Authors: Donald Spoto
By the time
Paid
was released—oddly, during Christmas week 1930— Joan had also completed work on
Dance, Fools, Dance,
a far more violent movie than its irrelevant title suggests. Produced in November and December at a cost of $289,000, the immediate box office receipts were over $900,000. (No wonder that Joan was Mayer’s house special: her pictures essentially paid for the more expensive Garbo and Shearer productions.) Directed by Harry Beaumont, who had worked on four Crawford pictures and would direct two more,
Dance, Fools, Dance
is an important film from several viewpoints and warrants detailed consideration—not least because it was the first of eight films in which Joan’s costar was Clark Gable.
Gable had appeared in seventeen movies, mostly as an uncredited extra or in minor parts. But his career now seemed stalled and his prospects hindered by virtual anonymity, and roles in three short-lived Broadway plays from 1928 to early 1930 did not help. At twenty-nine, he had just been divorced from his first wife; he would soon marry the second of five, this one the wealthy daughter of a Texas millionaire. In
Dance, Fools, Dance,
Gable at last landed a significant supporting role, while Joan had sole billing above the title.
She also contributed to the development of the story and final screenplay. Writer Aurania Rouverol had no trouble with the two opening sequences. But on the production’s rushed schedule, she found it impossible to transform herown story into a movie, and to write credible and engaging dialogue. She needed help, and Joan—with more than thirty movies behind her—was willing and able. In fact the script of
Dance, Fools, Dance
owes almost everything to her.
THE MOVIE OPENS ON
a private pleasure schooner, and at once Joan, as the spoiled socialite Bonnie Jordan, sings and dances for a full four minutes (“Oh, he is a gay caballero …”). Surrounded by her rich young friends, she then whines, “If something doesn’t happen soon, I’ll die.” Well, she need not go that far: a young man calls out, “All right, everybody—stand by, and off with your clothes.” That’s the cue for dozens of pleasure-seekers to strip to their underwear and dive into the water. Later, Bonnie’s equally rich boyfriend, Bob (Lester Vail), goes to her cabin and proposes marriage, but she is diffident: “I believe in trying love out—on approval.” The moonlight swim sequence and this kind of dialogue could never occur in a Hollywood movie four years later, when the stringencies of the Production Code and its concomitant censorship went into effect.
The holidaymakers return home to their mansions and their waiting servants in Chicago. It’s the autumn of 1929, and Bonnie and her brother, Roddy (William Bakewell), are idle and rich—infallible signs of this are her chainsmoking and his bootleg whiskey, even in the era of Prohibition. Moments later, their fabulously wealthy father, on whom they depend for everything, drops down dead after learning that the stock market collapse has wiped him out. Bonnie and Roddy are now completely penniless, and their lawyer tells them they will survive only by going out and getting jobs. Boyfriend Bob enters to offer his condolences when he learns of Bonnie’s financial predicament, and he offers “to do the right thing"—which means, of course, that he will marry her because they have been lovers.
But Bonnie wants her independence, and she is willing to face the world and find work: “I’m going out to get myself a man-sized job. I’m not afraid! You’d be surprised what she can earn when a young girl sets her mind to it.” Roddy, on the other hand, is a shiftless idler for whom
work
is only afour-letter word; he prefers to start drinking at breakfast and remains in an alcoholic haze throughout the day and evening. It would be fine with him if Bonnie became the full-time breadwinner.
Dirt-poor but plucky and resourceful, she lands a job as a newspaper reporter and is soon appreciated for her hard work and good humor. “You don’t know the thrill of making it on your own,” she tells her brother in the cramped flat they now share, “and I don’t mean by trading on your name and running to parties all the time.”
“I’m on the verge of big money,” Roddy replies, “and I’ll soon have you running around with the old crowd again.” He fails to add that his money comes from bootleg whiskey, and that he will soon be linked to a notorious gang of crooks. At this point, Joan’s hand in the development of the script, and specifically of Roddy’s character, is clear: Roddy became only a slightly fictionalized version of Joan’s own brother, Hal, to whom William Bakewell bears a striking physical resemblance.
