Clara Bow stars in an all too rare dramatic role as a tragic jazz age flapper and her real life lover, Gary Cooper has his first leading man role.

“Kitty (Clara Bow) wrestles with a legacy of neglect. She tries to beat society at its own arbitrary game, to grasp happiness by deceit. She loses. Wounded by a lonely childhood and misguided by her mother, Kitty comes to recognize her youthful freedom for what it was: a chimera. Just as the collective trauma of WWI gave rise to the anything-goes culture of the 1920s, Kitty’s traumatic childhood cultivated her fatal combination of wildness, cynicism, and naïveté. In contrast to her upbeat, triumphant flapper in It, Bow proved herself a great dramatic actress as the haunted flapper. Through her character’s downward spiral, Bow captured the Jazz Age tragedy so beautifully articulated by an admirer of hers, F. Scott Fitzgerald: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”-Nora Fiore aka Nitrate Diva

Co-presented by: Designing the Movies

Restoration by Library of Congress Film courtesy of Flicker Alley

Accompaniment: Morgan-Paige Melbourne