OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS: Blu-ray (MGM, 1928) Warner Archive

An apocryphal story about MGM contract fledgling, Lucille Fay LeSueur, only recently having stepped beyond the footlights to claw her way up from the chorus, and, rechristened by studio PR as Joan Crawford, suggests she stripped naked for producer, Hunt Stromberg as her audition to appear in director, Harry Beaumont’s Our Dancing Daughters (1928) – a silent flick, distinguishable only for revealing ‘the real’ Joan Crawford to the rest of us – the one with a room full of trophies won in local dance competitions, and, for kick-starting a minor cottage industry of sequels. According the tale, Stromberg reportedly told Crawford if she really wanted the part, she would have to go au naturel again for Beaumont. She did, and Beaumont cast her as the inwardly virtuous, but outwardly audacious flapper, ‘dangerous’ Diana Medford. Chalk it up to Crawford legend. At once, everything you have either heard or read about Joan Crawford is probably true. And yet, it is also tinged with the pall of hyperbole and a near reckless fascination by some, to view the entire contents of both her character and career from only the last chapter of her life, ripped clean from the pages of Christina Crawford’s scathing tell-all, ‘Mommie Dearest’.

There is, decidedly, another Crawford we should remember, and arguably, best and apart from the leering gargoyle reborn in Faye Dunaway’s camp of Christina’s crude and jealous reimagining. Crawford’s youth was hardly the stuff of dreams or legends. She struggled to escape the poverty she was born into, and desperately sought the company of men older than she, to begin her ascendance in the social register. This, repeatedly denied, gave Crawford the awesome stubbornness to succeed where she might otherwise, and more believably, have failed. “I never learned to spell regrets,” Crawford once proudly proclaimed. And to her dying day, she held fast to this mantra. Supposedly, her final words on earth, spoken to her housekeeper were, “Don’t you dare ask God to forgive me!” Arguably, there was nothing extraordinary about the early Lucille’s entrance into pictures. She craved stardom more ravenously than her peers. This much is true. And through hard-driving ambition, Crawford managed to become that which she desired: a self-made woman whose overriding myth of culture was as thinly veneered as the pancake make-up on her face. “How can I ever compete with that,” she openly told the higher ups at MGM, referring to rising star, Norma Shearer, “She sleeps with the boss!” True enough, although Shearer was also wed to Metro’s VP, Irving Thalberg – the wunderkind behind Louis B. Mayer’s throne.

If patience and tact were hardly Crawford’s strong suits, self-confidence, and a willful spirit to succeed were heady confidants to get her where she was going. After Our Dancing Daughters, the trajectory of Crawford’s stardom was not only secure. It was fabricated into the stuff of dreams and legends, albeit, completely concocted from studio-sanctioned banana oil, fluff and nonsense, fit to print in those fan magazines movie buffs adore. The industry, alas, knew better. Just one reason why Crawford, despite her Teflon-coated perfection to the outside world, was never entirely accepted in her Hollywood’s social circles. If Crawford bitterly resented this (and quite frankly, she must have), she nevertheless spent the next three decades repeatedly reinventing her image to suit the times while maintaining an enviable slate of projects, in later years, running buckshot over starlets half her age, and going through husbands as readily as lovers. The appeal of Crawford’s audacious performance in Our Dancing Daughters was not lost on the jazz age. No less an authority of the times than F. Scott Fitzgerald was to comment, “Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.” Actually, Fitzgerald’s description fit Crawford to a tee.

With a story cobbled together by Josephine Lovett, Marian Ainslee and Ruth Cummings, Our Dancing Daughters is as distinguishable for MGM art director, Cedric Gibbons’ embrace of the ‘then’ new trend in Art Deco décor. This would see out the 1930’s. The picture also beefed up the profile of costar, Johnny Mack Brown – an MVP halfback for the University of Alabama during its 1926 national championship, but a veteran of only 9 movies to Crawford’s 27. Both Brown and Crawford would go on to have careers seemingly into perpetuity, with Brown ending his in 1965, and Crawford besting him 7 years later, bowing out with 1972’s abysmal sci-fi drivel, Trog. The last bit of inspired casting is Anita Page, as the evil blonde bombshell, Ann. A teenage beauty, Page – in only her second movie for MGM – became something of a main staple for a few years, appearing opposite such big-ticket names as John Gilbert, Buster Keaton, William Haines, and Marie Dressler. With the coming of sound, Page’s popularity fizzled and, after leaving MGM, making a few quota quickies for poverty row, she left the industry for good, just another ‘has been’ of the silent to sound era, who later found renewed fame on the talk show circuit as one of the last survivors from this early age in movie-making.

Although primarily a ‘silent’ picture, Our Dancing Daughters does contain a synchronized music score and sound effects, afterthoughts to breach the studio’s nervous concern that ‘sound pictures’ might be on the cusp of taking over the industry. Despite this technological advantage, today the picture plays very much as one gigantic fluffy ball of super-kitsch, ably abetted by MGM’s seemingly bottomless wellspring of money. Actually, it only cost Metro $178,000 (a paltry outlay, even then). It went on to earn a whopping $1.1 million at the box office, over six times its production costs. Barring publicity and distribution MGM’s net profit was a cool $304,000 (or approximately $6 million in today’s dollars). Mayer and Thalberg were no fools. Crawford was suddenly a star. The picture was twice Oscar-nominated. And so, two ‘follow-ups’ were made – each, with diminishing returns: 1929’s Our Modern Maidens, and 1930’s Our Blushing Brides.

