Viewers who seek out this Clara Bow double feature will likely compare it to IT, the 1927 charmer to which all of her films are compared sooner or later, the film that finally captured the most naturally exuberant (and unnaturally wounded) personality in silent film. Bow had made more than 30 films in the five years preceding IT, only a handful of which survive in any condition. Even her minor films, therefore, are impossible to ignore. DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS shows us Bow in 1922, barely 17 years old and fresh as rain. In her small role as a long-haired tomboy, she neither poses nor emotes; she is simply herself at 17. The part offers few hints of the luscious flapper whose unembarrassed sensuality would one day startle even Elinor Glyn and deluge Paramount with nearly fifty thousand fan letters a month. PARISIAN LOVE, released three years after DOWN TO THE SEA, teases us with glimpses of the It Girl-to-be. But they are tantalizing glimpses: the long tresses are gone, replaced by a pushed-up, snip-sprung, crazy-tilt hairdo that eases our entry into the softest, most haunted eyes that ever looked out of a movie screen. The silly plot is forgettable; Bow is not. PARISIAN LOVE should serve as the springboard to a much better Bow film from 1925, THE PLASTIC AGE (available from Image in a twofer with THE SHOW OFF).