Conceiving and Consuming It: From Spectator to Spectacle and Lingerie to Jazz Baby

"Would you like to sin / With Elinor Glyn / On a tiger skin? / Or would you prefer / To err with her / On some other fur?"

- anonymous (maybe George Bernard Shaw) rhyme.

"She’s got it / And plenty of it, brother / She’s got it / I never saw another have so much / Of such and such...."

- Harry Reser, "She's Got It."

It seems a twist of fate that the innovations of this landmark and once-enormously-popular film, “It,” ensured its own relative dismissed obscurity among future generations. The main knock on “It” these days seems to be that it’s supposedly dated and clichéd. Maybe that’s like calling, say, “Rocky” (1976) “generic” because just about every sports flick afterwards imitated it. What are tropes and viewed as old-fashioned now weren’t always so. At some point, they were new conceptions. At least given how much fun “It” remains, I don’t feel the need to defend it as vigorously as that other film everyone must see to understand 1927 film and culture, “The Jazz Singer.”

None of which is to say, either, that romance author and pretentious arbiter of taste Elinor Glyn invented “it” as a euphemism for sex appeal. Maybe Rudyard Kipling beat her to it. Nor to say Clara Bow was the original film flapper or New Woman. There was Colleen Moore, for one. Surely, neither was this the first recognizable instance of what became the modern rom-com or the first scenario of a shopgirl in a cross-class romance, replacing prior feudal versions of the fairy tale or modern melodramas. The innovation here is more in the commodification of all of that in a Hollywood production that is entertainingly and reflexively about doing just that—cinematic wish fulfillment of the (female) movie consumer’s desire for intimacy with or to become the star, as realized by identification with the most relatable film superstar there was with the unpretentious, proletariat, and cinema-raised Bow. High concept, product placement, and Bow’s signature film not only because it was a box-office hit that forever labeled her the “It girl,” but also because it’s a film about commercially, and artistically, making her, and movie-goers vicariously through her control of the gaze, “it.”

“Waltham’s World’s Largest Store,” then, the marquee from which the picture opens before panning out, down, and in on the storefront street scene and dissolving inside the shop, should be read as “Hollywood.” Marsha Orgeron, in her especially instructive essay, suggests it’s a movie theatre and the film overall a parable for fan culture. “It is a place (just like a movie theater) where one is expected to look, to desire, and to experience pleasure through fantasies of acquisition.” I also wonder if King Vidor saw this foreword before filming a similar one for “The Crowd” (1928), and while other filmmakers took to imitating the entire scenario—e.g. ”My Best Girl” (1927) with Mary Pickford and “Why Be Good?” with Moore (1929). Note how the Monty figure (the mugging William Austin), then, acts like a studio assistant reading a script or potential source for a scenario, the very “Cosmopolitan” serialized novella by Glyn from which this film is supposedly (and reportedly very loosely and mostly by wife-and-husband team Hope Loring and Louis D. Lighton) adapted. Crass product placement and set-up for an eye-rolling cameo by Glyn? Sure, that’s how it may be viewed today, but think about it as a film about its own making, and it makes reflexive sense, seeking her promotion of “it.”

After reading the magazine, Monty then goes about scouting in-house the store, or studio or movie theatre, for the talent, shopgirls lined up like movie-goers or starlet contestants in a queue, to play the lead with that “it” factor. Of course, comically, he flatters himself another “it” and while dismissing the co-star claim for his dashing mustached pal and boss played by Antonio Moreno (and, OK, maybe the mustache is dated, but we’re kidding ourselves nowadays if we fail to recognize how cool such grooming of facial hair looks). Sure, now, too, we know the real “It boy” was that Gary Cooper fellow serving here as a bit-part reporter in one scene. Importantly, Monty, however, hits the jackpot with the female star, Bow.

As Barnett and Weedon have reported, Glyn’s book focuses on the male lead exuding “it,” a character who is a thinly veiled version of William Randolph Hearst, the actual boss of “Cosmopolitan” and much else in print media back then, as well as the head of a film production company that featured his actress star mistress, Marion Davies. “Citizen Kane” (1941), but flattering to the couple. Heck, the film even ends on a yacht. Although no Thomas H. Ince-like producer supposedly-mysteriously dies aboard, there is some life-threatening action. By the way, I love the shot with Bow and Moreno with “it” made out in print from a yacht’s name behind their blocking. This is a perhaps surprisingly well-made late silent given the brief runtime and genre prejudices well deserved after producer B.P. Schulberg, pre-Paramount, had Bow run ragged through one quickie programmer production after another. “It” requires nurturing, and this seems to be the first vehicle for Bow to fully realize that.

