Rarely have I seen a film so thoroughly divide an audience, young girls cheering and swooning (and their young men, if invited, more quietly); older people sitting arms crossed, grumbling, or in a few cases walking out in protest. It’s the latter response the newsprint will immortalize, deriding it for, of all things, being “frequently anything but conservative.” Doubtful few were shocked (though perhaps some will be, outside the city) but you’d think it were a scandal, as the grumblings overheard largely forecasted Mordaunt Hall’s rebuke this morning that “it is quite unnecessary to depict an intoxicated girl, as is done for considerable length in this film.” Imagine! This film — with all its wild dancing and music and romance and yes, intoxication — is just a Friday night at the dance hall for us girls, and we loved it.

To go on to say that that unnecessary depiction of intoxication (forgivably?) “[points to] a moral, for the young woman falls to her death down a flight of stairs” is to completely miss the point — are our heroines priggish and virtuous by those standards? Hardly. (We know the reviewers did not fail to notice Joan Crawford’s flailing, sensuous, and half-clad dancing.) There is no particular moral in so gruesomely dispatching villainess Anita Page who would steal our Joan’s great love (both are delightful in their rôles) — only entertainment and deep satisfaction. Indeed the film relishes more in delivering the comeuppance to Page than likewise her patiently earned prize to Crawford. Does that diminish the impact or worth to an older audience? Then call it instead a cautionary tale to all such vamps (your writer knows many).

Also stunted by conservative notions is the reaction to the sound experiments — here again, less for technical innovation and more for entertainment, but who will listen? None who will look back on another time with blinding fondness and ignore the advantages of living in 1928. No, why have synchronous sound effects when an orchestra might have suggested the same? Why sing when one is heartsick when one could mime it, cheer when one is excited, or shriek when one is stricken? Oh, no, restraint is always in order. We must not try new things as long as movies have got on perfectly well just as they are for this long.

Well, you’re welcome to your stodgy ethos, then; dismiss me as one of a throng, enraptured by shiny curios, consumed with baseless “glee.” Over the course of the film, the girls grow up, face real challenges, cope with disappointment, learn the real reward of getting what one wants in the end. It is not all the frivolity and excess of youth we are supposed by some to begin and end with. True, then, there is little “startlingly novel” in this, but it is at times startlingly lifelike, or so at any rate it seems to this viewer.