Our Modern Maidens
Directed by Jack Conway
Written by Josephine Lovett, Marian Ainslee, and Ruth Cummings
1929/US
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental
Billie Brown: All together, children… what are *our* thoughts on leaving school?
The Girls: Men! Men! Men! Men! MEN!
Jazz age love quadrangle could have been better if someone had asked Joan Crawford to rein her performance in a little.
Billie Brown (Crawford) is the daughter of an immensely wealthy man. As the film begins, she becomes engaged to Gil Jordan (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.)., an ambitious diplomat. They decide to keep the engagement secret.
Billie runs into hunky tycoon Glenn Abbott (Rod La Roque) on a train and decides to invite him to a huge house party she is hosting. She wants to use her feminine wiles to get Glenn to use his influence to get Gil an assignment in Paris. The party is wild, to say the least, complete with entertainment including imitations of famous actors by Gil and a bizarre interpretive dance by Billie.
Billie has invited her beautiful romance-novel-reading friend Kentucky (Anita Page) to live with her for the summer. Kentucky falls madly in love with Gil and he doesn’t exactly object to her attentions. In the meantime, Billie is going out with Glenn and he falls in love with her. When her engagement to Gil is revealed, he is furious. The bride, the groom, and the best friend are all miserable on the wedding day.
Joan Crawford is not a great favorite of mine and she was much too much in this movie. She prances around like a flirtatious and precocious child. Her dance solo must be seen to be believed. Everybody else was good and the film has MGM glamor written all over it.
This was Crawford’s last silent movie. She met Douglas Fairbanks Jr making this film and their real life wedding was highly publicized to promote the picture.
