Preceded by THE PILL POUNDER (1923, d. Gregory La Cava, 14 mins) starring Charlie Murray and Clara Bow)
No matter what they may say, there is such a thing as an overnight star—or close to it—but that wasn’t Clara Bow. When the legendary B.P. Schulberg made a deal that included an associate producer gig at Paramount in 1925, aided by the fact that he had Clara under contract, she’d been acting in films since 1921. She had been the subject of numerous “watch out for this one!” press items and was named the “most successful” of the 1924 Wampas Baby Stars. When, at the end of 1925, Bow replaced Betty Bronson in what was called “the juvenile lead” in Dancing Mothers, Clara had been in at least two dozen movies, including Down to the Sea in Ships (1922), the hit The Plastic Age (1925), and many small gems such as the recently rediscovered short The Pill Pounder, from 1923.
Clara Bow was on the verge of stardom. Everyone knew it. Her standout work in Herbert Brenon’s Dancing Mothers was one of the last supporting roles she played. In April, just after its release, “Paramount ranked Clara thirty-eighth in its Galaxy of Stars,” writes David Stenn in Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild. “One year later, she would be beyond numerical ranking.”
Bow plays Catherine “Kittens” Westcourt, the spoiled flapper daughter (seemingly about eighteen years old, although it’s never spelled out) of rich Hugh Westcourt (Norman Trevor) and his wife, the former Broadway actress Ethel (Alice Joyce) and the movie’s main character. Joyce was thirty-six at this point and had been acting in films since about 1910. In the Hollywood of the time, Joyce’s age meant that despite her nearly unchanged looks, she was easing, or being eased, into “mother” roles. In fact, she had done superlative work the year before as the gentle second wife in Henry King’s version of Stella Dallas. Dancing Mothers, based on a hit Broadway play by future film directors Edmund Goulding and Edgar Selwyn, offered her another appealing role that made it clear Joyce was still a beautiful woman. There was something ineffably patrician about Joyce’s face that made Hollywood cast her as a society lady—which was somewhat ironic as Joyce’s father was a smelter and her mother a seamstress. This gave Joyce something in common with Bow, whose Brooklyn background was a great deal rougher than that, and who was also finding herself cast more than once as part of the carefree rich.
The plot manages to put some twists on a familiar tale. Kittens is in pursuit of the much older rake Jerry Naughton (naughty, get it?), played by the serviceable Conway Tearle. Her father, Hugh (Norman Trevor), is playing sugar daddy to gold-digging Irma (Elsie Lawson). And poor Ethel is stuck at home, flipping through the scrapbook she’s kept from her acting days. Neither father nor daughter thinks twice about Ethel’s loneliness or even cares much about being caught themselves. In one speakeasy scene, Kittens’s callow former boyfriend becomes enraged that she is dancing all night with Jerry. When the discarded suitor tells Kittens he’s going to tattle to her father, she says breezily, “Go ahead, he’s right over there.” And so he is, slipping cash into Irma’s evening bag.
There’s not much fun in this arrangement for Ethel and one night her best friend, Mrs. Mazzarene (Dorothy Cumming), points that out. “I used to do what you do,” she says. “Sit home night after night alone. Then one day, I looked in the mirror and was vain enough to think there was still years of life before me, and now I’m living.”
The penny drops for Ethel. She dresses up and sashays out to a club—where she meets and fascinates Jerry. Ethel knows this is the cad who’s leading Kittens astray, so she fakes a French accent and another identity in an attempt to protect her daughter from heartbreak. But, in the way of movies like this one, Jerry and Ethel end up falling in love.
Although Clara Bow’s sparkling presence remains the most appealing thing about Dancing Mothers, seeing it now from a distance of almost a hundred years, the movie has plenty of other things to recommend it. Under the direction of Herbert Brenon, it has marvelous Jazz Age atmosphere, including rebellious youth, rebellious parents, all-night dancing, bathtub gin, pocket flasks, and Spencer Charters billed as a “Butter and Egg Man”—an out-of-town businessman who’s rich, unwary, and very, very drunk. The movie’s high style, even then a characteristic of Paramount releases, went over well with fans. Magazines like Picture-Play suggested that readers copy the dress that Bow wears in the climactic confrontation scene, terming it a “typical flapper frock,” though adding, “it by no means needs to be confined to that type, as it is a sport dress which is practical in style and could be worn by almost anyone.” Exhibitors Herald noted the two big nightlife scenes, one in “The Pirate’s Ship,” which it called “a bizarre cabaret in Greenwich Village” (bizarre is right), and the other at “a fashionable night club in the Roaring Forties along the Gay White Way.” Motion Picture News suggested “staging a Charleston contest” as a promotional gimmick for Dancing Mothers.
Clara Bow, with her instinctual approach to her roles, decided to reinterpret Kittens from the rather brittle way she’d been played on stage. Bow opted to make the girl merely heedless and out for fun instead. This is obvious from the opening set on a liner returning from Europe. We meet Kittens on deck, wrapped up against the wind and reading, or at any rate holding, a weighty book that she flings aside for the first cute fluffy dog she sees (which, of course, is in the care of Tearle’s Jerry Naughton). Kittens offers the pup a treat off her tea tray and begins to play. Suddenly the dog scampers toward the ship’s side, and Kittens jumps up to save it, without a thought for the elegant tray in her lap. Cups, plates, and tray clatter to the ground as she barrels after the imperiled animal. Thus does Kittens charm the audience, and she will retain that sympathy even as her behavior gets less charming. Not only is this a girl that dogs like—always a good sign—she puts the pup’s welfare first.
After a while, you feel a little sorry for Alice Joyce. Although it’s not considered nice to say so, mothers can feel outshined by a vivacious young daughter. In this case, when the daughter is Clara Bow, at times “outshined” is more like “obliterated.” Still, Joyce brings her characteristic intelligence to the film; Ethel is no doormat. Discovered at a club by Hugh and ordered to go home, she gives her hypocritical spouse a radiant smile and dances away with a younger man. And while reviewers at the time were not particularly happy with how Dancing Mothers ends, nowadays Ethel’s final decision about what to do with her life comes as a pleasant shock. In his biography of Bow, Stenn quips that “one wonders what genetic mutation made Ethel bear Kittens,” but the final scene may make it more apparent. It was a good part for Joyce and that same year she had an important role in the immortal Beau Geste. But she retired from the screen in 1930, and her later years were not happy ones. Divorcing director Clarence Brown in 1945, Joyce claimed he was cold and often left her alone, a sad irony for anyone who might still have remembered Dancing Mothers.
Clara Bow, on the other hand, “was absolutely a sensation in Dancing Mothers,” Louise Brooks recalled many years later. “Clara was so marvelous; she just swept the country! I thought she was oh, so wonderful; everybody did. She became a star overnight with nobody’s help.” Overnight—well, no. But wonderful, absolutely. As Bow stops a canine from drowning, dances the night away, back-talks her stuffy father, and makes sure the cocktail shaker is full, Dancing Mothers is a brilliant preview for the career of one of Hollywood’s greatest legends.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Wayne Barker