Our Dancing Daughters (1928)

Our Dancing Daughters was the first movie written specifically for Joan Crawford and it made her a star. It's the story of a rich, wild girl (Crawford) with an addiction to short dresses and the Charleston who loses the love of her life to an even richer, wilder girl (Anita Page, also in a star-making role), all while soaking up Jazz and bootleg booze in fabulous art Deco palaces that could only have existed on the set of an MGM movie.

None of this is meant to be taken seriously — just another Hollywood studio clucking its tongue at girls gone wild even as it exploited the phenomenon to rake in box office bucks.

What's not to like?

Although technically the film's lead, Crawford winds up playing second fiddle to Page.

Although she had only just celebrated her eighteenth birthday when the movie hit the theaters, Page is absolutely convincing in her ruthless pursuit of the man, first putting on an act of virginal innocence to entice him then exploiting him to the hilt after she lands him.

In the movie's penultimate scene, Page is drunk, evil and standing at the top of a staircase. No prizes for guessing what happens next.

"Our Dancing Daughters was my picture," Page said years later. "I say that because I did the acting. Joan Crawford danced her way through it. I acted my way through it."

Our Dancing Daughters was one of a series of Hollywood movies seeking to both exploit and condemn the Jazz Age flapper phenomenon. The script called for an undercurrent of tension between Page and Crawford and, boy, is there ever.

Years later, Page claimed Crawford physically assaulted her on the set but the mutual hatred didn't hurt their on-screen chemistry any. In fact, despite their mutual loathing, Page and Crawford made two more movies together, Our Modern Maidens and Our Blushing Brides, trading the good girl/bad girl roles back and forth, to great commercial, if not artistic, effect.

Page also starred in the year's Oscar winner for best picture, The Broadway Melody, and received over ten thousand fan letters a week, including nearly a hundred from fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who was infatuated with the young actress.

"Are you starting to believe your own publicity?" director Harry Beaumont asked Page during the filming of one of their six pictures together.

"Of course," she said, "Aren't you?"

In addition to The Broadway Melody and the Joan Crawford flapper trilogy, Page appeared in films with Lon Chaney, Buster Keaton and Clark Gable.

Page's final movie for MGM was 1932's Prosperity, starring Marie Dressler and Polly Moran. On the outs with studio head Louis B. Mayer after twice refusing to sleep with him (the second proposition made in the presence of Page's mother), Page served out the remaining years of her MGM contract on loan to poverty row studios, making such low-budget bombs as Jungle Bride and Hitch Hike To Heaven.

It was an ignominious end for an actress who just a couple of years before had been second only to Greta Garbo as the studio's top draw.

Page left Hollywood and married Navy flyer Herschel House in January 1937.

After his death, she began to make films again, mostly low-budget fare such as The Crawling Brain and Witchcraft XI.

On the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Page received a standing ovation at a special screening of The Broadway Melody. She was the last surviving attendee of the first Oscar ceremony and died in 2008 at the age of ninety-eight.