Who May Love: Criminally Melodramatic Eugenics

I was going to skip this pre-stardom programmer, "Free to Love," in a retrospective of Clara Bow's oeuvre, instead focusing on her major surviving titles, but I came across Russell L. Johnson's essay that explored the film within the era's widely practiced bigoted pseudoscience of eugenics, especially popular then in Hollywood's home of California, a state leader at the time in forced sterilizations of those deemed reproductively unfit. With that in mind, then, what I was rather surprised by is how unremarkable is the film. One may find explicit eugenics texts in silent cinema: e.g. "The Strenuous Life; or, Anti-Race Suicide" (1904), a satire on the eugenics policies of then-President Teddy Roosevelt, "Where Are My Children?" (1916), a film by Lois Weber based on the birth control and eugenics advocacy of Margaret Sanger, or the tellingly-titled "The Black Stork" (1917), written by and starring a eugenicist physician. "Free to Love," however, is like most tired melodramas back then. It's certainly not explicit about any Nietzschean, proto-Nazi philosophy. But, that's not to say eugenics isn't the ideology underpinning the narrative; it was just if not still that pervasive.

It's rather a trope in these things for there to be a poor, disabled, a character of another race, or perceived as less attractive in some way, who sacrifices themself for the central romance. I remember being annoyed with, for instance, the Mary Pickford vehicle "Stella Maris" (1918) for similar reasons. That was even a more extreme example of what Johnson denounces as the tendency to either cure or kill (or both, as the case may be) disabled characters. Makes me wonder if that's what's behind the more modern trope of the gay best friend, for relieving the procreative pressures of sex as they otherwise continue to serve the central heterosexual relationship. But, I digress.

In this one, there's such a character who is hunchbacked and club-footed, as well as a criminal. Effectively narratively neutered, he's not free to love--indeed, is assaulted over gifting jewelry to a woman--and sees less action than Quasimodo. Of course, he'll end up sacrificing himself in some way for the central romance that doesn't involve him. Meanwhile, Clara Bow's lead is absolved of a criminal record or associations with the criminal underworld for the purposes of this mating. That's not even a spoiler; it's how the film begins. The thinking goes, obviously she's too good looking to not also be morally good and physically and mentally fit. Even fainting back then, which she'll assuredly do by the runtime's end, being a sign of a woman's upstanding character supposedly. Although we're unsure of her parentage, she's adopted by a wealthy judge, essentially establishing a good pedigree for her. And, fishing for a man, quite literally, she catches a priest. Although his father turns out to be the leader of the criminal underworld, look for an action and letter to solve this crisis of an obsession with being well born.

"Free to Love" isn't worth seeing if not for this historical and genre context. Especially as it only seems to be available from the same washed out print from bargain-bin Alpha Video, which has subsequently been uploaded to the web. The right corner of the frame even seems to be cut off, and I could hardly tell what was in that aforementioned letter and so relied on Johnson's quoting of it. Even for early Bow, this is unusually bad. She's decidedly not a flapper type here, and in so much as she demonstrates the "It" factor it's more bigoted than sexy. Unfortunate for an actress who, as Johnson and others have remarked, was born into poverty and to a family history of mental illness. Her mother was institutionalized, and her father raped her, it's said. "No one wanted me to be born in the first place," to the biggest movie star in the world. Not exactly an argument for eugenics there.

Work Cited
Johnson, Russell L. "Clara Bow in 'Free to Love' (1925): Feature Films and Eugenics in the 1920s." Australasian Journal of American Studies 27, no. 1 (2008): 1-15.