Programme notes CH 01 — The Silent Signal
The Plastic Age
A freshman track star falls for the fastest girl on campus.
Percy Marks wrote the 1924 bestseller to warn parents about college; B. P. Schulberg bought it to sell them Clara Bow. Donald Keith is Hugh Carver, a track star who arrives at Prescott College with his mother’s advice and nearly leaves it in disgrace. Bow is Cynthia Day, the girl the faculty talk about, and the film cannot decide whether to scold her or follow her round the room. It follows her. Gilbert Roland, in one of his first parts, is the roommate. Watch the tints carry the moral: amber for the campus, blue for the drive out of town. Within two years she was It.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Wesley Ruggles
- Photographed by
- Gilbert Warrenton
- With
- Clark Gable · Janet Gaynor · Carole Lombard · Clara Bow · Mary Alden · Henry B. Walthall
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Clara Bow two years apart, on the way up. In The Plastic Age she is the girl the college warns its sons about; in Wings she is the girl next door who follows one of them to France. Both films put a young American man between a race he means to win and a girl he did not plan on.