So this week's movie Monday in honor of my weekend is Dance Fools Dance starring Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, long before Mildred Pierce and Gone With the Wind.
It's about a wealthy, young society girl (Joan Crawford, before her trademark heavy brows)whose father dies broke when the stock market takes a dive. She realizes that most of her "friends" actually disliked her and feel free to treat her badly now that she has no money.
She decides to take a job with the newspaper to support herself and her brother, Rod, who begins a new venture of his own-- selling alcohol during Prohibition. What seems like easy work for him, gets messy when someone gets killed and he accidentally leaks information to a reporter. The big boss played by a very young Clark Gable (before the mustache <gasp>) demands that Rod must knock off the nosy reporter who happpens to be a friend of his sister at the paper.
Joan must get to the bottom of the story and attempts to get information out of Gable by taking a job at his nightclub and getting herself invited up to his apartment (scandalous pre-code stuff!). She figures it all out, of course, and there is a bit of a shoot out at the end.
It was very neat to see these two big stars in their earlier roles (this movie was from 1931). In fact, it was the first movie J.C. and C.G. did together and they went on to do seven more. The movie was only an hour and a half long and it was disappointing that it didn't pursue more of an involvement between The Gang leader and The Reporter. I thought the plot was lacking. Thumbs down :(
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