It & The Pill Pounder: Live Score by Philip Carli

A black and white photograph featuring two individuals sitting at a desk. One individual appears to be reclining with legs crossed on the desk, while the other is seated upright, seemingly writing or signing a document. On the desk, there are various item

The quintessential flapper, Clara Bow, is captured at the height of her charm in the definitive Jazz Age romantic comedy: It.

Inspired by a story by Elinor Glyn, who used the simple pronoun to encapsulate the spirit of the sexually-liberated youth of Prohibition-era America, a saucy lingerie salesgirl sets her sights on the handsome owner (Antonio Moreno) of the department store in which she works. Leading him on a romantic chase from the Hotel Ritz to the whirling attractions of Coney Island, Betty Lou (Clara Bow) decides to crash a high-society yacht party in a last-ditch effort to get her man.

Unlike the sexless starlets or cool beauties who generally appeared on screen, Bow was prone to playing the sexual aggressor in her films, a daring deviation from female passivity that revolutionized the role of women not only in cinema, but in society as well. With It, Bow's gregarious personality and striking beauty are brilliantly showcased, making it easy to understand how she became Hollywood's most popular leading lady of the late 1920s.

The film screens with a recently-rediscovered Clara Bow film: The Pill Pounder (1923, dir. Gregory La Cava, 14 min.), courtesy of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

In one of those serendipitous man-makes-astonishing-discovery-by-accident stories, filmmaker Gary Huggins came across a cartoon he was looking for among a stack of film cans in an Omaha parking lot. But to get the cartoon, he had to buy the whole stack. Going through the footage later, he realized one of the titles, The Pill Pounder, featured a 17-year-old Clara Bow. Author David Stenn — who wrote the definitive biography Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild — had given up hope of finding this obscure, independent, Queens-made short. And it was not even a sure bet that Bow was in the film until Huggins unspooled the title in his living room!

The Pill Pounder was produced by All-Star Comedies and distributed in the United States by W.W. Hodkinson. The short film stars comedian Charles Murray as a druggist (a.k.a. pill pounder) who is running a secret poker game in the backroom of his pharmacy. The short two-reel comedy was released on 22 April 1923 at a length of approximately 2,000 ft. (600 m.). The only known surviving copy is an abridged 35mm print with a length of 1,161 ft. (354 m.) from which the original titles and an unquantified number of pictorial shots were removed. This restoration was completed in April 2024 by San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

Acclaimed musician Philip Carli will provide live musical accompaniment for the two films.

Philip Carli is one of the world’s leading silent film accompanists. He brings both prodigious musical talent and a committed scholarly outlook to his lifelong passion for the music and culture of the turn of the last century. He discovered silent film at the age of five and began his accompaniment career at thirteen, with a performance for Lon Chaney’s 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. While at college he programmed and accompanied an annual series of silent films, and also organized and conducted a 50-piece student orchestra using 19th-century performance practice. Since then, he has continued his studies of the film, music and culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, earning a doctorate from the Eastman School of Music. He has at the same time toured extensively as a film accompanist throughout North America and Europe, performing on keyboard and with orchestra at such venues as Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, DC, the Cinémathèque Québécoise in Montreal, the National Film Theatre in London, and the Berlin International Film Festival. He is the staff accompanist for the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, and performs annually at several film festivals in the United States as well as at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Italy.

It screens in a 35mm print courtesy of Kino Lorber. This special event features as part of our series "(You Look Like) Clara Bow" in honor of Silent Movie Month in Ithaca and is presented in collaboration with the Wharton Studio Museum.