Our Dancing Daughters (1928)

(On Cable TV, January 2022) While the traditional definition of Pre-Code cinema usually starts with the beginning of sound cinema, it’s obvious that it didn’t spring from nothing—the trends were already there, the morals already loosened by the swinging 1920s, the appetite for frankly portraying the world already whetted. While Our Dancing Daughters is a silent film at the very end of that era, its frank subject matter revolves around a young woman (Joan Crawford, in a star-making turn) playing with codes of what’s a good or bad woman at a time where unprecedented freedom was available. The story, with its numerous supporting characters, eventually turns to romance which resolves with a rather hilarious punishing-the-bad-girl-by-throwing-her-down-the-stairs ending. Our Dancing Daughters is sometimes tedious to get through given the low narrative density of silent cinema, but it’s not uninteresting as a Pre-Pre-Code piece of cinema. Crawford here shows the qualities that made her a star, and exemplifies the flapper archetypes that silent cinema just managed to catch at the right time. Older cinema usually survives when it has something to say or illustrate, and there’s a good case to be made for Our Dancing Daughters as a still-interesting portrayal of another era.