In terms of content, there’s nothing even slightly remarkable about It. In fact, this is one of those maddening plots where the central misconception — the idea that Clara Bow has an illegitimate baby — could be cleared up with one sentence. For that matter, if the characters behaved in a manner that reflected real life, it would have been, but these are movie characters with no basis in reality. Similarly, William Austin’s comic relief character is played strictly as a fussy gay stereotype — but the film then asks us to believe he’s besotted with Bow near the end. So what’s the appeal of the movie? Simple, it’s Clara Bow. She sparkles with earthy charm and unconscious sexiness. Plus, she’s just immensely likable. The movie doesn’t really have “It,” but she certainly does. Her reign as the “It Girl” may have been brief — lasting just about as long as the term did — but it was glorious while it lasted. (By 1931 we find “It” being made sport of in Monkey Business where Chico Marx tells a pretty girl she’s “got ‘It’,” only to then tell her, “And you can keep it.”)
As noted, It is also interesting as filmmaking, and the exact reason for this is hard to pinpoint — at least for me. The director Clarence Badger is all but unknown to me. The only other film of his I’ve seen is The Hot Heiress (1931), which is perhaps most notable for the Rodgers and Hart song “Nobody Loves a Riveter (But His Mother).” (It did not become one of their hits. Can’t imagine why.) Nothing about The Hot Heiress suggests the use of mobile camera seen in It. Now, that may be because of the problems of the early talkies, but those problems have always been exaggerrated, and by 1931 were even less an issue. The thing about It is that it’s from 1927 — the year that the American silent film broke free of its nailed-down-camera technique. So the film makes sense for its year, but it’s hard not to wonder how much of this may be attributable to the participation of the uncredited Josef von Sternberg, who worked on this before getting down to Underworld later that year.
The Hendersonville Film Society will show It Sunday, Aug. 23, at 2 p.m. in the Smoky Mountain Theater at Lake Pointe Landing Retirement Community (behind Epic Cinemas), 333 Thompson St., Hendersonville.
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