that could become prisons. Mary Pickford was sentimental, Gloria Swanson adventurous, Lillian Gish noble, and Pola Negri brooding. Clara Bow’s identity was chiefly that of sexual advertisement. Her appeal may no longer operate urgently, but. she is the first actress intent on arousing sex-1 ual excitement who is not ridiculous. She still | looks pretty and her fevered agitation—the i fluttering eyes, the restless fingering of men, i and teasing angled glances—-does seem tol speak for the liberated lascivious energies of 1 the new American girl of the twenties. She! has a speed that is sensual. She is very funny.f And she knows, and likes, more than her] movies can admit. For Bow herself and the women she played,! the 1920s was an age of brutal but enncin opportunism; a girl with bounce, or ener; could make it, provided she had that mu talked-about but still hidden ingredient-”it”—a willingness. “It” was the promise ( sex; and it was a ploy of advertising. Tha( Bow’s career demonstrates the busy collab ration of movies and publicity. She was first mass-market sex symbol, and she COB plained that it was “a heavy load to cs especially when one is very tired, hurt, bewildered.” Her hurt was a dry run for t awaiting Marilyn Monroe, whose mo came of sexual age in Bow’s brief glory. ] mother and Marilyn’s had something i common; mental illness. Clara Bow won a beauty contest and 1 1922 she was in pictures: a tiny part in Be the Rainbow (22, W. Christy Cabanne); i better one in Down to the Sea in Ships i Elmer Clifton). She was then signed up) B. P. Schulberg who worked her very hard succession of cheap films and loan-outs. F son, Budd, has said that Bow was too bright—”an irresistible little nothing,” But on-screen, she had a very knowing eye; if nothing else, she understood being photographed. The best films of this time are Grit (24, Frank Tuttle); Black Oxen (24, Frank Lloyd); Wine (24, Louis Gasnier);