Clara Bow --- Part Two


Talkies and other things broke Clara Bow’s spirit before she was twenty-five, the fun of movie making largely gone before she stepped in front of a microphone. Dialogue supplied the finishing touch. There were tawdry episodes in her personal life to sour reportage, the country by 1929 a changing place. Compare It with any of her talkers. The silent has a sunnier disposition all around, and it isn't only Bow buoyancy. Even tenements in It have a hopeful appearance, whereas in The Saturday Night Kid, they’re just squalid. You look at Clara doing sound and wonder how she got into such reduced circumstance. Her energy is drained and worse yet, she has to stand still, all of action and movement from yore immobilized by a looming microphone. Bow hated that boom all the more because she knew what it was doing to her performance. One time she cursed and pounded the heavy apparatus, knowing this was where fault lay for her decline. But even without the tumult of sound, Bow's career may not have lasted, for how long could Paramount have recycled the same dogmatic formulas? Other screen flappers were slipping before talkies arrived. Colleen Moore’s last three jazz babies went down in red ink --- Oh, Kay! lost $65,000, Synthetic Sin $75,000, Why Be Good with a $40,000 deficit. Colleen didn’t need sound to finish her in these roles. Fox’s Sue Carol, another aspirant to the Bow crown, whose own hotcha series took a plunge as Carol first spoke for fans --- The Exalted Flapper, Watch That Girl, and The Big Party all lost money. Both these actresses left the screen within a few years, as would Clara Bow, but being by far the biggest star, Bow’s descent was adjudged the most dramatic. Lesser lights could bow out quietly, but press hounds would nip at Clara’s heels all the way to the train station.



Her popularity was at its peak when she did The Wild Party (45,000 letters in January 1929), but Paramount unwisely rushed her into talkies, and lack of preparation showed. The movie went out in April, months before consensus was reached among exhibitors as to viability of sound. Talking pictures were still something you drove to. Big towns played them, but much of Clara’s loyal following lived in the rurals. My home town of North Wilkesboro, NC played The Wild Party in a silent version. I suspect that’s how most patrons saw it. By the time little houses got wired (those surviving the transition --- many of them simply closed), The Wild Party had come and gone as a silent, leaving a lot of Clara’s fans to experience her in sound for the first time in either Dangerous Curves or The Saturday Night Kid. All three were released amidst unseemly haste before the end of 1929. Clara Bow's eight starring sound features for Paramount are as many shadows today for all of exposure they have since had. These might just as well be lost along with the silents. Early television saw most of them back, but stations ducked early titles among bulging syndicated packages, preferring to run Hope, Crosby, or Ladd rather than creaky Bows, exposure they’ve had limited to restoration festivals and repertory screenings. 








What if Clara Bow had been reborn as a "serious" actress? She was all set for City Streets in 1931, but Sylvia Sidney played it instead. Would we really enjoy seeing Clara doing Sylvia Sidney parts? I for one don’t much enjoy seeing Sylvia Sidney doing Sylvia Sidney parts. A few Nancy Carroll roles would have been nice with Clara --- Hot Saturday comes to mind. These were the actresses Paramount was pushing in the new age of sound. Clara Bow’s contract was "settled" (she got nothing), and the actress announced she was through with movies. Married ranch life (her first) to cowboy actor Rex Bell was briefly interrupted by a return to the screen for Fox Film Corporation. Their pair of curtain calls were Call Her Savage and Hoopla. Savage is everything the title implies --- it flies off in a thousand melodramatic directions, but delivers precode goods, more so than anything Bow did at staid Paramount. It earned domestic rentals of $571,000 and foreign at $230,000 against a negative cost of $476,000 for a profit of $13,000. Any gain was good news in 1932, but it didn’t last. Hoopla cost $403,000, but brought back less than Call Her Savage with $437,000 domestic and $148,000 foreign --- final loss for this one was $58,000. There was talk of Clara staying on to do Stand Up and Cheer, but she wanted no more of it (Hoopla had been an ordeal), so this time retirement was for keeps. Mental illness rife in her family came to call within a next idle decade, time left before her death in 1965 largely spent in treatment and/or seclusion.





A few notes by way of captioning these stills. That whip Clara brandishes will be used on hapless Gilbert Roland, an old off-screen lover and lifelong friend who would stay in touch with Bow for the rest of her life (both this and the on-set candid of C.B. in bed are from Call Her Savage). That open car is shared with just acquired husband Rex Bell, and the shot is dated December 1931 --- keep in mind this is a woman twenty-six, and look what those years have done to her. The Screen Personalities montage mentions Clara having entered that fateful magazine star search "in her junior year" --- fact is she didn’t get beyond grade school, but adult education courses taken during retirement would improve both her writing and typing skills. This nightclub shot with Martha Raye found them celebrating the opening of College Swing in 1938 --- Clara briefly dabbled in the restaurant business during this period and was still willing to accommodate an always-curious press. After 1940, she’d seldom be photographed. Everything about Clara Bow’s incredible life is set forth in David Stenn’s book. By way of getting an update, I asked David if there had been any interesting rediscoveries since his last updated edition of the biography. Here’s his response ---

I guess you already know about the UCLA Festival of Preservation -- which will include two Clara Bow films that have been in the works for a decade -- MY LADY'S LIPS and POISONED PARADISE. On the first title, additional footage (including CB) was found in another nitrate print (only two 35mm nitrates survived) at the last minute so luckily what got preserved is complete. As you know, the problem with the indies of that period is they got chopped up for censorship in each state, so reassembling them is complicated -- right now that's the case with MY LADY OF WHIMS, which (believe it or not) has never received a full preservation. It's in the works now though.

Actually, I didn’t know about those two finds, but I’m delighted to hear that more Clara Bow continues to turn up (much of that due to David Stenn’s own tireless efforts). Thanks for the bulletin, David!