Film Forum

16 silents and pre-code talkies starring "It Girl" Clara Bow (1905-1965), the hottest star of the Jazz Age.

The festival opens with Bow in her signature movie, the silent comedy IT, also featuring a young Gary Cooper just on the verge of stardom.  The title refers to the synonym for “sex appeal” coined by British author Elinor Glyn (who makes a cameo appearance in the movie).  IT will be shown with THE PILL POUNDER, a 1923 short with Bow in one of her earliest roles.  It was considered lost until discovered at an auction in Omaha last year and restored earlier this year by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.    

Bow was hailed by F. Scott Fitzgerald at the time as “someone to stir every pulse in the nation.” But she has never left the public consciousness.  In 1958, Marilyn Monroe posed as Bow for a LIFE magazine spread photographed by Richard Avedon. Earlier this year, Taylor Swift released the song “Clara Bow” on her album “The Tortured Poets Department.”

Clara Bow was born in Brooklyn poverty to an abusive, alcoholic father and a schizophrenic mother. At 16, she won first prize in a fan magazine’s “Fame and Fortune Contest,” which awarded her a small part in a movie. Signed by independent producer B. P. Schulberg, she was cast as the perfect "flapper,” 1920s slang for a liberated, free-spirited young woman. But it was Bow’s career-defining role in IT that catapulted her to top stardom. Unlike many of her contemporaries, the advent of talkies failed to knock Bow off her throne. At the peak of her career, she made fifteen movies a year and received 45,000 fan letters a month. But at twenty-five, it was all over—the result of booze, scandal, and a Hollywood society that never accepted the brash kid from Brooklyn. 

Bow biographer David Stenn says, ”There was more to Clara than ‘It.’ Looking beyond her iconic stature as the greatest flapper of them all, here’s a chance to revel with one of the greatest natural talents in movie history.” 

Selected shows introduced by David Stenn, author of Clara Bow: Runnin' Wild, available for sale at our concession.

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Films in this Series