Looking through the movies on my DVR, and seeing that the 1930s have been slightly overlooked in the last few weeks of posts, I decided to watch Our Blushing Brides, an early Joan Crawford talkie.
If the title sounds familiar, it's because the movie is the third in a sort of unofficial trilogy with two silents also starring Crawford (and, in fact, a couple of the other female stars), Our Dancing Daughters and Our Modern Maidens. I know I've seen at least one, if not both, of those, but don't quite remember them well enough to do a full post on; in any case the women don't actually play the same characters in the three movies. Here, Crawford stars as Jerry, working in a New York department store together with her friends Connie (Anita Page) and Frankie (Dorothy Sebastian). The three also share an apartment in order to cut down on costs.
All three are single working girls, but this being 1930, it's the era when most women would be expected to stop doing work out in the wider world certainly once they became mothers, and often simply once they got married. Connie and Frankie seem to be OK doing what it takes to snag a richer man so they can live a life of more leisure, while Jerry wants virtue and not a man pushing her to be a trophy wife. Meanwhile, she's already getting approached at the department store by co-worker Joe Munsey (Edward Brophy) in a recurring comic sub-plot. This being 1930, many screen personas of actors in the sound era had not yet been set, but even in 1930, the idea of Edward Brophy as a romantic suitor is somehow rather humorous.
But as with the other two young women, Jerry also has a rich guy interested in her, partly because part of her job is to model dresses, something which implies that she's going to be seen by a lot of fabulously wealthy people, because who else can afford to buy the sort of clothes where you go and watch people model them. For Jerry, however, the rich man isn't one of the guys buying for his girlfriend; it's Tony Jardine (Robert Montgomery), the son of the store's owner. Tony has a kid brother David (Raymond Hackett), who happens to be pursuing Connie. Frankie also gets a rich guy who is interested in her, Martin Sanderson (John Miljan), who comes in looking for $500 worth of fabric. This being John Miljan, alarm bells probably should have gone off for Frankie; as it turns out, he's the mastermind behind gangs working the department store robbery racket, Frankie being totally ignorant of this.
Frankie goes off with Martin, while one evening, Jerry returns home to find a note from Connie telling her to call Connie at a certain phone number. Connie has been given an apartment by David, to live as a kept woman. Connie thinks David is going to marry him, but the second half of the movie turns to melodrama and Jerry learns that David has a girlfriend from the upper crust and is in fact going to marry that girlfriend. Jerry's also had some melodrama of her own with Tony, who has in her view trying to put the moves on her too fast in a fabulous (by the standards of 1930) treehouse.
Our Blushing Brides works best as a time capsule, now that it's well over 90 years old. Since the movie has three women's stories to tell, it has a tendency to veer rather sharply in tone when it goes from one subplot to another. As a result, there's some unintended comedy here. The movie is fairly slow in the first half, for me especially due to the fashion show aspect of it, but those as well as the set designs in general are part of the time capsule feel of the movie. And then there's that one scene where Joan Crawford has to wear a blonde wig and heavy makeup that makes her look ghoulish.
If I'm going to introduce people to early sound movies, there are other things I'd pick well before Our Blushing Brides. But for people who have already seen those other films, Our Blushing Brides is certainly an interesting, if mixed, glimpse into the past.
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