In this racy MGM pre-Code, the stock market crash dumps society playgirl Joan Crawford into the working class. She toils at a newspaper but her brother consorts with bootleggers — and both of them are targeted by gangster Clark Gable. Sparks fly in Crawford & Gable’s first screen teaming, which has a bit of everything — a gangland rubout or two, glamorous Depression details, and Woo-Hoo naughtiness. Favorite Cliff Edwards co-stars. The restoration is excellent and the disc comes with a good TV show about MGM’s history.

Dance, Fools, Dance
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1931 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 81 min. / Available at MovieZyng / Street Date October 31, 2023 / 21.99
Starring: Joan Crawford, Lester Vail, Cliff Edwards, William Bakewell, William Holden, Clark Gable, Earle Foxe, Joan Marsh, Russell Hopton.
Cinematography: Charles Rosher
Art Director: Cedric Gibbons
Costume Designer: Adrian
Film Editor: George Hively
Story and Dialogue by Aurania Rouverol
No producer credited
Directed by Harry Beaumont

The Warner Archive has been digging into the 1930s lately, pre-Code and ‘post, and coming up with some real gems — The Devil-Doll,  The Broadway Melody,  Westward the Women — plus a continuing series of Greta Garbo pictures. The label appears to be moving on to MGMs’ Tarzan films and Warners’ biopics with Paul Muni. And we’ve just been told that the great gangster picture The Roaring Twenties is on its way. Fans of these pictures need to know that these digitally remastered Blu-rays can seem a new experience, especially with films that haven’t been touched in decades.

A few months back the WAC continued its Joan Crawford remastering program with her breakthrough silent picture Our Dancing Daughters. The effort continued unofficially on license to Criterion, with Crawford’s impressive performance in Tod Browning’s silent horror picture The Unknown. This writer spent months editing a career docu on Joan Crawford, and got a close-up look at the development of her career, so it’s good to see another of her early starring vehicles.

Dance, Fools, Dance is five or six features into Ms. Crawford’s talkie career. It’s her third year as a top MGM star, and she appears to have welcomed the idea of headlining a show with a gangster background. Although some sources call Joan as a ‘collaborating writer’ on this one, the only credited screenwriter is Aurania Rouverol.  ^*  A possible Crawford writing contribution makes sense — her character makes all of her own decisions, even when to have premarital sex.

Released in 1931, the show carries a 1930 copyright. It’s a screenwriter’s genre pastiche — an ‘innocent girl makes good’ melodrama and some big-city newspaper business plugged into a brisk bootlegging tale. The actual St. Valentine’s Day Massacre was only a year old during filming . . . and gangland rub-outs were already hot pre-Code subject matter.

The show slips between genres rather well, as if concocted by that fictional script doctor genius Cosmo Brown. We start with a scandalous flapper-era wild party on the yacht of millionaire Stanley Jordan (not that William Holden). His wild daughter Bonnie (Joan Crawford) and her spoiled friends are boozing it up and making out on the aft deck; Bonne dances with her beau Bob Townsend (Lester Vail). Then all strip down to their underwear for a midnight swim.  ↖  After Bonnie declares her belief in ‘trying love out on approval,’ it is implied indicated that she and Bob share a bed . . . in between a fade-out, fade-in, of course.

But Bonnie soon learns that such pampered decadence is not a birthright. Her father dies in reaction to the stock market crash, which wipes out the Jordan finances. Bonnie and her spoiled and listless brother Rodney (William Bakewell) will lose everything: the yacht, the servants, the mansion. Bonnie’s false friends turn tail when she’s no longer one of them. Blonde party girl Sylvia (Joan Marsh) looks forward to seeing the popular Bonnie humiliated. Bob offers to marry Bonnie, but only as a gentlemanly obligation. Bonnie hides her anger and turns him down.

Deciding to be independent, Bonnie uses family connections (that’s MGM’s idea of independence) to secure a job as a cub reporter on a big newspaper. She’s at first treated as a joke but shows her commitment to the job, and to a new pal, the experienced crime reporter Bert Scranton (favorite Cliff Edwards).

Bonnie has no idea that her brother Rodney is taking the easy way out. He routinely bought liquor for the society parties, mostly quality goods smuggled from Canada. Now he’s recruited to peddle booze to his friends. Pretending to ‘be in business,’ Rodney is instead entrapped by the murderous gang of the violent, unpredictable Jake Luva (Clark Gable). The gangland story goes into high gear when Luva’s hoods murder several members of a rival gang in one bloody massacre. Rodney is tricked into driving the getaway car.

Crime reporter Bert snoops around Jake Luva’s speakeasy. Discovering that the nervous Rodney didn’t stay mum about the massacre, Luva assigns him to follow Bert to the subway entrance and shoot him dead. In response, Bonnie’s editors enlist Bonnie as a seductive undercover agent. She performs at Luva’s club and is soon invited to a swank private dinner in the gangster’s apartment. Bonnie keeps her wits about her . . . until she discovers that her own brother played a role in the massacre.

Although these kinds of plot twists were likely Old News a hundred years earlier, the plot turns in Dance Fools feel like new inventions. The economical storyline hides three or four potent secrets and hidden identities btween just a few relevant characters. The plot mechanics would function even if the characterizations were dull.

Is director Harry Beaumont (The Broadway Melody) considered much of a hand with actors?  The cast comes across unevenly. The most assured player is star Cliff Edwards in an (unexpected?) straight dramatic role, without his ukelele or wisecracks.  ←  Edwards’ downplays his eccentric persona, as Bonnie’s professional pal who becomes a gang victim.  ^**   But many may recognize his famous, highly sentimental Jiminy Cricket singing voice.

