Bow moves when everyone else in the frame stands still, and in Wings that is the whole difference between her and the men. The flapper was a formula the studio kept her in; the energy was hers, and it still plays.
Fi1m perspective
Halfway through Wings (1927), Jack Powell is bent over his racing car and Mary Preston, the girl next door, is trying to get him to look up. He does not. Clara Bow plays not being noticed as work: she sulks, she drives, she climbs, she changes her mind, and William Wellman's camera, which only properly wakes up in the air, follows her more willingly than it follows any of the men. Charles Rogers stands still and emotes at the lens. Bow is already out of the door.
The career was short and nearly all of it was the twenties. She came into films after winning a magazine beauty contest in 1922, while still at school, and had a first notable part that year in Down to the Sea in Ships. B.P. Schulberg produced dozens of her silents, most of them flapper pictures, and in 1927 two films made her a star: It, from Elinor Glyn's story, which gave her a label she never shook, and Wings. She went into sound with The Wild Party (1929), for Dorothy Arzner, Brooklyn accent and all, made a handful more and stopped in 1933 with Hoopla.
She knew what she was doing. "All the time the flapper is laughing and dancing, there's a feeling of tragedy underneath. She's unhappy and disillusioned, and that's what people sense." In Wings the Paris nightclub is where you see it. Edith Head and Travis Banton put her in a glittering borrowed dress, the camera glides across the tables, and she is dressed up to be seen by a man who cannot see her. No title card says so. We found we had stopped watching Jack Powell's war and were watching her wait for him, and it is the only stretch of the ground story we would not cut.
The studio found the formula and kept her in it, one flapper after another between 1927 and 1930, and she said as much herself, more than once. The dramatic sound parts, Call Her Savage (1932) among them, came late and came few. We have reviewed only Wings, so we will not pretend to a verdict on the rest. What we can say is that the thing she does there, the refusal to hold still while the plot happens to her, is not a trick of silent acting, because the talkies did not take it from her.
Start with Wings, and watch the scenes on the ground, which is not advice we would give about anyone else in it.
Biography
Clara Bow (born Clara Gordon Bow) was an American actor who rose to prominence in silent films during the 1920s. She was born on 29 July 1905 in Brooklyn, New York City, and died on 27 September 1965.
She appeared in Wings (1927) as Mary Preston and in It (1927) as Betty Lou Spence. The latter role earned her the nickname "The It Girl". Bow appeared in dozens of films and was a leading box-office attraction in the late 1920s.
She made the transition to sound films and retired from acting after marrying actor Rex Bell in 1931. Her final film, Hoop-La, was released in 1933.
