Dance, Fools, Dance
![Dance, Fools, Dance](https://prod-images.tcm.com/Master-Profile-Images/dancefoolsdance1931.3338.jpg)
Brief Synopsis
Cast & Crew
Harry Beaumont
Joan Crawford
Lester Vail
Cliff Richards
William Bakewell
Clark Gable
Film Details
Technical Specs
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Synopsis
Bonnie Jordan, formerly a spoiled, carefree socialite, is faced with poverty or hard work when her father, Stanley Jordan, dies of a heart attack during the stock market crash of 1929. Though she in in love with Robert "Bob" Townsend, she refuses his proposal of marriage, because he offers it merely as "the gentlemanly thing to do." Instead, she goes to work as a cub reporter on the New York Star . Her brother Rodney takes an easier way out by helping bootlegger Jake Luva peddle his liquor to Rodney's wealthy friends. Bonnie grows to love her work and is befriended by Bert Scranton, the Star 's top reporter. When a group of bootleggers are murdered, both Bert and Bonnie are assigned different aspects of the case. While investigating the crime, Bert unwittingly encounters Rodney, who, realizing that Luva is responsible for the murders, lets information about his gang slip out. When Luva hears about it, he tells Rodney that the only way out is to shoot Bert or be shot himself. Though he doesn't want to do it, his own fear leads him to kill Bert. Bonnie, who doesn't know about Rodney's connection to Luva, is then assigned by her editor to infiltrate Luva's gang and find out who actually did the murder, as all of his gang have airtight alibis. She gets a job as a dancer in Luva's nightclub, posing as "Mary Smith" from Kansas City, and although both Rodney and Bob see her at the club, Luva doesn't know her real identity. One evening Luva invites her to his apartment to seduce her. She goes along with him, hoping to get her story, but when she answers his phone and hears Rodney's voice, she realizes the extent of her brother's involvement and tries to leave. When Rodney arrives, the three argue and Rodney kills Luva, but is killed himself, trying to protect Bonnie. Bonnie then phones in the real story to the Star . The next day her boss and others at the paper try to discourage her from leaving, but she feels that she must. As she walks out, Bob finds her and proposes again, this time for real, and as they kiss, some of her friends on the paper capture the moment for the announcement of their marriage on the society pages.
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Director
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Harry Beaumont
Cast
![](https://prod-images.tcm.com/Master-Profile-Images/JoanCrawford.40864.1.jpg?imwidth=188&height=141)
Joan Crawford
![](https://prod-images.tcm.com/Master-Profile-Images/LesterVail.196197.jpg?imwidth=188&height=141)
Lester Vail
Cliff Richards
William Bakewell
![](https://prod-images.tcm.com/Master-Profile-Images/ClarkGable.jpg?imwidth=188&height=141)
Clark Gable
Earl Foxe
Purnell B. Pratt
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Hale Hamilton
![](https://prod-images.tcm.com/Master-Profile-Images/NatalieMoorhead.jpg?imwidth=188&height=141)
Natalie Moorhead
![](https://prod-images.tcm.com/Master-Profile-Images/JoanMarsh.jpg?imwidth=188&height=141)
Joan Marsh
![](https://prod-images.tcm.com/Master-Profile-Images/RussellHopton.88930.jpg?imwidth=188&height=141)
Russell Hopton
Crew
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Film Details
Technical Specs
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Articles
Dance, Fools, Dance
Crawford wrote that she was intimidated at the idea of acting opposite Gable because he had stage experience, and she didn't. But they got on, becoming friends after exchanging reminiscences of their respective unhappy childhoods and notes on their respective unhappy marriages. By the time they filmed Possessed, their off-camera affair was an open secret. Their chemistry was noted at the outset in Dance, Fools, Dance. As a Chicago bootlegger named Jake Luva, who doesn't appear until 35 minutes into the 80-minute film, he invites her to his apartment above his nightclub and asks her if she's going to be nice to him. For reasons of her own, Crawford's character says yes. When he goes to kiss her the first time, she turns her face and he kisses a cheek. Another try, another cheek kiss. The third time, she doesn't turn away. The long, juicy kiss on the lips has, for want of a better word, voltage.