Neither of the younger male leads has much to offer. William Bakewell is painfully thin in the pivotal role of Rodney Jordan, the spoiled heir who gets caught up with the mob. We see no evidence that the hardened criminals would have anything to do with him. As Bonnie’s boyfriend & lover, Lester Vail could have used better direction — his gesture of marriage is weakly played, so much that we can’t tell if Bob is sincerely stupid, or just shallow.

That leaves Joan Crawford to carry the scenes with Bonnie’s brother and boyfriend. She plays these aggressively, with the same overstated gestures she used in her silent pictures. Bonnie reacts sharply to relevant dialogue, sometimes bugging her eyes out. Ms. Crawford had long before learned that she had to fight to keep afloat at MGM, and needed every film to make an impact. Hence the racy swimming scene and the inference of pre-marital sex, plus her solo dance showcase opportunities. Some of her dance moves look a tad awkward now, as if she was still using her stage moves from 1925. But when the dancing is elegant, we get a hint of the Joan to come, the ultra-glamorous vision we see in the George Hurrell portraits.

Where the movie takes off is the chemistry between Joan Crawford and Clark Gable. It’s the first of their numerous films together, and sparks do fly. Crawford’s acting is much improved in every scene with Gable: more natural, less mannered. The romantic chemistry here is very real. Gable only received 6th billing, and at this time was just finding his own screen image. His Jake Luva makes a strong entrance, staring down a gang advisor. Jake blows smoke in the face of his steady moll (Natalie Moorehead of The Thin Man), letting us know he’s a cruel lover. The midnight ‘dinner in the private apartment’ seduction scene may be a cliché, but Gable and Crawford give it unexpected oomph.

Otherwise we know we’re in an efficiently-constructed thriller, streamlined to be over and done in less than 90 minutes. The playgirl turns out to be a woman of character, eager to do good in a serious job. The Old Boys club at the newspaper accepts her (a stretch) and then sends her out on a risky undercover mission (absurd). Luva’s tough gangsters unwisely invite the immature outsider Rodney into their inner circle of killings. Letting the rich kid shoot the reporter is a good idea, but only if you kill him at the same time. The final shoot-out works well enough, eliminating all the bad guys plus allowing Rodney to redeem himself. The only really painful moment is the fade-out, where all of Bonnie’s problems are vanquished with a marriage proposal. Ain’t life swell?

What we remember most is Clark Gable’s impact — not all of his pre-Code appearances are as impressive. The Crawford-Gable combo generates a heat not found with MGM’s Norma Shearer — whose own 1931 pairing with Gable now seems laughable. A lot was stacked against Joan at MGM, what with being unable to compete with the sex goddess Jean Harlow, or the fact that Norma Shearer was married to the studio’s head of production. There was nothing mysterious about Crawford and Shearer’s fang-and-claw rivalry, which encouraged Joan to grow a hard shell and adopt a take-no-prisoners approach to career survival. Dance, Fools, Dance may have shown Crawford the way forward — through glamorous pairings with Clark Gable.

The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of Dance, Fools, Dance is a good picture made more entertaining by a polished new digital restoration, said to be sourced from original nitrate materials. Before recently we didn’t expect this kind of quality from a show filmed in 1930. The clean, stable images are matched by a flawless, robust audio track. The full-on introduction of sound was only a year or so old, but the studio technicians had already solved the problems of hidden microphones and audio tracks that couldn’t be mixed. In just a year or so the MGM house style would double-down on high-gloss glamour, with art deco sets and close-up photography to make Harlow and Crawford into glittering godesses. With gowns by Adrian Joan looks fine here, even if she’d soon reinvent her screen image.

The Warner Archive continues to put more effort into their extras. The two Merrie Melodies short subjects Smile, Darn Ya, Smile and One More Time star the Micky Mouse rip-off character ‘Foxy.’  Both cartoons employ ‘Toontown’ animation cycles, that make characters and even inanimate obects ‘bop’ to the musical beat.

A nice surprise is the longform MGM TV documentary Hollywood The Dream Factory, the 1972 production narrated by Dick Cavett. Starting with rather depressing images of MGM’s auction and the demolition of some of the MGM back lot, it’s a good compilation of studio history, packed with film clips. Both the TV docu and the cartoons are confirmed as HD remasters. It looks as if many of The Dream Factory’s film clips have been replaced with new digital versions — montages with busy opticals are unchanged, but scenes from individual movies appear improved.

^*   Aurania Rouverol was a busy writer, but in terms of film work her career really begins and ends with a sale she made to MGM for Skidding, a book about the travails of a teenaged boy in an average American family, one where the father is a respected judge. The book became the first of the unending Andy Hardy film series that Louis B. Mayer promoted as his contribution to middle American values. Rouverol contributed screenwriting only to the first, but wisely had a contract that paid well for the use of the characters in the many sequels. Aurania Rouverol may now be best known as a footnote on discussions of her daughter. Jean Rouverol was an actress turned accomplished screenwriter, whose career story became entangled with that of her writer husband Hugo Butler, a major name in the blacklist years.
^*   The killing of a newspaper reporter is also taken from real life, from a real reporter murdered by a Chicago mob in June of 1930. It was later determined that the reporter wasn’t as innocent a victim as initially believed.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Dance, Fools, Dance
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
TV documentary Hollywood the Dream Factory
Merrie Melody Cartoons One More Time and Smile, Darn Ya, Smile.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: November 25, 2023
(7032danc)

Final product for this review was provided free by The Warner Archive Collection.

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