She's best friends with Ann, a gold-digging flapper. Headstrong she may be, but she is true to herself and incapable of being false to any other. After completing Our Modern Maidens, they placed their footprints in the forecourt of Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theater, then went off to get married in New York. The opening shot, an emblematic figurine celebrating the madcap spirit of the Jazz Age, dissolves into Crawford’s lower limbs, so impatient to take their owner to an all-night party at the yacht club that they are already doing a tap-dance as she steps into her undies. With Joan Crawford, Johnny Mack Brown, Nils Asther, Dorothy Sebastian. Our Dancing Daughters launched Joan Crawford into stardom as the quintessential, peppy flapper girl. She is a dauntless girl, who takes her misfortunes with a smile, which was not exactly, received in a sympathetic manner by an audience in the Capitol Theatre yesterday afternoon. And just to jolly up the potential box office, MGM “borrowed” me from First National to play the second lead. In her next few films, MGM gave the public the Crawford image they wanted: a party girl. The Capitol now is equipped for the reproduction of sounds, which fact was only too patent yesterday, for while “Our Dancing Daughters” is not furnished with dialogue, it has a musical accompaniment, several love songs, stentorian cheering and, at the end, a chorus of shrieks. Emboldened by  having a film role tailored for her in Four Walls, Crawford purloined the new script. Comes the pat reply (in silent-era titles): ‘Yes–all! Her credo is simple: as she explains to her swain during their passionate tryst on the beach, “I want to hold out my hands and catch [life]–like the sunlight.”  Crawford’s renowned Charleston is performed in a half slip and fringed blouse; a skirt would have been too confining. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the golden-haired Anita Page and Rod La Rocque are the principals in this offering. You can include an image to complement your Review / Analysis, Try to introduce the movie without revealing crucial plot points, Strange or interesting facts about Our Dancing Daughters, Post only the YouTube video URL, not the embed code. Reviews / Analyses cannot be changed once submitted - please post carefully! The whole story will rise and fall on her performance. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. sent a belated message of congratulations. He was constantly busy during the silent period, his lack-lustre talented salvaged by periodic prestige films and big name stars: Barrymore’s Beau Brummel, tonight’s film, and The Broadway Melody of 1929. At the beginning of Our Dancing Daughters (1928), a golden art deco statue of a woman frozen mid-dance dissolves into a pair of shoes in front of a three-way mirror. Anita Page…………………………………………………………………….. Ann I also sang the theme song of Our Dancing Daughters.’  But wanton hedonism was not the lesson that most children absorbed. Yet within a few years, Crawford was Queen of the Lot, and Page was being loaned out for trash like Jungle Bride. Ben and Diana begin to realize their true love for each other and plan a new life together as drunken Ann falls down the stairs to her death. They had dressing rooms adjacent to each other, and they announced their presence to each other with a special whistle. They were designed to trade on the success of Our Dancing Daughters and with that paucity of imagination for which Hollywood in the thirties was famous, her next was called Our Modern Maidens. Life seemed to be an extension of art and the fans could imagine themselves privy to the real romance while paying to see the scripted one. Overnight she became a symbol of the Jazz Age; the era’s premier chronicler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, proclaimed her “the best example of the dramatic flapper.”. Director Harry Beaumont was “scared to death to take me. “Dangerous” Diana, as our flapper heroine will call herself later in the film, is dressing before her mirror, dancing into her modern “step-in” underwear before stepping out for the evening. The “legs” slip on a pair of short bloomers, revealing a lovely young woman who is dancing while she’s dressing to go out. Finding herself improbably encumbered by a party gown that can scarcely have weighed an ounce in the first place, she whips it off and finishes Charlestoning in her slip. So may I always like myself!’, The impression is of spoilt, exuberance, youthful audaciousness, heedless abandon. A devoted mother’s boy himself, Jack, I imagined, might become both a proxy for me and for my never-forgotten father in Mother’s life. Ben attends behind Ann's back. Billie’s leading man in Our Modern Maidens was an old Malibu Beach camp friend, Rod La Rocque. In other words, there is a ludic embodiment of femininity that transcends the limited subjectivity of self-commodification, and encourages the flapper spectator to imagine and emulate a playful subjectivity that is not simply enslaved to commodity culture. Cinematography by Oliver T. Marsh. Set Decoration by Cedric Gibbons. The technique was to poll several executives until a consensus was reached. Showing all 2 items Jump to: Summaries (2) Summaries. It was a very ‘flapper’ type dress, and I don’t usually go in for that sort of thing.”  Or as another respondent, a nineteen-year-old female Jewish college sophomore insightfully explained, “Certainly the movies have made me sharply aware of the fact that men place a high premium on the physical aspect of woman, that primarily a man’s attention is drawn to a woman because of her beauty; that a large degree of the proverbial ‘IT’ may be attained by pretty clothes, risqué clothes.”