Truly Dreadful Film

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Blistering performances.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

For me, there are two alternating pleasures in watching silent movies. The first is the opportunity to watch a fledgling medium, one that is still so much with us today, being born. Silent movies showcase the intuitive genius of a lot of early filmmakers who seemed to just know what to do with these moving images. This is the pleasure of watching Chaplin, Keaton, Murnau, Griffith. But even when a silent movie is not so innovative or culturally fresh or technically groundbreaking, it can still offer up a window into a moment in time. Movies are, after all, a reflection of both what we actually are (sometimes, unintentionally so) and a projection of what we wish to be. Our Dancing Daughters (1928) falls firmly within the second category. Simply put, Our Dancing Daughters is a visual ode to The Jazz Age. Full of flappers, flasks, and slangy intertitles, the interiors are gorgeous art deco museum pieces and all the gals have adorable bobs and fringed dresses. They are young, wealthy, beautiful, and navigating a tangled web of evolving sexual politics. Our Dancing Daughters was pretty risqué for 1928. It had the censors fuming, and kudos to director Harry Beaumont and writer Josephine Lovett for even trying to tackle that rat's nest. Or at least kudos to them for trying to exploit the public hysteria that simmered around the loose morals of 1920′s youth in America. But does the movie hold up to scrutiny when viewed through the old sexual politics lens? Not really.In her first true star turn, a lovely and young Joan Crawford is "Dangerous" Diana Medford, a wealthy socialite who runs with a jazzy crowd. She's vivacious, flirty, full of a lust for life, and not at all opposed to doing the Charleston on a table top. Anita Page plays Diana's friend Ann, a venal little gold digger backed my a money grubbing mom. Diana falls hard for Ben Blaine (Johnny Mack Brown), a super wealthy playboy who's just looking for a nice gal to settle down with. Ann falls hard for Ben's cash and we have a good old-fashioned cat fight on our hands. There's a nifty little side plot concerning Diana's gal pal Bea (Dorothy Sebastian), who will be eternally tormented for her bad girl indiscretions prior to marrying Norman (Nils Ashter).So here's what happens Ben is drawn to Diana but mistakes her vivacity and verve as loose morals. Diana is not the kind of girl you marry. Ann offers him an alternative, with a phony little-miss-innocent act, and the damn fool falls for it. Diana is heart broken and Ann goes about her boozing and catting ways, rewarding herself with diamonds for serving out the sentence of her marriage. Ben is unhappy, realizes he's made a HUGE mistake, but *spoiler alert* Ann gets her Karmic comeuppance when she falls down the stairs and breaks her pretty little neck, leaving Ben and Diana to be happy together forever. The moral of the story: hussies always lose and good girls always win, even in these crazy modern times when it's at first hard to tell which girl is the tart and which one is virtuous. As progressive and daring as Our Dancing Daughters pretended to be, it ultimately reinforced traditional sexual mores without really celebrating the liberation of women. Even while pulses raced at the saucy script and semi-shocking visuals, the movie also puts a reassuring hand on the viewer's shoulder and says, "See, they only seem wild, but they're still nice girls. And if they aren't, they'll eventually get theirs." It's not at all unlike Sex and the City, where even after 6 seasons of free-wheeling sexual independence, the only satisfying conclusion could be Carrie Bradshaw's marriage to Mr. Big. Some things never change, I suppose.With all that said, if you watch movies made in 1928 to explore sexual politics, you're most likely a fool. It's a testament to the complexity of Our Dancing Daughters that it provokes the same kind of head-scratching discussion of where women really fit into society that we still engage in today. But that's not the reason to watch this movie. Watch it because it is a sheer delight to watch. It's fast, fun, and Joan Crawford is a revelation. I personally love the crazy eyebrows, line-backer shoulder pads version of Joan, but to see her young, fresh, and really shaking a tail feather is a pure joy. And despite the confused social messaging of the movie, Our Dancing Daughters is a pretty little time capsule of 1928. The clothes are perfect and the art deco sets are stunning – the sort of thing that might make girls from small Southern towns move to New York City (you know, I have a friend of a friend, or something). The slangy title cards ("Mother – how vicious!") are pure fun.With the benefit of hindsight, Our Dancing Daughters also has a little taste of the bittersweet. The theatrical release date of September 1, 1928 puts this little gem almost exactly one year after the release of The Jazz Singer and almost exactly one year prior to the Wall Street Crash of 1929- two events that will be cataclysmic to the industry and the world that made Our Dancing Daughters possible. That makes the movie feel like a fragile thing – like a butterfly wing or a fire-fly in a jar – beautiful, but doomed. As ever, I remain grateful that the camera were rolling.

