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.

MissSimonetta Our Dancing Daughters (1928) is routine melodrama at best and hypocritical tripe at worst.This film is famous for supposedly celebrating the liberated youth of the Roaring Twenties, but if anything, it's espousing a more conservative views in terms of romance and sexuality. Joan Crawford plays a flapper who's really a virginal innocent underneath it all. All shine, no substance.The plot itself is predictable, with little to distinguish it. The way the romantic triangle is resolved at the end is beyond convenient and almost laughable.Joan Crawford is fun and the underrated Anita Page does well with her role, but they cannot save this ship. Cool party scenes do not a great movie make. ODD is a great time capsule, but that is the most I can say.

ConDeuce If you have ever stumbled onto one of Joan Crawford's films from the 1950's such as Queen Bee or Sudden Fear, what you see is the caricature of Crawford that she herself seemed to endorse: tough, ballsy and no nonsense. She's inhumane, unreal and kind of scary. You have to wonder where this woman came from and why she is considered a Star. Check out "Our Dancing Daughters" to find out why. At the very least it showcases an appeal that Crawford had that was completely gone by 50s. In it she plays Diana Medford, a rich society girl who is also a great dancer. The plot is simply about a cat fight between Crawford and Anita Page over the rich Ben Blaine (Johnny Mack Brown). Page disparages Crawford to Ben and ends up married to him but Ben never stops loving Diana. Thanks to a melodramatic ending (complete with a drunken confrontation and a fall down a stairs), Diana and Ben end up together (or so it is inferred). So plot wise, there's not much to it and for a lot of people, the film won't hold much appeal outside of seeing what Crawford was like very early in her career. I'm interested by the films of stars that "made" them famous. Too often the films that stars are remembered for aren't really the ones that show their appeal. Take Clark Gable. He's mostly remembered for "Gone With the Wind" but is he really that good in it? I don't think so. He's much better in "Red Dust" and "It Happened One Night". Those are the films where is appeal is very clear. For a somewhat more contemporary view, take someone like Tom Hanks. What is he known for today? "Forrest Gump"? What made Hanks initially appealing to audiences were his comedies like "The Money Pit" or "Turner & Hooch"" and "Splash". Getting back to Crawford and "Our Dancing Daughters" it's this early appealing side of Crawford that is so interesting. She's very attractive here. Not beautiful but very pretty and that's an important distinction: Crawford connected with her female fans (and supposedly her fan mail greatly increased after this movie) because she was accessible, not an aloof, above it all beauty like Garbo. You genuinely feel for her as the movie progresses and then there's a protectiveness that develops in the viewer. At the end, when she "triumphs", you feel like the order of things has been restored. These feelings are due entirely to Crawford. What is fascinating is how completely opposite her later films are. Some of them are grotesques and others just feel clueless like Crawford was trying anything to bring back success. Crawford was good in "Mildred Pierce" but after that each of her films became more strained and some (like "Torch Song") were truly odd and campy. Crawford's legacy would have been completely different had she simply faded away like so many stars of the late 20s and 30s did. Perhaps most are forgotten (does anyone outside of film buffs really talk about Norma Shearer?) but is being remembered now as a grotesque, campy figure any better than being forgotten?

mukava991 Our Dancing Daughters is a beautiful example of how far the silent cinema had come by 1928, the year it decisively decided to give itself up to talk. The medium had reached a point where the action was silent but synchronized to a score and embellished with occasional sound effects such as knocking on doors, ringing of phones or a spoken word here and there. It was the short-lived pinnacle of a dying art form. These feature films from the late silent period provide valuable insight for composers who are supplying music for previously unscored silents. This solidly constructed and well-shot story follows the trajectories of three young females of differing temperaments living through various stages of being young and wild in the roaring twenties. We have Diana Medford (Joan Crawford), a straightforward, unashamedly pleasure-loving, self-absorbed but basically decent sort who lives to dance and generally party around. Then there is the more serious and experienced Beatrice (Dorothy Sebastian), whose fiancé (Nils Asther) chooses to overlook her wayward past as long as she will marry him and retreat from the party circuit. Finally there is Ann (Anita Page), a coldhearted golddigger who lures the dashing millionaire Ben Blaine (John Mack Brown) away from Diana by pretending to be an innocent maiden simply yearning for marriage and motherhood. At first it seems as if Diana is a hellcat, but her splashy demeanor is merely the honest excess of youth. Life has its knocks prepared for her and she has to take them, which she does nobly and sportingly. Not Ann. She turns to drink, with disastrous results. Each of the three main characters is introduced by shots of their legs and feet: Crawford's slipping into heels to shimmy in front of a mirror; Sebastian's planted firmly next to her fiancé's as they attentively listen to a pre-date lecture by her parents; Page's seen while seated on the floor, removing a pair of ripped silk stockings, preparatory to stealing a pair of from her mother.The soundtrack is made up of a small number of musical compositions from the period, repeated throughout the film. There are up-tempo dance numbers for the party scenes and slow ballads for the one-on-one romantic clinches. The photography is uniformly beautiful with generous use of medium close-ups, all against the backdrop of sumptuous sets designed by Cedric Gibbons. Great looking costumes too.Crawford and Page are both stunning embodiments of the light and dark sides of "the flapper." Sebastian's role is less flashy. None of the performances is dated.Most documentaries that deal at any length with "roaring twenties," the Great Depression or the Golden Age of Hollywood inevitably include a bit from this film, usually the party where balloons fill the air as Crawford dances exuberantly on a table top.