Our Dancing Daughters introduces us to Diana Medford, an outwardly wild child of the flapper age, dazzled by excess and a devil-may-care to do as she pleases after the sun has gone down. It’s all a ruse, however. Diana is ‘dangerous’ in name only. Actually, she is a respectable girl who masks her inward optimism to fit into the crowd. This includes her best friend, Ann (Anita Page) – a flaxen-haired mantrap, who goes after money rather than love and is as scheming as her mama (Kathlyn Williams). A rivalry brews between Diana and Ann for the affections of Ben Blaine (Johnny Mack Brown), a varsity letterman with a bright future ahead of him. Owing to Diana’s clever subterfuge in playing ‘hard to get’, Ben weds Ann instead. Ann has faked sincerity to get what she wants. But will she be able to keep Ben? Mutual friend, Beatrice (Dorothy Sebastian) has also done well for herself, marrying wealthy suitor, Norman (Nils Asther), desperately in love with her, but haunted by her past. For a brief wrinkle in time, Bea and Ann’s ability to steal away with handsome, rich men leaves the moral Diana distraught. After all, don’t good guys desire good girls? Apparently not.

Meanwhile, Bea elects to throw a hedonist’s soiree at the yacht club. Ben makes Ann turn down the invite. This puts a real kink in Ann’s plans to meet up with her lover, Freddie (Edward Nugent). So, Ann lies to Ben about having to attend her sick mother. However, when Ann’s mom telephones, thus to expose the lie, Ben confronts his wife, who nevertheless storm off in a huff to rendezvous with Freddie. Overcompensating for this rejection, Ben decides to go to the party, finds Diana and declares his love for her. This appears to be quite genuine. Ben realizes what a mistake he has made in wedding and bedding Ann. Tragically, a thoroughly intoxicated Ann also turns up with Freddie in tow. She makes a scene, forcing Ben and Diana to retreat. Later, the couple confides their mutual affections, but reason it can come to not, and elect to go their separate ways. Norman arrives at the party to discover Bea attempting to help the drunken Ann home. Instead, after mocking several servants, and exposing her mother’s gold-digging strategies to all, Ann takes a tumble down a flight of stairs, breaks her neck and dies. The movie ends with headlines in the social register, declaring that after two years abroad, Diana came home and was reunited for her ‘happily ever after’ with Ben.

Our Dancing Daughters is a pretty silly picture – even for the jazz age. There is no denying it made Joan Crawford a star. She is in just about every frame, and when she appears, despite her rambunctious need to chew up the scenario with needless energy, there is something strangely compelling about her performance. One can almost see the cogs of Crawford’s mind reeling, as though to consider this picture her celluloid rendition of Gen. Custard’s last stand. And, with such a make-or-break mentality firmly affixed to her Charleston-kicking loins, Crawford breezily bounces from frame to frame with the incessantly ridiculous appeal of a hungry little starlet about to become a fully-formed star in the cinema firmament. The rest of these largely forgotten faces all do their part. But the picture really is a Crawford tour de force. She carries the lion’s share of the show, managing the major coup of running away with the movie that could just as easily have tanked her entire career. To those only familiar with la Crawford from her golden period (roughly 1935-1950), she appears here almost entirely unrecognizable, save those oversized eyes, brilliantly to emit a high-voltage beam of starlight, beckoning the first-time viewer to fall in love with her spry sex appeal. It works. She pulls us in. And once there, it is virtually impossible to escape Crawford’s magnetic sway, in spite of the occasionally awful and thoroughly contrived situations her alter ego is forced to navigate.

Our Daring Daughters is yet the latest recipient of the Warner Archive’s (WAC) bottom-up restoration efforts. And the results here are astounding. Having only ever seen snippets of the picture, excised for documentaries about the silent age, but looking as though to have first been fed through a meat grinder, the magnificent yield of image fidelity in WAC’s effort to resurrect it from oblivion is nothing short of miraculous. It is also uniformly excellent and belies the fact these elements are almost 100 years old. Contrast is superb. Gray scale tonality is incredible. There are a few ‘soft’ shots intermittently scattered throughout. Again, for a movie of this vintage, totally acceptable. And WAC has done everything possible to mitigate the ravages of time. This looks amazing! Understandably, it doesn’t sound quite so good. This is a VERY early synchronized sound and effects track. There is only so much to be done about it. Hiss and pop are never an issue. The track is clean. But it decidedly lacks range. No kidding. One minor caveat. I sincerely wish WAC could find it in their budgets to produce a short to explain to us the technical process by which they are able to restore and remaster seemingly ‘lost’ movies to a quality that is not only far better than anticipated, but actually even better than anyone could imagine. Clearly, this was a time-consuming and costly effort to bring back from the brink. We certainly champion the results. No extras. But hey, WAC has spent their coin wisely. No self-respecting cinephile should be without this one on their shelves. Very highly recommended!

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

3

VIDEO/AUDIO

4.5

EXTRAS

0