Sept. 20, 2002 - 1:59 pm

cover
It (1927)

i hope everyone likes the new crossfade java applet which is currently taking the place of my old basic movie image with the diary address on it. that took a bit of doing. let me know if it's not working out on your browser, it looks like crap, or you just don't like it. or someone could give me some positive feedback too. you know, whatever you want.

after finishing up my last list, i retreated to the old faithful National Film Registry list. this film was on it and sounded interesting, so i picked it up at the library. you know the term "the it girl?" yeah, that's from this movie. after this film, they started calling Clara Bow (the star) "the it girl." then they've called other female actresses that in recent years. it all started here.

this is sort of a romantic comedy starring Clara Bow as a girl who seems to have everything she needs to attract whatever man she wants. basically "it" consists of a strong dose of attractiveness to the opposite sex, a great personality, and really high self-confidence. in the film, she works in a lingerie store and decides she wants to marry the store owner. she spends the rest of the film chasing him, and he chases her. there's some confusion about her possibly being a single mother, him not wanting to have a public relationship with her because of it, and whether or not she actually is in love with him, but it all works out of course. don't all romantic comedies? you've got to throw in that jeopardy to make it work.

the film is actually quite good for being only 72 minutes long. but you have to be able to deal with the insane insane insane repetition of the word "it" as a noun and not a pronoun for about the first 20 minutes of the film. after that, it settles down a bit. i wonder if anyone else has caught the movie connections in this. they don't appear on the IMDb, but i saw two fairly obvious ones. there's the skirt being blown up by an updraft thing that was made truly famous by Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch (1955). and another thing that was copied from this film was the Coney Island trip. the exact same rides and everything showd up in a date that John, Bert, Mary, and Jane went on in King Vidor's The Crowd (1928).

that brings me to another point. i want to go on a date at Coney Island. i don't know if they still have those same awesome rides there, but the ones they have in the two films are spectacular. there's this one great one where you get like 40 people and sit them in this big wooden bowl thing with a rotating section in the middle. then it starts going faster and faster. the people on the outside shoot off to the edge of the bowl, and slowly you get whittled down to where there are just a few people in the middle. everyone eventually gets slung out of the center. oh i want to get on that. so fun.