“Run around with the old crowd?” Bonnie asks. “I’m not sure I want to run around with the old crowd again.”
“Why not?”
At this point, Bonnie answers for herself—and for Joan Crawford: “I used to think anything I did was all right. I was Bonnie Jordan
—in society.
Society! What is it but a lot of people who are for you when you’re on the up and up, but what would one of them do for you when it came to a showdown? Nothing! It isn’t
who
you are, Roddy, but
what
you are that counts!”
Unknown to Bonnie, Roddy now goes off to make his fortune with a gang of criminals headed by the notorious Jake Luva (Gable, without a mustache), who uses his fancy nightclub as a front. Roddy is accepted into Jake’s mob because of his social connections and does very well selling liquor illegally. At the same time, Bonnie is assigned to cover the rackets in a series of stories for the newspaper.
The second act of the movie now begins, as Jake’s cronies murder members of a rival gang. “Seven mowed down with machine guns in a garage!” cries the paper’s editor—an obvious reference to the real-life Saint Valentine’s Day massacre the previous year, when seven men were gunned down in a Chicago garage. This scene at the news headquarters is clearly critical of the media frenzy to get big stories with pictures—the more violence and blood, the better for selling daily papers.
Roddy is in shock: he drove the getaway car for the Luva gang and is sickened that his job has led to murder. He then talks too much with a visitor to Jake’s club, unaware that the man is none other than a reporter, Bert (Cliff Edwards), Bonnie’s colleague at the newspaper. Luva orders Roddy to kill the reporter—which he does in order to save himself.
The police are after Bert’s killer, but the newspaper wants to track him down first: “Nobody knows the Jordan girl is working on our paper—and they’ll never suspect a girl!” says the editor, sending Bonnie to infiltrate the mob and smoke out the killer. And so Bonnie goes undercover, assumes a false name and becomes a dancer at Luva’s club.
But Jake falls for Bonnie. “You’re going to have a little supper with me tonight—up in my room,” he whispers to her seductively as they dance. “We’ve got to get better acquainted.”
“I’d love it—I’ll go and dress now,” she replies, as both of them smile knowingly.
“Don’t be too long,” he says—and then Gable bluntly draws Crawford toward him, hip-to-hip, groin-to-groin. She was obviously not expecting this bold sexual advance, for she tries to conceal a grin of surprise and mild shock—and glances toward the director and cameraman, expecting to hear “Cut!” But the film kept rolling.
When Bob recognizes her at the club, Bonnie tries to throw him off the track: “I’m just a cheap little dancer in a nightclub.” He departs, and when the phone rings in Jake’s private apartment, Bonnie answers and recognizes Roddy’s voice. What can she do about him, now that she knows her brother killed Bert? She sneaks away from Jake and confronts Roddy, who admits his crimes.
The third act begins as Jake and his gang discover the truth about Bonnie and threaten to kill her and her brother. There’s a shoot-out that leaves Jake and his henchmen dead and Roddy dying in his sister’s arms as she chokes back hersobs. She then calls the newspaper and reveals the truth. At the end, Bonnie quits her job and welcomes back boyfriend Bob, with whom she dashes away.
Dance, Fools, Dance
remains one of the best early sound movies made in Hollywood before Motion Picture Code censors took out their pencils and scissors. Lacking the extreme ugliness of the Warner cycle of crime thrillers like
The Public Enemy
and
Little Caesar,
it was crisply directed, convincingly designed, economically paced and expertly acted—and it has lost little of its impact with the passing of time.
Joan had mastered the full range of emotions for a character that is variously an idle socialite, a career woman and a betrayed sister, and her appearance and performance indicated that she was a modern American woman who could endure and overcome crisis after crisis. There was good reason, after
Dance, Fools, Dance
was released in February 1930, for the American public to vote her its most popular actress that year, and she remained in the top ten annually until 1936.
Her glow of sexual availability and her neatly tailored wardrobe do not isolate Joan as Bonnie from the “ordinariness” of Depression-era America—and that was the difference between Crawford and Garbo, and between Crawford and Shearer. Somehow these other women seemed to be in a world apart, glamorous and remote no matter what their roles. Joan, on the other hand, was working from the interior, from her own experience, and here she had a character she understood.
