"Our Dancing Daughters" is the film that made a star out of Joan Crawford.
Released in 1928, the film was slightly behind the curve. Sound had arrived, and filmmakers were scrambling to produce product that took advantage of the new technology. "Our Dancing Daughters" is primarily a silent film, though there are the occasional sound effects and at one point you hear the voice of a bandleader. Crawford plays a fun-loving flapper, while Anita Page plays a more traditional "good" girl. Both are vying for the affections of a rich playboy. He picks the safe, wholesome one, only to be surprised when she turns out to be a bit of a mess and he realizes he should have gone with Crawford, who may seem like a good time gal but who's actually a girl with her head squarely on her shoulders.
It was hard for me from the vantage point of 2019 to find anything to care much about in this film. It's about a bunch of rich people and their not very pressing problems, and about which girl gets rewarded at the end with a man. But taken in context of its time, "Our Dancing Daughters" is cool for the peek it gives modern day audiences into the roaring 20s and the flapper age right before it all went south because of the stock market crash. It's also an interesting look into the gender dynamics of the time, and the extent to which women's futures were determined by men. The men could act any way they wanted, but a woman's actions defined whether or not she was marriage worthy, and God forbid a woman do something with her life that wasn't getting married.
"Our Dancing Daughters" was directed by Harry Beaumont, the man who was nominated for an Oscar in the same year for directing "The Broadway Melody," which won the second Academy Award ever given for Best Picture. Beaumont doesn't have a recognizable style, but his direction of this is much better than that of his Best Picture winner, which sits like a lump on the screen. I have to believe he was simply cowed by the task of directing a sound film and didn't have a clue what to do with it. The editing of "Our Dancing Daughters" is what really needed some work. For such a simple story, it's at times ridiculously hard to follow, since the editing jerks abruptly from one location to another without any transition, and doesn't give us an adequate sense of time passing.
The movie was nominated for a couple of Oscars of its own, one for Best Writing before there was any such thing as a screenplay award, and the other for George Barnes's cinematography. There isn't anything very special about the cinematography in this film, but there are a few scenes set against a picturesque oceanscape filmed in blurry, gauzy light, and I wonder if this was significantly artsy enough to impress Oscar voters.
Grade: B
Released in 1928, the film was slightly behind the curve. Sound had arrived, and filmmakers were scrambling to produce product that took advantage of the new technology. "Our Dancing Daughters" is primarily a silent film, though there are the occasional sound effects and at one point you hear the voice of a bandleader. Crawford plays a fun-loving flapper, while Anita Page plays a more traditional "good" girl. Both are vying for the affections of a rich playboy. He picks the safe, wholesome one, only to be surprised when she turns out to be a bit of a mess and he realizes he should have gone with Crawford, who may seem like a good time gal but who's actually a girl with her head squarely on her shoulders.
It was hard for me from the vantage point of 2019 to find anything to care much about in this film. It's about a bunch of rich people and their not very pressing problems, and about which girl gets rewarded at the end with a man. But taken in context of its time, "Our Dancing Daughters" is cool for the peek it gives modern day audiences into the roaring 20s and the flapper age right before it all went south because of the stock market crash. It's also an interesting look into the gender dynamics of the time, and the extent to which women's futures were determined by men. The men could act any way they wanted, but a woman's actions defined whether or not she was marriage worthy, and God forbid a woman do something with her life that wasn't getting married.
"Our Dancing Daughters" was directed by Harry Beaumont, the man who was nominated for an Oscar in the same year for directing "The Broadway Melody," which won the second Academy Award ever given for Best Picture. Beaumont doesn't have a recognizable style, but his direction of this is much better than that of his Best Picture winner, which sits like a lump on the screen. I have to believe he was simply cowed by the task of directing a sound film and didn't have a clue what to do with it. The editing of "Our Dancing Daughters" is what really needed some work. For such a simple story, it's at times ridiculously hard to follow, since the editing jerks abruptly from one location to another without any transition, and doesn't give us an adequate sense of time passing.
The movie was nominated for a couple of Oscars of its own, one for Best Writing before there was any such thing as a screenplay award, and the other for George Barnes's cinematography. There isn't anything very special about the cinematography in this film, but there are a few scenes set against a picturesque oceanscape filmed in blurry, gauzy light, and I wonder if this was significantly artsy enough to impress Oscar voters.
Grade: B