The Plastic Age

The Plastic Age is a silent-era comedy romance about Hugh Carver, a freshman at Prescott College who is both a standout athlete and a serious student. He falls for Cynthia Day, a popular girl whose social life revolves around parties, and soon finds that keeping up with her leaves little time or energy for his studies and training. The strain pushes the pair toward hard choices about what they want from each other and from college life.

The film was directed by Wesley Ruggles, arriving between Love and Cimarron in the run of features he made. Eve Unsell and Frederica Sagor Maas wrote the screenplay, and B.P. Schulberg produced it through his production company. Donald Keith plays Hugh, with Clara Bow as Cynthia, Gilbert Roland as Carl Peters, Mary Alden and Henry B. Walthall as Hugh's parents, and David Butler as coach James Henley. Running just over an hour, it belongs to the cycle of 1920s campus pictures.

On IMDb it holds a 5.9 rating from roughly 420 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.2 from a much smaller group of 15. Both scores come from audiences rather than professional critics, and the wide gap in how many people weighed in on each platform says more about the two sites' reach and age profiles than about the film itself.