The Fleet's In.
No laggards are the press agents of Clara Bow. For better or worse they have affixed to her the appositive name, "The It Girl," and the connotation to that title means to collegians, railway clerks, farm boys that Clara Bow is the personification of sex appeal. But Miss Bow also has histrionic ability. Some measure of praise is due her in this piece, in which she is the mercenary mink who works as a professional partner in a dancehall. Like the heroine in that play called Night Hostess, she maintains a nominal chastity—"she walks home alone"—but teases sailors out of gifts and dance tickets. Of one breezy gob she becomes enamoured and over her he starts a free-for-all fight. No peace-lover, his past record is against him when he is arrested. Unless he comes out of this scrape, he will be court-martialed.
On his day in court the virginal teaser appears as a voluntary witness, convinces the magistrate that she was the cause of the fight and tells the crowded courtroom (which includes her mother) that she is a lady of joy. The magistrate discharges the prisoner-gob, saying, "Instead of protecting you from these young men, we should protect them from you." This is not one of the best pieces, but it is one of Clara Bow's best. One Jack Oakie, as a sailor named "Searchlight," ought to get somewhere as a character actor with the flattest face on the two-dimensional medium. James Hall and the subtitles make the breezy gob almost true.
4 Devils. The cinema, said a punster, again has come to the four. There were The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Four Walls, Four Sons; there is 4 Devils; there will be The Four Feathers, a piece now in the casting process.
The four devils are acrobats, two male, two female, who come to the top trapeze of their profession. The story deals principally with the love of two of the foursome (Janet Gaynor and Charles Morton) and a rather elaborate exposition of backstage life—perennially acceptable theme. The discordant note in the quartet comes with the entrance of a strident villainess (Mary Duncan), done in the grandiose manner of Bara-esque sirens. In the early moments of the piece, when the child-lives of the four devils are revealed, two cinemasters, two cinemisses take the parts of the four devils and are notable for their strong resemblance to their adult colleagues. A plethora of film-footage retards the vehicle but never altogether halts it.
Janet Gaynor, newer to fame, is currently contrasted with Clara Bow. Clara stood for sex; Janet for sentiment. The Bow-sprite lingers at the great U. S. soda-fountain of youth, along with 'Varsity drags, high school fraternities, sheikism, shebaism, girls who say "If you don't think so, you're ca-RAzy," insipid youths who say "And I don't mean perhaps." More truly, with greater ease than any other cinemactress, the Bow-sprite typifies the slangy, vital grisette who frolics in and out of adolescence, does her marrying, gets the embonpoint.