"..A beauty contest in Brooklyn had first brought her into the movies. She had arrived in Hollywood in 1923, a vibrant, gum-chewing, slightly tattered, and emotionally vulnerable eighteen-year-old. The pretentious social hierarchy of twenties Hollywood, embodied by her "discoverer" and producer, B.P. Schulberg, had slotted her into semi pornographic flapper and Cinderella stories, where she would remain until the end of her career in 1933. But now that Bow's movies are emerging from vaults, it is possible to see how original was the talent she brought to those cheap twenties formulae, and how critical is her place in the whole history of female screen acting in America. Bow not only summed up the techniques of her predecessors Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, and Mae Marsh-the D. W. Griffith pioneers-she suggested those of her "descendants." She brought to the screen an openness that hadn't been seen before, and elemental good nature, a wish to please that read as a healthy sexuality, and an unstudied naturalness about the extremes of grief and joy-qualities that Mae West took from her and caricatured, and which the romantic comedy heroines then took over, via West, and turned into virtues. Yet Clara had done it all herself: no director, producer, or screenwriter ever tried to build a movie around her unstinting generosity. She constructed her own roles. Romantic comedy was obliged on the surface to repudiate her example, since she was associated with the wild jazz years though responsible for the Crash. But this most exploited of actresses haunts the genre. Her trustingness lives in its heroines; her magnificent vulnerability prepared the way for them." (Elizabeth Kendall-THE RUNAWAY BRIDE)

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