Moreover, in this store–Hollywood–theatre nexus, romance becomes but another commodity to sell, extensions of the store’s marketed lingerie and dresses, and somewhere between the boss, shopgirl, and customers. The modern rom-com personified by way of Glyn’s prior revolutionizing of the modern romance novel, including her earlier scandalous erotica “Three Weeks.” From the metaphor of woman as predator of her male prey upon a tiger-skin rug to the got-to-have-it consumer gaze of the shopgirl. Bow, a real-life fan magazine starlet contest winner, as the movie spectator gazing upon the embodiment of consumer desire, as Orgeron says, the store’s owner, to performing her way into the spectacle (including putting on airs as a French-reading cosmopolitan like “Madame” Glyn), the actress and star, for his gaze. Either objectifying voyeur or object-to-be-looked-at, she’s always in control of the film’s primarily female gaze. Bow, Glyn, Hollywood, and this film didn’t invent romance, sex appeal, the unabashed sexually-assertive female, women’s liberation, Cinderella-like aspirations of upward mobility, the capitalistic American Dream, fan magazine-fueled desire for intimacy with the stars, or any such thing; they introduced a then-novel way to package it all together and sell it.

Of course, it all falls apart without Bow as the anchor. Hollywood literally proved they couldn’t teach that sort of youthful pep and charm, those dancing and expressive peepers, the tangled red hair (well, OK, fellow redhead Glyn was reportedly responsible for the bob here), a relatively untrained talent really from working-class poverty who may not have had the most classically attractive profile or figure in the business, but she had the most cinematically important sort of sex appeal and charisma—the kind that only fully came alive when she moved. “It” in a nutshell. Never mind the three other definitions that the title cards provide; just watch Bow instead to know what “it” is. A great film from an unimpressive director because all that was needed, by his own admission, was to point the camera at her. As biographer David Stenn wrote, “No one cared about the concept until Clara personified it,” and as Orgeron specifies, “Bow made such aspirations [of fans] look particularly possible because she failed to create the distance between herself and her fans that other stars worked rigorously to achieve. She was in many ways the star system’s best advertisement precisely because she perpetuated the illusion of possibility for fans.”

Even the Coney Island date—so many movies back then set at the amusement park, the subsequent “Lonesome” (1928) being among my favorites—with a pre-Marilyn Monroe gust of wind blowing Bow’s skirt up to reveal her knickers and the mistaken-identity business with the mother of the infant fit into this high “conception.” Reportedly, Bow even in real-life worked at one time as a Nathan’s bun-slicer at Coney Island, but even otherwise there’s the added spectacle of the sequence. And, if you’re making a movie about sex, you might as well include the frequent result of it, procreation. The baby of the Jazz baby provides the scandal for its scandal-prone star, who after all is playing a version of her star persona. Why would Gary Cooper in an early role as a reporter out for a scoop be writing about some anonymous unwed shopgirl mother? I mean, sure, fan magazines and tabloids are sensationalist, but that makes no sense. A fictionalization of “It girl” Hollywood star actress Bow as an unwed mother, however, is a story. To all those dismissing the film as dated, too, note how progressively this recognizes single motherhood as even a thing, but more than that establishes imperfect characters who learn lessons, including not treating such a woman like trash, or whatever a “left-hand arrangement” means besides “mistress” (huh, maybe not so brown-nosing of Hearst, either, after all).

Treat it all with some decent film technique (the editing around dissolves and amusement based around looks I found especially well done, and I love the dress making that only makes any kind of sense with a well-placed film cut), within a brisk runtime, get some good laughs in with the title cards (“Sweet Santa Claus, give me him!”) as well as with the cast led by Bow (lots of moments worth highlighting, but Bow’s right hook was one of my favorite surprises), and you’ve got it. And, if you doubt this novel and startlingly modern conception has been unfairly and mistakingly believed to have been diluted by countless imitators lacking its artistry, check out everything from “You’ve Got the AOL-Time Warner Merger: The Email Movie” (1998) starring who-cares Hanks and also Ryan, to “Love Buying Christmas Crap, Actually” (2003) featuring a bunch of actors who’ve given up and the same sort of lousy seasonal songs played in department stores for weeks on end every year. The rom-com just as with Bow’s career, Hollywood had it and, then, squandered it.

Works Cited
Barnett, Vincent L. and Alexis Weedon. Elinor Glyn as Novelist, Moviemaker, Glamour Icon and Businesswoman. Ashgate, 2014.

Orgeron, Marsha. “Making ‘It’ in Hollywood: Clara Bow, Fandom, and Consumer Culture.” Cinema Journal 42, no. 4 (2003): 76–97. www.jstor.org/stable/1566529.

Stenn, David. Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild. Doubleday, 1988.