Free to Love

You may have heard about how Clara Bow was the It Girl of the Prohibition era. 1927's "It" (not to be confused with the Stephen King novel) was her most famous outing, but another example was 1925's "Free to Love". This movie doesn't have any sort of complex plot, but it's still enjoyable enough for its short runtime. Worth seeing.

This was one of Clara Bow's films that had passed me by , I thought I had seen them all , being a fan and all that The version I watched was a bad print but what do you expect , as my heading states the film is nearly 100 years old , but Clara when you can see her properly still looks amazing

The plot is silly ,, this film apparently took two weeks to make ,and it shows , but I only watched it for Clara , I must ask why in every film the leading men and love interests are always old enough to be her dad

I would recommend watching just to glean every performance of the genuine IT Girls the one and only Clara Bow ,

Having just watched "The Vamp" Theda Bara in A Fool There Was on YouTube, I thought I'd go to another sex symbol of the silent era on the same site and seek out a film starring "The 'It' Girl", Clara Bow. Unfortunately, the one I watched, Free to Love, was a melodrama about a girl wrongly sent to an institution a couple of years ago who goes to her accuser and confronts him with a gun. That accuser now knows her innocence and asks for her forgiveness, which she does. Then there's some various twists that sort of made my head hurt and there's this twitchy guy named Tony and...Like I said, this was a melodrama that provided Ms. Bow and others to overact like you see in many silent pictures. I watched wanting to care about the characters but I just wanted the whole thing to be over. And on top of that, the print itself was just so blurry and the music picked to score the film was so overwhelming, it was just overkill for me. I also could've sworn some scenes were edited. So on that note, unless you're a silent movie buff with lots of curiosity, I wouldn't recommend Free to Love.

Thanks to Alpha, a really good DVD is now available in which nearly all the acting seems both lively and convincing, and where it can now easily be seen that Clara's magnificent performance is by far her best work in her entire career. We no longer have to rely on a murky, fair-to-middling print of this moody melodrama in which director Frank O'Connor pulls out all the stops to give ALL his players a free hand to connect with the audience. Raymond McKee (soon to achieve fame in Mack Sennett shorts as Jimmy Smith), over-acts and chews up the scenery a bit. Hallam Cooley runs him a close second, whilst Charles Hill Mailes and Winter Hall (and even the actor who plays the police captain) are not far behind. As for Donald Keith, he plays a wet character—and acts accordingly. But it all fits together. That Miss Bow manages to hold her own under this combined assault is a tribute not only to her skill, but her charisma. She has only to look into the camera with her soulful, flashing eyes to quickly register whatever emotions the script requires.

Whatever else, the title "Free to Love", has not a great deal to do with the fast-moving, gloriously melodramatic, expensively produced, cops-and-robbers plot which even contrives at least two or three genuine surprises.

This old Clara Bow melodrama moves quickly and has a story that holds your attention. Bow plays a young woman trying to get a new start after being unjustly sentenced to a term in a reformatory. The story that follows is not very plausible, and it has a couple of rather routine elements, but it does have a lot of action and creates some suspense. Bow's performances and many of her films relied on her personality and her contemporary appeal, rather than on depth or creativity, and thus they have not always held up as well over the years as the best movies of the era have. But she's usually worth watching, and while this one does show its age, it's still a decent film that is worth a look for fans of silent movies.