Scott (November 2007)

Rating:  of 5

While Our Blushing Brides may be what is known as "slight" entertainment, it's still a whole lot of fun. Joan plays Jerry, a virtuous shopgirl holding out for true love while her two somewhat hedonistic gal pal-roomates (Anita Page & Dorothy Sebastian) settle for shortcuts that ultimately lead to bad ends. Naturally, the long- suffering Jerry will win in the end, but in the meantime, virtue must be its own reward.

The predictability of the plot hardly matters here. The real pleasures of "Brides" are the beautiful cinematography and Joan, who seems to have turned down the contrast on her former flapper image of only a year or two before. Her acting is toned down, too, and subtle compared to Our Dancing Daughters or Our Modern Maidens. Also skillfully comedic is the acting of Dorothy Sebastian, but Anita Page seems to think she is still in a silent movie, with her overly broad pantomimes and monotone Cupie-doll expression. Still, even she is appealing, and manages some touching moments, and the three girls generate a nice screen chemistry as they struggle to live in, and climb out of, poverty. Each in her own way, and with very different results.

Of course the film is a morality tale--but then so were most MGM pictures at this time, and acting in general was much stagier than it became even a few years later--still with many of the trappings of silent films to it. In light of this, I find Crawford judged a little harshly in contemporary reviews of the film that fail to take this factor into account. No one onscreen is acting in anything like a naturalistic style. In an operatic era, I find Joan's acting refreshingly natural and candid in fact, as is Robert Montgomery as her love interest. Crawford does have some self-conscious mannerisms around this time-- pursing her mouth too much, biting her lip, elocuting a bit too precisely, but she is already great at smoldering confrontation scenes--which would eventually become her trademark.

These scenes of confrontation are really the meat of most of these otherwise-airy productions. And she is also one of the only actors on screen who really LOOKS at the other characters with any real sense of connection or urgency. She seems truly ALERT to them, not just waiting to say her next line as the others do. Her eyes are already unusually expressive too, and adept at telegraphing her emotions. Even her shoulders and hands convey her shifting emotions, whereas the other actors seem to rely wholly on the dialogue to communicate their desires. Joan is convincingly touching as the "Mama Bear" who maternally watches over--and tries in vain to protect--those she loves, which in this case are two ingrates who barely appreciate it. Dorothy as "Franky" is the lazy one, who makes Jerry do all her chores and then complains about the dinners Jerry slaves to serve them, while Anita as "Connie" seems incapacitated by her constant mooning for the man who will eventually be her undoing. Only Jerry seems to have the benefit of common sense here, but nobody's listening. And she's got problems of her own--pursued by the boss's son (whom she secretly loves) and trying to be his equal, not merely another of his sexual conquests.

You see, "Brides" is also about the Class Struggle between sexes. Is a poor woman just as eligible to marry a rich man--and just as worthy of his love--as a wealthy women? Or is becoming his mistress the highest she can aim? For an early talkie, "Brides" moves along at a nice brisk pace, with gorgeous camerawork, lighting & set design, costume hair & makeup-- all the production values that MGM did better than anyone. Gauzier & more fantasy-heavy than it's grittier Warner Bros. counterpart--who generally had better stories--MGM nonetheless was the real Dream Factory, and its stars were presented as Gods and Goddesses, not real- life people. Joan elevated these lofty soap operas & melodramas with characterizations that have withstood the test of time and resonate even today with a touching sincerity.

Stephanie (January 2006)

Rating:   of 5

Our Blushing Brides is a disappointingly slight film (accompanied by some slight, rather stilted acting from Joan) that seems to focus more on Joan's underwear than on solid plot or characterization.

Despite the "Our" and alliteration in the title, Brides is completely unrelated plot-wise to Joan's earlier Our Dancing Daughters ('28) or Our Modern Maidens ('29), though she is reunited here with her Daughters director (Harry Beaumont) and co-stars Anita Page and Dorothy Sebastian. Here, the three women are department-store clerks and roommates in New York City who yearn to escape from their drab clock-punching existences and their primary collective fear that they'll wind up "in the Bronx doing dirty dishes."

