The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 23-29
Directed by John Francis Dillon
Chockful of plots surrounding the doe-eyed, titian-haired Clara Bow as the wayward Nasa Springer, this adaptation of Tiffany Thayer’s novel is a pictorial look at an impulsive woman—on-screen and off—and her escapades. Springer is a spitfire from birth, spawned into a cursed family of no-gooders with devil-may-care attitudes. Her mother and alleged father cannot control her, and they abandon all hopes of putting their daughter on a more righteous path. After numerous affairs, an unsuccessful marriage and the accidental (but reckless) loss of her only child in a fire, Springer inherits a fortune, but she cannot seem to shake the snake-whipping, fiendish behavior from her upbringing. In this pre-Code tale, it’s Bow’s vixenish charisma that takes center stage. Samantha Vacca (March 23, 8pm at Film Forum’s “It Girls, Flappers, Jazz Babies and Vamps”)