Our Dancing Daughters is a beautiful example of how far the silent cinema had come by 1928, the year it decisively decided to give itself up to talk. The medium had reached a point where the action was silent but synchronized to a score and embellished with occasional sound effects such as knocking on doors, ringing of phones or a spoken word here and there. It was the short-lived pinnacle of a dying art form. These feature films from the late silent period provide valuable insight for composers who are supplying music for previously unscored silents. This solidly constructed and well-shot story follows the trajectories of three young females of differing temperaments living through various stages of being young and wild in the roaring twenties. We have Diana Medford (Joan Crawford), a straightforward, unashamedly pleasure-loving, self-absorbed but basically decent sort who lives to dance and generally party around. Then there is the more serious and experienced Beatrice (Dorothy Sebastian), whose fiancé (Nils Asther) chooses to overlook her wayward past as long as she will marry him and retreat from the party circuit. Finally there is Ann (Anita Page), a coldhearted golddigger who lures the dashing millionaire Ben Blaine (John Mack Brown) away from Diana by pretending to be an innocent maiden simply yearning for marriage and motherhood. At first it seems as if Diana is a hellcat, but her splashy demeanor is merely the honest excess of youth. Life has its knocks prepared for her and she has to take them, which she does nobly and sportingly. Not Ann. She turns to drink, with disastrous results. Each of the three main characters is introduced by shots of their legs and feet: Crawford's slipping into heels to shimmy in front of a mirror; Sebastian's planted firmly next to her fiancé's as they attentively listen to a pre-date lecture by her parents; Page's seen while seated on the floor, removing a pair of ripped silk stockings, preparatory to stealing a pair of from her mother.The soundtrack is made up of a small number of musical compositions from the period, repeated throughout the film. There are up-tempo dance numbers for the party scenes and slow ballads for the one-on-one romantic clinches. The photography is uniformly beautiful with generous use of medium close-ups, all against the backdrop of sumptuous sets designed by Cedric Gibbons. Great looking costumes too.Crawford and Page are both stunning embodiments of the light and dark sides of "the flapper." Sebastian's role is less flashy. None of the performances is dated.Most documentaries that deal at any length with "roaring twenties," the Great Depression or the Golden Age of Hollywood inevitably include a bit from this film, usually the party where balloons fill the air as Crawford dances exuberantly on a table top.

Wealthy and flashy Diana falls hard for Ben Blaine--who unjustly interprets her vivacity as looseness and in turn falls hard for prim and proper Anne--who is in fact a vicious gold digger with a heart of stone. Will Ben ever see through Anne's facade and realize Diana's true worth? Directed by Harry Beaumont with sets by the legendary Cederick Gibbons, OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS was bright, sharp, pretty to look at, and just sexy enough to make the censors fume--the type of film that MGM seemed to produce by the bushel during the late silent era. The studio expected it to perform well, but there was no reason for anyone to think it would generate more than passing interest, much less a legendary star. But it did.Born in 1904, Lucille Le Sueur endured a hardknocks childhood to become a popular chorus girl in New York night spots before signing with MGM in 1925--and renamed Joan Crawford she churned out some two dozen films in three years without setting the world on fire. Until, that is, MGM allowed her dance on table tops and despair of winning her true love in this slickly produced, well acted, but essentially formula melodrama. And even today it is still possible to see what all the fuss was about: not only was she bursting with youthful energy and appeal, it was the first film in which Joan Crawford really LOOKED like Joan Crawford, and although still limited her acting chops weren't half bad either.The overall cast is particularly strong, with Anita Page turning in a memorable performance as the pretty but wicked Anne and Dorothy Sebastian as Bea, a good girl with a few missed steps in her past; male leads Johnny Mack Brown, Nils Aster, and Edward J. Nugent provide solid support as various love interests; and Kathlyn Williams proves memorable as Anne's manipulative mother. While OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS will never rival the truly great films of the late silent era, it is still a lot of fun, and those who want to see Crawford's first cinematic hurrah will not be disappointed.GFT, Amazon Reviewer

When Joan Crawford signed with M-G-M studios, her name was Lucille LaSeur. Feeling the name was too long for the marquees, M-G-M held a contest in Photoplay Magazine to find their starlet a new name. "Joan Crawford" was the winning choice. Now with a new identity, the studio cast her in various "flapper roles," with the most famous vehichle; "Our Dancing Daughters." It made her a star and she remained so until her death in 1977.