Harry Beaumont | Our Dancing Daughters / 1928

a pretense

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marian Ainslee and Ruth Cummings (screenplay, based on a story and scenario by Josephine Lovett), Harry Beaumont (director) Our Dancing Daughters / 1928

 

Harry Beaumont’s 1928 film, Our Dancing Daughters, pretends to be a lot of things it isn’t and is perhaps better off for the confusions. First the silent film “pretends” to be a talkie. As Matt Bailey writes in “The Silence After Sound: Hollywood’s Last Silent Movies”: “in a year in which the hottest trend of all was the talking picture, Our Dancing Daughters is mute. It is, however, far from silent, because it is one of a handful of strange hybrids that lived for just a few years: it is a sonorized film. While filmed as a silent picture, a soundtrack of music and effects was attached to the prints, allowing for popular songs and jazz riffs, crowd noise and car horns, and even a single line of dialogue (“Come on, Miss Diana! Show us your stuff!) all to be synchronized with the action of the film.”

     As Bailey points out, the myth that suddenly after The Jazz Singer of October 6, 1927, audiences would have nothing to do any longer with silent films, given the fact is that Our Dancing Daughters was a great success, and that it was one of many such films with mixes of various sound recordings made until studios had been able to purchase “sound recording and duplication equipment and soundproofed their studios, and that movie theater owners required just as much time to equip their facilities for sound playback” proves to be just that: a nice film textbook factiod that proves to be untrue. 

      Secondly, the film was widely advertised to be, as the promotional campaign broadcast, “an up-to-the-minute narrative of our pleasure-mad generation.” Joan Crawford, playing in her first major role as Diana “Di” Medford, better known to her set as “Diana the Dangerous,” plays a wild flapper with bobbed hair and the thinnest of eyelashes, while “showing a whole lot of skin”—at one point ripping off half her dress to perform a truly ferocious version of a Charleston for her crowd. Her performance led writer F. Scott Fitzgerald to pen the unforgettable description of both a flapper and Crawford: “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.”

     Some venues, and even state censor boards banned the film primarily on account of her performance. The mayor of Lynn, Massachusetts, as Bailey points out, “made his decision solely on the advertising for the film,” noting “The cuts advertising this show are indecent, immoral, and lascivious, and it is this character of entertainment that lowers to the very depths the movie picture shows.” Others followed suite, an editorial in the Newberry, South Carolina Observer pontificating that the film was “almost absolutely devoid of intellectual quality” and was made by “exploiters of the sheerest animalism of sex.”

     Ironically, the Crawford character Diana is, at heart, a good girl whose attentions to the male lead, the newly minted millionaire Ben Blaine (John Mack Brown) are completely honest and quite innocent, counterposed to the pretending virtuous Ann “Annikins” (Anita Page), who declares she doesn’t drink, while keeping a flask near her at all times, and repeats several times, “I’m not that kind of girl,” presumably in comparison with the more openly flirtatious Diana, while actually being, as one critic put it, “a gold digging floozy masquerading as an ingénue.” In fact, the good girl, given her own restrictions loses her dumb man, who’s sold on the imitation goody two-shoes whom the moment she snares him begins buying diamond bracelets for every month of her “servitude” and quickly acquires a not-so-secret lover, Freddie (Edward J. Nugent).

     Even Diana’s kind and gentle friend, Beatrice “Bea” (Dorothy Sebastian), who admits to a torrid past (she evidently has had sex with one of her set previous to marriage) catches a wealthy beau in Norman (Nils Asther).

     Confused about how things have turned out, Diana decides she should take a world voyage to think it over why the liars and loose girls get the best men when she has failed.

      Thirdly, despite its Art Deco sets and costumes, its intimations of the rich and famous, Our Dancing Daughters is really a rather old-fashioned melodrama, with the real love displayed mostly between friends Bea and Diana, about whom LGBTQ commentator Derek W. Le Beau observes: 

 

“The two of them are inseparable and have a number of intimate moments together in the film; they kiss on the lips, joke that they’re a couple, and find each other in countless intimate situations sharing intense eye contact – and sometimes even a bed. There’s a lot of subtext in this one.”

      While they do kiss often and even sleep in the same room (in different beds), I’d argue that these two figures are less representations of Sapphic love than they are merely performing the standard Victorian role of close female friends, permitted by the society in general and even Bea’s otherwise fussy husband Norman who demands she have nothing to do with her former set, to engage in an openly “loving” relationship that would certainly not be permitted for males of the same age.

      The gayer sexual implications of this film exist among the male trio of Diana and Bea’s former friends. Early in the film Ben kisses Diana goodnight quite passionately, so intensely in the fact that she pulls away, responding “What a service station you turned out to be!” In the background two of these men play out a similar kiss in imitation of Diana and Ben.

      Later in the film when Diana is visiting Bea at her new home with Norman, the male trio of Freddie and his two friends suddenly appear again as the two women are out for a walk. They suggest that they’ll stop by for visit, but Bea tries to make clear that they not invited (“I’m sorry, but our house isn’t quite ready for guests?”) Nonetheless, to Norman’s strongly disapproving glances—surely based on the fact that he believes one of these young men may have been the one who deflowered his wife—they pop in for visit, also revealing to her husband that Bea has lied about seeing any members of old crowd. Together they mock Ben and Ann’s marriage quoting from a letter “Annikins” has mailed them talking about how dull she finds Ben for admiring the moonlight and sunrise.

      This trio of awfully cute boys don’t really do anything too outrageous other than backing up Freddie’s toast “To the husbands of the women we love;” but it’s enough to raise Norman’s wrath as he sends them packing. They are simply what you might describe as male gadflies, boys as interested in one another as they are in the women they pretend to court. Their relationship is quite evidently a sort of late adolescent fraternity or locker room fascination with the male homoeroticism that they provide one another. Freddie and the other two may even have occasional sex with women—although there is no evidence of it in this film—but their true joy, it is apparent, is in their male comradery.

      Later on, of course, we perceive Freddie to be Ann’s secret “lover,” although there is no evidence that their relationship consists of anything other than heavy flirtation, and indeed, when Ann shows up late in the film to Diana’s farewell party drunk, Freddie quickly jumps ship, escaping the house so as not to have to witness Ann’s public declaration that she believes her husband is secretly having an affair with Diana.

      In fact, Ben has just admitted to Diana that he still loves her and that he has made a terrible mistake in marrying Ann. But this is the first the two have encountered each other, and even then, although they declare their love for one another, Diana leaves on her voyage without seeing Ben again.

      Finally, despite the claim of Our Dancing Daughters presenting an up-to-date picture of youth, the film closes as an old-fashioned revenge drama as Ben and his friends attempt to take the now totally plastered Ann home. She stands at the top of staircase mocking the cleaning woman below for not having beautiful daughters like herself who might save them from working. Refusing the help of others, she begins like Norma Desmond to descend the staircase, tripping and falling to her death, permitting Ben and Diana to reunite upon return from overseas two years later.

      As a final note, I’ll add that I cannot comprehend what Diana truly sees in the boring dunce Ben or what Bea finds so wonderful about a husband who is constantly forgiving her for having had pre-marital sex. Actually, they should turn their intense female friendship into something a little more adventuresome. But as I begin this essay saying, this film pretends to be a lot of things it isn’t, and such behavior is not permitted for “our dancing daughters.”

 

Los Angeles, September 12, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).