Clara Bow: Discovering the It Girl

Hugh Hefner, Ted Turner, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive might sound like a weird trio, but together with producer Timeline Films, they've given us a compelling portrait of the silver screen's first sex symbol, the "It" girl, Clara Bow. Narrated by Coutrney Love (sometime actress, sometime lead singer of Hole), Clara Bow: Discovering the "It" Girl is an often heartbreaking account of a poor Brooklyn girl who was born July 29, 1905, raised by an abusive father and mentally disturbed mother, and won a contest which launched a movie career that would catapult her to superstar fame with the release of Paramount's romantic comedy It in 1927 (also available separately, along with two other Bow films--The Plastic Age and Parisian Love--for $24.95 each). Including clips from over 25 films, and interviews with Leonard Maltin, biographer David Stenn, Budd Schulberg, and Bow's son Rex Bell Jr., the film traces Bow's wild life (she was rumored to have had a succession of affairs; a running joke of the time--not mentioned in the program--was that Clara Bow laid everything but the linoleum), her shaky transition from silents to talkies (she hated the microphone), a painful trumped up tabloid scandal initiated by a friend, her marriage to cowboy star Rex Bell and abrupt departure from Hollywood to live on a Nevada ranch, and the final years which saw her divorced and in and out of institutions until her untimely death in 1965 at the age of 60. A moving portrait of an early silent screen queen who outdrew Garbo and Gish at the boxoffice, this is highly recommended. [Note: Larger collections will want to add all four titles, but if you are limited to just two, pick up this documentary and It, which features a wonderful piano score by William Perry that I can't seem to get out of my head.] Aud: C, P. (R. Pitman)