The first official hit film, so popular and so much a personal triumph for Joan Crawford that her studio could no longer ignore her power, was Our Dancing Daughters, with John Mack Brown, Anita Page and Dorothy Sebastian giving solid support to the direction of Harry Beaumont. For the social historian, Our Dancing Daughters is an important film. It is a morality play of the latter twenties – a visual eloquent dramatization, for popular understanding, of the era’s basic clash between a puritanical heritage and the postwar, youthful urge toward a new attitude to sexual freedom and the edonistic enjoyment of all possible privileges of a prosperous segment of society. Joan Crawford acted too soon; if only the movies in the twenties had been more respected, she might have been acknowledged as the formidable actress she was. Scott Fitzgerald himself singled out Joan Crawford as the one film actress who most completely embodied the flapper.

James Card, Seductive Cinema. The Art of Silent Film, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1994