Our Dancing Daughters (1928)
The 1928 (partially) silent film OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS features two quick kisses, and a surprising amount of queer-coding, between Joan Crawford and Dorothy Sebastian’s characters. Their kisses may seem like nothing by today’s standards, but same-sex kisses like this were rarely seen on screen in American films after the full implementation of the Hays Code in 1934.
OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS
1928 | USA
Director: Harry Beaumont
Screenplay: Marian Ainslee & Ruth Cummings
Starring: Joan Crawford, John Mack Brown, Nils Asther, Dorothy Sebastian and Anita Page
OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS follows a wealthy party girl, Diana Medford, as she decides to slow her ‘wild’ lifestyle down and start pursuing a man for marriage. Her rival, another wealthy woman named Ann (Anita Page), is also interested in the same fellow and tricks him into marrying her.
Diana has her ‘good friend’ Bea comfort her after she hears news of the marriage. 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. After Bea has married, Diana mourns her inability to connect with a man and has a conversation with her parents about why she is different than her other female friends.
Offscreen, much like her character in the film, Crawford had built a reputation on her Hollywood lifestyle of dancing and partying. She is also said to have been bisexual, a detail that mirrors the film’s subtext surrounding Diana. Of the character, Crawford stated:
“It was a way of life I knew. I was the flapper, wild on the surface … a girl drunk on her own youth and vitality.”
Perhaps her connection with Diana is what helped create such a magnetic onscreen performance. Whatever the reason, moviegoers were certainly drawn to it — Our Dancing Daughters was the film that truly grabbed the public’s attention and made Crawford a star.
You can find OUR DANCING DAUGHTERS streaming for rent/purchase on YouTube and also available on DVD.
