McL-Cassandra Art Director Cedric Gibbons truly out did himself on this sumptuous set! Wow! Crawford and the gang spill from one stunning Art-Deco room to another. From the wallpaper and murals, to furniture and fittings, this movie is a riot of cool sleek decor. The screwball inter-title lingo alone is worth a gander. The films plot is ultra simple but the picture is worth investing a little time into, especially as it portrays an era when young people first began asserting themselves through fashion. I'll bet not many viewers know where the moniker "FLAPPER" comes from? Well. back in the 1920's, the VERY FIRST fashion "craze" began to spread across the youth of America and soon young ladies actually enjoyed being considered overtly wild, and loved vigorously dancing to the hip new sounds of jumping jazz music. They sported stylish short bobbed hair cuts and donned their brothers galoshes. If you're unfamiliar with galoshes, ..they are rubberized winter boots that usually fit OVER the shoe with a zipper or buckles in front to hold them in place. Well these gals decided to wear their brothers galoshes DELIBERATELY UNZIPPED/ or UNBUCKLED so that when doing the Charleston, (and other aberrant dance steps), their boots would FLAP around! They also wore dropped waist dresses to appear more straight up and down like a male and even bound their breasts to be as flat chested as possible! The whole idea was to shock society and the girls loved scandalizing their parents by trying to look like boys! Must have seemed OUTRAGEOUS at the time given that the Edwardian period was still clinging to the decade? Of course the boys egged on this behaviour and swooned over this "new" girl who seemed far more approachable and therefore touchable! Not surprising. Anyway the fad of flapping boots rather quickly faded away but the "FLAPPER" designation stuck. Our Dancing Daughters is a somewhat forced time capsule of the era but Joan Crawford gives a frantic flapper film performance for the ages.

secondtake Our Dancing Daughters (1928)Listed as a "silent" movie but actually an early synched-score movie with intertitles, and it's a really good one. If you think a dance and music movie can't be silent, check this out. Yes, it's 1928, less than a year after "The Jazz Singer," but we see a full blown plot about infidelity, some pretty terrific photography, and dancing like only 1928 can offer.The star is the ever self-aware Joan Crawford.But there is a whole slew of beautiful "girls" on hand here, daughters all of them, and parents with different kinds of acceptance and worry. All these young women are going out to party hard, and some disguise their intentions and others just let loose. There are lots of scenes for the men in the audience—women dressed in as little as possible for the times (which was quite little, before the 1934 Code) and lots of legs and bright faces and big eyes. That of course is also the downfall of what is a pretty amazing movie, filled with crazy fun dancing. Crawford was famous for her dancing (she won lots of trophies going out to local competitions—and I mean Crawford, not any character). We see it here. She's the wildest of the women (she tells one suitor she is "Diana the Dangerous"), and one parent even bemoans that their sweet girl is cavorting with the likes of such a wild one.But what else does this movie offer? Great question. I think it might be about courtship, or falling into superficial love, or maybe just how to snake a rich due with some lifted gauzy skirts. The men don't have much to offer, or show—they are fully clad in expensive tux-like suits. Alas. It's worth saying, as a photographer, that the visuals are really nice even if the camera is often stuck to a tripod. The use of very shallow focus (allowing for great soft backgrounds behind the sharp foreground figures), and the atmospherics of the place (the rocky coast, or the rainy day) are great. This is no German Expressionist film— nothing that remarkable—but George Barnes does what the film needs really nicely. (He did Hitchcock's "Rebecca," to give you an idea of his talent.) You have to see it with this in mind to get it, and then you'll see what I mean, especially the very very careful shallow focus.In the end this is all about boy meets girl…and the matchmaking and the engagements and the cheating. It's a fast ride, and if not especially deep or complex, it's fun and wonderfully immoral. I'll say, if you don't like silent movies you should skip this, I think. There are too many silent movie qualities here (like some of the exaggerated reactions, and the stiff over-telling of the story) to keep you going unless you are used to it. But there is a lot of the fun 1920s stuff here if you are prepared for the style. I liked it more than I expected, and some of it even made me wistful and appreciative.

