Our Dancing Daughters (Cosmopolitan Productions, MGM, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that TCM’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” featured a movie from MGM in 1928 that launched Joan Crawford on her road to superstardom; Our Dancing Daughters. Actually it wasn’t strictly speaking a silent film; it was finished after the release of The Jazz Singer and MGM accordingly supplied it with a soundtrack. The sound consisted of some “wild” lines of dialogue (I.e., not synchronized to any on-screen action), including one scene in which a bandleader calls out to Diana Medford (Joan Crawford), “C’mon, Diana, strut your stuff!” to get Diana to dance in public. The film turns on the rivalry of three young “flapper” types – Diana, Ann (Anita Page) and Beatrice (Dorothy Sebastian) – to attract equally uper-class men, particularly Ben Blaine (John Mack Brown), an ex-football star (as Mack Brown was for real) who’s both attractive and super-rich; and Norman (Nils Asther, considerably younger than I’m used to seeing him), who is attracted to Beatrice but can’t get her to take him seriously because he’s not super-rich – though no one in this film is exactly hurting for money. When the three girls make fun of three scrubwomen cleaning the floor of the Yacht Club where much of the action takes place, I got upset and wanted to yell at the screen, “At least the three scrubwomen have jobs! They’re not just sponging off rich parents like you are!” (It’s the same sort of lack of class consciousness that turned my husband Charles off to F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose writings clearly inspired the author of this film, Josephine Lovett, with Marion Ainslee and Ruth Cummings supplying the intertitles: as one critic noted, it wasn’t until Fitzgerald’s last book, the unfinished The Last Tycoon, that he wrote a novel about a man who actually had a job.)

Part of the problem is that, even though OUr Dancing Daughters was supposed to be a vehicle for Joan Crawford (apparently she stole the story out of MGM’s back vaults and insisted toat producer Hunt Stromberg make it as a star-making role for her), she really doesn’t stand out that much. Aside from Anita Page having lighter hair than the others, it’s not easy to tell Crawford, Page and Sebastian apart. The film’s gimmick is that Diana, despite her wild, free-wheeling exterior, is really a “good girl” at heart, while Ann is a gold-digger who’s just after Ben for his money. In the end, Ann married Ben but then gets taken out by authorial fiat when she slips down a wet flight of stairs the scrubwomen were working on, and Dinaa heads off to Europe but returns two years later to find Ben a widower and swoop in on him. One of the most remarkable things about Our Dancing Daughters is the use of music; in addition to songs of the period like “Ain’t We Got Fun” and “That’s My Weakness Now” heard as instrumentals on the soundtrack to give Diana and the others something to dance to, the soundtrack features a song called “I Love You Now As I Loved You Then,” written in 1927 by Dr. William Axt, David Mendoza and Ballard McDonald, and used on the soundtrack much like the rock songs were in Easy Rider in 1969 (another film about rebellious youth!) to reflect the characters’ innermost thoughts. (F. Scott Fitzgerald used the same technique of quoting pop songs of the day in his novel Tender Is the Night, published in 1934, six years after Fitzgerald saw Our Dancing Daughters and proclaimed Joan Crawford the screen’s ultimate image of the flapper.) Directed by Harry Beaumont – who’d go on to make the first talkie ever to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, The Broadway Melody, as well as Our Blushing Brides, third of a series of films in this series (though they weren’t sequels, just different stories featuring Joan Crawford in rambunctious-young-woman roles; the middle one, directed by Jack Conway, was Our Modern Maidens), and according to one screen historian got more authority on the MGM lot than more highly regarded directors of the time), and he keeps it moving and gives it the je ne sais quoi energy it needs to work even though the ending is clunky and not particularly believable.