During that busy year of 1931 - his single most prolific -- Gable often was cast as heavies. In A Free Soul (1931), he shoves Norma Shearer. In Night Nurse (1931), he plays a nasty chauffeur who starves two little girls and socks Barbara Stanwyck. In Dance, Fools, Dance, Gable's Jake Luva would have gunned down Crawford's impoverished socialite, Bonnie Jordan, working as an undercover reporter if the script hadn't dictated otherwise. His stock in trade became - and remained - his ability to make rugged masculinity seem to come naturally to him. There's also the matter of screen presence. That's there, too, in Dance, Fools, Dance. It had to be for each to hold the screen as equals. Like Gable's, Crawford's brand of acting was un-nuanced. Each, in their respective ways, seemed a force of nature - her wide-set eyes and wide, screen-eating smile were made for film.
Dance, Fools, Dance spends considerable time setting up the back story of Bonnie and her weakling brother Rodney (William Bakewell), cleaned out when their rich father is ruined in the stock market crash and dies of a heart attack. Rodney, wimp that he is, whines about having to work. Bonnie rolls up her sleeves and moves on. He's given ungainful employment by his bootlegger, and the latter's boss (Gable). She gets a job as a reporter and, after proving herself, is given an assignment -- go undercover as a cabaret dancer and bring down the public enemy behind a thinly-veiled St. Valentine's Day Massacre. It was a natural for Crawford, who began her career as a dancer and whose initial screen persona was as a flapper. To get the goods against Gable's Jake, she gets a job in his club. Her high spirits catch his eye (it couldn't be her dancing - surprisingly klutzy for a woman whose forte had been high-energy modern women).
What Bonnie doesn't know is that her shiftless brother also works for Jake and was one of the smoking guns in the garage massacre. She puts things together, with the aid of the street-smart reporter at the desk next to hers (round-faced, button-eyed Cliff Edwards, who appeared in as many movies in sidekick roles as he made popular song hits as Ukulele Ike). From there, it's only a few hops, skips and jumps until the tough and not-so-tough guys shoot it out indoors in their hats and overcoats and Bonnie, through her tears, phones the story in to her paper. The gunfight looks pretty hokey. Crawford projects more toughness than any of them when a rich boyfriend, condescendingly proposing when she turns poor, is one-upped by Crawford, who remains composed enough to dismiss him first, saying "I can still pick my own men." All the more reason to frown at the film's cop-out ending.
Crawford's way of playing emotion usually involves setting her jaw and bravely staring off out of the frame, as if her troubles are too cosmic to bear, but she'll bear them anyway. It was no small source of her popularity with women audiences that she often played hard-working, hard-driving women. Gable's long suit, on the other hand, was to never seem as if he was acting. He essentially unrolled his high-testosterone performances, varying little but the pitch and volume. This is not intended condescendingly. With acting, simpler is usually better, and Gable embodied this supremely, never showing much patience for theories of acting.
It would also be a mistake to condescend to Dance, Fools, Dance. Not so much for its pre-Code naughtiness. We've all seen seamier stuff since. Some of the partying is quaint - idle rich partygoers going for a moonlight swim over the side of a yacht in their undies. But a scene in which Bonnie and a lover agree to spend the night together, no strings attached, has a matter-of- fact sophistication that didn't reappear in Hollywood films for decades. Director Harry Beaumont keeps it boiling along crisply, with a light hand. There even are a few drolly satirical touches. A scene in the chaotic stock exchange aping a peppy Jazz Age dance sequence makes clear that there are fools to be found off the dance floor as well as on. One of the stocks being touted by the rich codgers around a card table is called "Consolidated Air." And let's close with a few Gable-centric ironies. He fought being cast in It Happened One Night (1934), which won him an Oscar®. He was lukewarm about filming Gone With the Wind (1939). His string of '30s successes was marred by losing out to Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan movies. Still, not a bad career for a guy Daryl F. Zanuck rejected for Scarface (1932), saying, "His ears are too big."
By Jay Carr
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Dance, Fools, Dance
Quotes
Trivia
Notes
The multiple murder which is part of the film's plot was loosely inspired by the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre that happened in Chicago in 1927. According to a news item in Film Daily on August 16, 1932, actress Lita Friede had been signed to appear in an M-G-M produced German-language version of this picture, however no additional information on such a production has been located.
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Miscellaneous Notes
Released in United States 1931
Released in United States 1931