. It assuredly detracts from the action of the picture in some of the sequences. Cinematography by George Barnes . I want to hold out my hands and catch at it.’. She is not really particularly graceful or agile, but she has the abandoned intensity of a pent-up animal who has tasted freedom for the first time. Josephine Dunn…………………………………………………………….. Ginger It was good publicity, for a start. Our Dancing Daughters is a silent film drama made in 1928. Nils Asther………………………………………………………………… Norman The outcome of this Our Dancing Daughters, which opened at the Capitol in New York in October, 1928, broke every existing record at the theatre, and proceeded to duplicate the feat throughout the country. Our Dancing Daughters was a declaration, a manifesto. Even if they remained virgins in the final film reel, modern women with sex appeal were in, good girls aligned with old-fashioned innocence were out. Dorothy Sebastian………………………………………………………. (MGM couldn’t let well enough alone. Clearly, commodification was (and remains) a central function of the cultural work of movie culture, but an interpretation that privileges commodification, eve  the active process of self-commodification that Doane advances, would not fully account for the kinetic and comic aspects of the flapper film. Johnny was a football player, as if he couldn’t protect himself! Directed by Jack Conway. The lesson is rubbed in–scrubbed in, rather–when Anita, who has gone to the bad, falls fatally down the stairs at the private club after standing at the top sneering drunkenly at the charwomen washing them. In one version of the script, Crawford and Fairbanks were re-united. He didn’t even know about it until Billie (Joan Crawford) wired him. Harry Beaumont, the director, has among his worthy sequences in this film, one in which the fractious Diana tells her companion, Beatrice, that she is in love. After dancing the night away at some country club, the girls and their beaux, jam-packed into open roadsters, race each other back to the school gates where an impromptu fling–‘What are our thoughts on leaving school? The story’s third ‘daughter’, Dorothy Sebastian, is a victim, too, but of male chauvinism: her husband cannot cope with the revelation that she has played around before marriage. Anita Page……………………………………………………………….. Kentucky At last, moviegoers saw her earthy, exuberant sex appeal. I was expected to do my “party piece,” which comprised a series of mimed imitations of well-know picture personalities. ‘No matter what happened,’ said one girl in her teens, ‘[Diana Merick] played fair, even when she lost her man…  The older generation [think] that when a modern young miss wants her man back, she’d even be a cut-throat; but Joan Crawford showed that even in a crisis like this she was sport enough to play fair. It was called The Dancing Girl, and was intended to be turned into a film for William Randolph Hearst’s movie company, Cosmopolitan, which released its productions through MGM. Testing stories for their public appeal in this way, before spending money in turning them into a scenario, was one of the few bonuses which MGM derived from its links with Hearst, whose film company w as simply one way of promoting the career of his mistress Marion Davies, vainly as it usually turned out. I thought it would be fun to screen these two late Silent films together. Anita Page gives a fairly good portrayal of her idea of a dancing daughter. When MGM released Our Dancing Daughters–the landmark tribute to flappers and jazz babies–in mid-1928, one star stood out from the crowd. Douglas Fairbanks gives a competent performance, and during the youthful escapades he not only mimics John Gilbert and John Barrymore but also imitates his own father’s gestures and expressions in the film “Robin Hood.”, The New York Times by Mordaunt Hall, September 7, 1929. I told him, ‘Joan is worried I was going to hurt you,’ and he told me, ‘Give it everything you’ve got.’  So her little ploy didn’t work.”, Golden Images: 41 Essays on Silent Film Stars by Eve Golden (2001), THE FLAPPER FILM, Comedy, Dance, and Jazz Age, Kinaesthetics by Lori Landay. She gives a beautiful performance as the girl who sticks to the straight and narrow. Joan Crawford: A Biography by Bob Thomas (1979). Edward J. Nugent……………………………………………………………… Reg Our Dancing Daughters is hardly an unvarnished picture of those times – but it’s an interesting, Hollywood-oriented point of view. Our Dancing Daughters (1928) and Our Modern Maidens (1929) I thought it would be fun to screen these two late Silent films together. ‘Personally like title These Modern Girls for Dancing Girl,’ cabled one MGM executive. When Beaumont voiced doubts, Mayer smiled, “She’s a Bernhardt.”  Her role in Our Dancing Daughters was “terribly naughty,” Anita laughs, “but as long as I died, that was all right. Gals with gold-digging aspirations can see this and learn. Sometimes the indecisiveness revealed doubts about where audience tastes might lie in times when trends were changing, sometimes it suggested corporate uncertainty about casting, content or style. In the midst of a national debate over changing sexual and social expectations for women, Hollywood was accused of encouraging a new, dangerous model of female sexuality. MGM’s “history” of the wedding insists that the New York trip was L.B. Earn QUA for FREE by contributing to MovieQUA! Joan Crawford……………………………………………………. Although talkies were firmly entrenched by the time Our Modern Maidens was released, it found a large and eager public. ( Log Out /  Post a Review / Analysis! Diana is an incarnation of the nude deco figurine, self-absorbed in her dancing. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.