calvinnme This film was the first in a trilogy - Our Dancing Daughters/Our Modern Maidens (1929)/Our Blushing Brides (1930). The first two were silent with Vitaphone sound effects, the last was a talkie. Joan Crawford had gotten good reviews and got noticed in her earlier MGM roles from 1925 to 1928, giving good performances even in some of the dog pictures MGM starred her in. This film is what made her a star. She literally steps into the role of Diana and makes it her own. From the first scene she IS this energetic and honest flapper.This movie could just as well be accurately retitled as "The Stupidity of Men, The Suffering of Women". The story centers around three flappers - Beatrice (Dorothy Sebastian), Ann (Anita Page), and Diana (Joan Crawford). Bea is in love with Norman (Nils Asther), but she has a past with other men that she tells Norman about when he proposes. He says it doesn't matter, but then after their marriage Norman insists that the couple live in virtual isolation as Norman is so sure that one of the men in Bea's past is part of "their crowd" and is laughing at him. Diana meets the wealthy and handsome Ben Blaine (Johnny Mack Brown) at a party and they hit it off and fall in love. However, Ben has second thoughts about marrying Diana because she is so upfront about her love of the nightlife. It gets Ben's wheels turning, wondering if Diana admits to A - her love of the nightlife, she has to be guilty of A + B, with B being, of course, wild sexual values. All of this waffling has Ben turning to Ann, a girl whose mother has taught her a maxim to live by - "A rich man wants his money's worth - beauty and purity". Ann is a master saleswoman and sells Ben on her having both virtues, and thus he picks her as a bride. This is a decision that breaks Diana's heart and that Ben comes to regret, because Ann has her own maxim about how to behave once she's married - "Once I'm married, boy am I going to have a fling". That she does.Joan Crawford takes center stage here of course, but I couldn't help be captivated by Anita Page's performance too. At the time this film was made, Page had just turned eighteen, yet she seems to grasp all the hypocrisy and sophistication her role demands. Crawford's career was rightfully long. In contrast, Page's career was woefully cut short by MGM studio politics. A highly recommended film from the late silent era.

d_fienberg It sounds absurd, but I would suggest that Harry Beaumont's 1928 silent film Our Dancing Daughters would make an amusing double bill with Whit Stillman's 1990 film Metropolitan. Both films are rather sophisticated critiques of life among society's elite, the gala balls, the flippant attitudes, and crushing realities of romance, treachery and friendship. Written by three women, Our Dancing Daughters is an interesting example of early female empowerment, teaching women that being true to yourself is better than letting others shape you to their ends.A young Joan Crawford, Anita Page, and Dorothy Sebastian play three wild girls in the early Jazz age who are coming to terms with their place in society and the repercussions of their "flapper" ways. Crawford is "dangerous" Diana, wild, intelligent, and sexual beyond her years. She's unapologetically flirtatious and provocative. Page is Anne, saucy and flirtatious as well. Anne is also poorer than her friends and her mother is counting on her to marry into wealth, urging her to use her virtue as a tool. Sebastian's Beatrice is largely reformed, but she has some kind of past, which bothers her more than it bothers the man who's devoted to her (at first, at least). When Johnny Mack Brown's Ben Blaine (a millionaire and former college football star) enters the picture, he falls for Diana and Anne decides that she will win his heart.In one of her earliest roles, Crawford is amazing. If you've only seen her later performances (like her Oscar winning Mildred Pierce) or Faye Dunaway's impression of her in Mommie Dearest, it's possible to forget just how beautiful and lively she was. She's a marvelously liberated character, the type woman Hollywood frequently featured in the late silent period before forgetting about them for decades of regressive female characters. She is supported by her parents and feels strength in her independence. When she sees herself falling in love, she seems genuinely surprised and when Anne steps in, she seems genuinely heartbroken.Our Dancing Daughters (lensed by George Barnes, who later shot several Hitchcock classics like Rebecca) is a rather joyous production when it isn't commenting on society and gender. The film had a jazzy original score written for it and the film comes alive during the several large party/dance scenes. Showing all of the freedom that late-silent films allowed, the camera is mobile and amidst the dancing. The film also features several moments of synchronized sound, mostly involving applause from the crowd.Our Dancing Daughters is intellectually ahead of its time and it features excellent performances and fine writing. I'm telling you, look at it with Metropolitan. I bet it works well.I'd give this one a solid and positive 7.5 out of 10.