Let’s close this autumnal week with some madcap 1920s dancing featuring Joan Crawford. Above and below I’ve posted a few minutes from ‘Our Dancing Daughters’, the 1928 silent vehicle that officially launched Crawford’s career and world wide fame. Actually, calling the film ‘silent’ isn’t quite accurate as it was released with a synchronized musical score with sound effects, though no audible dialogue. (This was one of several dip-the-toe-in-talkies-water experiments the studios were utilizing during the transition into the full talking picture). The above clip is the film’s opening few minutes and is a veritable feast of Art Deco design, dress, attitude and dance. I wouldn’t call Crawford’s dance number a Charleston exactly, but its mad improvisatory energy captures the era’s spirit just as well as that famed dance. Below is a mash-up of scenes featuring Crawford and others dancing the then-new ‘Fox Trot’, a very loosely defined much more polite dance of the era. (Soon ‘Fox-Trot’ started appearing on sheet music and record labels with an increasingly vague definition referring to tempo). The club setting of the below clip–featuring one of the most massive staircases in cinema history–is truly a remarkable bit of production design and must have filled the generous MGM sound stage to its breaking point. Crawford’s portrayal of the ultimate flapper–the ferociously free madly-dancing, Prohibition-era, booze-swilling, stage-diving “Dangerous” Diana Medford–provoked this tribute from the official scribe of the era F. Scott Fitzgerald:

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.