There was barely any plastic around in 1925 when The Plastic Age debuted. “Plastic” in this context has its original sense of something easily moulded – “rendering the material more plastic”, my dictionary offers as an example.
That “material” in this case is a young man and his “Age” is the reason he’s so biddable, labile, impressionable, easily influenced – see your thesaurus for more synonyms.
Donald Keith plays the dude, Hugh, a young man off to college where, his parents hope, he’ll keep the family end up and fulfil himself as a sportsman of track and field (no one at this college seems to do any studying). But instead of knuckling down and doing well, once he’s there Hugh gets led astray by a young woman, “hotsy totsy” Cynthia Dane, and is in terrible danger of making a mess of his big chance in life. Will stern warnings from his coach (David Butler) put him back on the primrose path? Will desperate pleading by his distraught parents (Henry B Walthall, Mary Alden) encourage him to buck up? Or will his rivalry with room-mate Carl (Gilbert Roland) for the attention of the lovely Cynthia drive him even further into the arms of Cynthia and the “fast set” she runs with, and beyond the reach of all that is true and good?
All or nothing is the choice – have Cynthia and ruin his college career or do without and do well – and it is a touch overwrought as a plot driver. But then that is the sort of choice you get in a cautionary moral tale, which this purports to be.
In fact it’s really sailing under a flag of convenience. No one in 1925 was watching this movie for its edifying message. Instead, just like the huge numbers of people who’d bought the book it’s based on the year before, they came for the sex, the partying, the drinking, the “petting”, the hazing and the many examples of loose student living. Director Wesley Ruggles gives us parties and wild dancing, young men climbing into the rooms of young women and the occasional shot of couples billing and cooing, but he suggests there’s much, much more of this stuff going on in corners that we never quite glimpse.
Which brings us to Clara Bow, the film’s star and a distillation of potent pheromones in screen form. She looks sexy as hell – the big eyes, the “I know what I’m about” structural hairstyle, the breasts swinging loosely under her chemise (bras were not such a big thing in those days). She is plausibly the sort of young woman who would divert a man from his studies.
Remarkably this was her 15th film of 1925 but unremarkably it was the one that finally made her a star. She was 20. By the age of 22 she had become the “It Girl”, by starring in a film called It – you either had “it” or you didn’t, and Bow does. By 28 it was all over.
So this is the beginning of her comet-like blaze across the sky. She is not only the best-looking woman in the film but the only character who really knows what they want. In the film’s only really decisive plot pivot, it’s Cynthia who calls the shots while Hugh flaps around like the ineffectual thing he is – no spoilers.
Hugh is a bit of a plank but Keith plays him as such a tool that it’s difficult to understand what Cynthia, who could have any man, sees in him. Hugh is no match, certainly for Carl, the first decent role in a long career for Gilbert Roland, who has both savoir faire and looks (Roland’s father was a Spanish bullfighter and the dashing son has the bearing of one too).
Clark Gable turns up, shirtless and uncredited, in a locker room scene featuring a lot of men in white towels, Ruggles suggesting the entire time that one of the towels is going to slip. It’s unlikely you’d see much if one of them did, because the film – even restored – does not look great at all. The original elements were lost and the restoration’s source material was a 16mm copy.
Mid and long shots have barely any detail at all in them, but luckily Ruggles likes his close-ups and much of the storytelling happens with one face or another filling the screen. And in any case it’s a story told in such broad strokes that there’s never any doubt as to what’s going on. Fun!
The Plastic Age – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
