“It—that quality possessed by some which draws all others with its magnetic force.”—Elinor Glyn.The first in an occasional series devoted to the most popular movie pin-up star of a given era. More of a snapshot of the era than any insight into my own quirks and preferences.
Tomorrow, the male equivalent.
Clara Bow, the Silent Era's greatest sex symbol, will forever be known as the "It Girl." Born in Brooklyn in 1905 to a schizophrenic mother and an abusive father, she made her biggest splash in the 1927 silent movie, It, about a sales girl who has an affair with a wealthy playboy. The movie made her an instant star.
That same year, she co-starred in the first best picture winner in Oscar history, Wings, playing the girl-next-door who loves a young pilot who winds up flying on the western front during the First World War.
Sound, however, didn't do her career much good—she had a thick Brooklyn accent—and a series of other problems, some tax related, some sex-scandal related. She later battled mental illnesses of her own, left movies in 1933 and died in relative obscurity at the age of sixty.[But click here for a more nuanced look at Clara Bow.]
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7 comments:
I'll show her "It."
C'Mere, Spider!
It sounds like Clara Bow was right in your wheelhouse, Mr. Bub ...
Say, is that Thelma Todd in the photo with Ms. Bow? Sort of looks like her with the It Girl. Was it to Thelma that Chico Marx in Monkey Business (?) remarked something like, "Baby, you got 'It' - and you can keep it"? That Chico could ever utter such a line seems wildly out of character and makes me search for deeper meaning. Could Chico's line be more than a simple word play on Clara Bow's moniker "It Girl"?
That's a good question. I looked it up -- Clara Bow and Thelma Todd were in three movies together, all pre-Code: Fascinating Youth, No Limit and Call Her Savage. But I admit I haven't seen any of them. I wonder if I have them down in the basement ... hmm.
The movies, that is. Odds are I don't have Clara Bow or Thelma Todd in the basement ... and God only knows what they'd look like by now.
Chico's line "Baby, you got it -- and you can keep it" has got to be a play on the whole concept of the "It" girl. Clara Bow was still making movies at that point and the phrase "it girl" would have been very familiar to audiences ... it's too much of a coincidence otherwise.
Oh, wait, I did a little more research -- the photo is from a movie called Ladies Of The Mob (1928). That would make the other woman either Helen Lynch or Mary Alden. (I'm assuming it's not Richard Arlen -- what a movie that would have been).
I'll see if I can track down photos of them and figure this out.
Okay, I'm thinking it must be Helen Lynch. She specialized in playing "floozies and gangster's molls." The other one, Mary Alden, was a veteran of D.W. Griffith silent movies and would have been pushing fifty at that point ...
You know, looking at this photo again, I think it's actually a publicity still from Clara Bow's last movie, Hoop-La and that's Minna Gombell with her. You might remember Gombell as the conniving Mimi Jorgenson in The Thin Man. At least that's what I think now ...
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