At that time, there was no “Method” style of drama, nor was there any mainstream or prevalent school of acting with exercises on which she might have drawn. Without coaches or classes, Joan simply went from project to project, doing the truth of things rather than analyzing her way through them. At the age of twenty-four, she already knew a great deal about raw life—and about refined life, too. With experience and feelings, however formative, jumbled and conflicted, she somehow realized that she could use just about everything and everyone to improve her talents, and that her talents might become art. Nothing was more important to her than her career, and her will to maintain it would in time become both her blessing and her curse.
1
For many years, if one believed the American press, spacious houses provided separate bedrooms for husband and wife, even if the couple (occasionally or always) used only one. For publication, however, spouses always had to appear as if they were roommates, chastely separated by walls.
2
For a fascinating essay about the abandonment of Great Day, see www.legendaryjoancrawford.com/greatday/html.
CHAPTER FIVE
Virtuous Vices
| 1931–1932 |
T
HERE WAS SOMETHING
desperate about the production of
Laughing Sinners
from day one. At times it seemed to the cast that it was almost cursed, which was a very strange feeling to have when the movie was supposed to celebrate good old-fashioned American religious frenzy.
Metro had purchased movie rights to Kenyon Nicholson’s play
Torch Song,
which had nothing to do with the 1953 Crawford picture with the same title. It had been a failure on Broadway, but the studio needed product, and so
Torch Song
was exported to Hollywood and became Joan’s next assignment; filming began in early February 1931. Her costar, as the man who saves a girl thrown away by a traveling salesman, was again John Mack Brown.
The picture began as
Torch Song
but was soon rechristened
Complete Surrender,
which implied something both criminal and erotic (or at least romantic). But the title was the least of their problems, for things began badly and turned even worse. During the first week of filming, Joan was singing “Brighten the Corner Where You Are,” in a scene designed to provide moral uplift, when suddenly, a thirty-nine-year-old supporting actor named Norman Phillips collapsed at her feet and was pronounced dead. After a moment of silence and the removal of the body, the show went on. But halfway through production, Mayer and his colleagues realized that they had a major failure on their corporate hands. The story was trite and humorless; Joan’s dyed blond hair was badly lighted in almost every sequence; the sound was muddy; and Brown’s scenes with Joan looked like
tableaux vivants.
Brown was an attractive and cooperative fellow, but unfortunately he was not a gifted actor, and, except when cast in cowboy roles (which he loved), he seemed like a very handsome cigar-store Indian.
Joan’s previous movie had just been released nationwide, and distributors now had firm booking dates for her next. What to do? Mayer insisted that Brown would have to go, and Joan hastened to the rescue: she would be willing to work overtime and weekends with a replacement—so why not Clark Gable, whom audiences and critics liked in
Dance, Fools, Dance?
Rearrangements were made in record time, and the movie’s title was changed again, to
Laughing Sinners.
But nothing helped. The story and screenplay were still creaky to the point of collapse; Joan’s hair was blond in some scenes and dark brown in others; plausible emotions were absent, and facile sentimentality abounded; and poor Gable, still far from his tenure as the confident, controlling romantic hero of his later movies, was literally unbelievable as the earnest savior of woebegone women. “He seems slightly puzzled to find himself banging a Salvation Army drum,” as
Time
put it.
Only Joan triumphed. “Miss Crawford has seldom looked so radiantly alive and beautiful,” wrote Andre Sennwald in the
New York Times,
adding that she had replaced the overly intense and self-conscious quality of some earlier performances with “a vibrant and breath-catching spirit.” Neil Hamilton, in the role of the unctuous traveling salesman who tosses her aside in favor of the boss’s daughter, explained Joan’s success despite the failure of
Laughing Sinners:
“Regardless of the script, she invested everyone else in the picture with that same sense of responsibility—to make a film that was as good as it could possibly be. I have never known anyone who works so hard on a performance, to bring it up to its highest level, or who was more conscientious about heracting. It wasn’t just about stardom with Joan—she wanted to be good, she wanted the picture to be good, and she wanted you to be good, too.”