Page is "Connie," who's in love with the store-owner's son David (Raymond Hackett), whom she naively believes will marry her. Sebastian is "Franky," who's so desperate for a rich man that she runs off with the crooked, seedy Martin. Joan plays "Jerry," who secretly likes the store-owner's other son Tony (Robert Montgomery), but constantly puts him off, fearing he's only toying with her. Joan's Jerry is the motherly, responsible one of the bunch, warning the others about trusting men and sitting home alone while the others are out with their inappropriate dates. (Jerry does have one suitor, a schlubby fellow store employee named Joe who's constantly pestering her to go out. She's amused but also depressed by his attentions---obviously the auras of "Bronx" and "dirty dishes" seem to hang over him!)

The movie does a nice job of portraying the little things that make low-paying working life so dreary: the cattle-like punching of the clock; the maddeningly mundane conversations and annoying customers at work; the cheap, monotonous takeout food; the rinky-dink apartments with loud, nosy neighbors. The desire to escape these dead-end surroundings is understandable, but here the theme is weakened by the broadly-brushed characters, writing, and plotting. For instance, the fact that Franky's man Martin is a lowlife is telegraphed from Minute One as he leers at her over the store counter, then leers at Jerry that evening when he comes to pick up Franky. In quick succession he and Franky show up drunk and married, then the law picks up Franky to question her about Martin, then the next thing you know Jerry is reading a letter from Franky, who's gone back to the farm. End of Franky. (Connie's dispatching takes until the end of the movie, but she too has only a few highly unsubtle scenes leading up to her denouement.)

Joan's relations with Montgomery's Tony are a bit more complicated, but still emotionally flat and uninvolving. Montgomery plays his stock 1930s character here---the suave, witty, rather smirky rich guy. The success of such a character, though, really depends on the quality of the dialogue and plot. It's hard to seem urbane when you take your date to a ridiculously art-deco TREE-HOUSE and the high point of your "banter" consists of immediately turning out the lights and groping your date, then when rebuffed trying to recoup your pride with a clunky pseudo-suave line like "That's clever. But you're being clever at the wrong time--- [intensely] Let's have a cigarette." (Not to mention the ludicrousness of having to refuse to lower a step-ladder to keep your date from leaving a tree!) Though Tony, unlike the other two beaus, is supposed to be a decent guy, he's actually more of a mild jerk, which doesn't lead to any concern on the part of the viewer about whether he and Jerry will end up together.

Joan's character is rather stereotypically noble, and her vedy proper accent way too high-falutin' for a small-town shopgirl. (Though, granted, this was only her 3rd talkie, and the vocal coaches at MGM had obviously been working strenuously to promote perfect diction.) And, as she also exhibited in a similar scene in the previous year's Untamed, her acting while grieving on someone's deathbed is excessive---heaving and overwrought. There are also plenty of annoying (to me) early-Joan mannerisms on display: the constant lip-biting, the forced gaiety. All in all, not one of Joan's strongest performances.

I have the sneaking suspicion that this film was cobbled together solely to provide a showcase for two things: (1) Joan the Clotheshorse in a myriad of outfits, and (2) Joan in her underwear. As for the first, how else to explain the film grinding to a complete halt nearly halfway through to present a 10-minute fashion-show sequence of no consequence whatsoever to the plot, other than to have Joan model four different outfits? (This sequence includes, inexplicably and cheesily, her doing some panty-revealing high kicks while wearing a delicate, long evening gown!) I disliked the fashion sequence in 1939's The Women for its clumsy disruption of the rest of the film, and found the tactic annoying here for the same reason. (There's also a scene near the beginning of Brides where Joan/Jerry and fellow mannequins also model fashions for several minutes, accompanied by the inane off-camera murmuring of the society ladies at the show: "Isn't that darling?" etc. Annoying, as well, but at least briefer and a way in the plot for Montgomery to first turn up and fall in love with her.)

As for Suspicion Number Two: I lost track of the number of times Joan plays scenes in her underwear. I get it, I get it: T-n-A sells pictures, but... just a little subtlety, PLEASE! Maybe a couple of underwear scenes rather than, oh, half-a-dozen of them? I'm no Breen, but, as a viewer, I do dislike being so overtly manipulated.

Come to think of it, much of this film made me also dislike having my intelligence so overtly questioned. Including the ending, for instance: What a weirdly-abrupt emotional turnabout! Though director Beaumont's work with Joan would improve the next year with Dance Fools Dance and Laughing Sinners, here he seems to either be completely out of control of, or to simply have no concern for, the proceedings.