Screening of "Our Dancing Daughters" to Mark Fiedler's 80th Birthday

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Roll down your stockings and bob your hair!

The 80th birthday of Leslie Fiedler, Samuel Langhorne Clemens Professor of English at the University at Buffalo and universally acknowledged as the "bad-boy of American letters," will be celebrated by his family, friends and colleagues with a public reception and jazz-baby film on Sunday, March 9.

The party will begin at 2 p.m. in the Drama Theatre in the Center for the Arts on the UB North Campus with a screening of Fiedler's favorite movie, the 1928 silent film "Our Dancing Daughters." It will be followed by a public champagne-and-cake reception in the center's atrium.

The event is free and everyone is welcome, but seating is limited. Tickets will be available at the Center for the Arts Box Office immediately preceding the event on a first-come, first-served basis.

The party is sponsored by UB President and Mrs. William R. Greiner; Provost Thomas Headrick; Kerry Grant, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Letters; Bruce Jackson, Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Literature, and the George Eastman House.

"Our Dancing Daughters" is the movie that made Joan Crawford a star and introduced Art Deco to millions of Americans. It is considered one of the best silents of the Jazz Age.

Film historian James Card called the movie "a parable of morality -- graphically pointing out the perils that lay in the paths even of those golden youth with never a care about where their next yacht ride was coming from."

The movie will be accompanied by pianist Philip Carli, one of America's most highly regarded film accompanists who performs regularly at major film festivals and screenings in North America and Europe.

"Our Dancing Daughters" was directed by Harry Beaumont and features Johnny Mack Brown, Dorothy Sebastian, Nils Asther, Anita Page, Kathlyn Williams and Edward Nugent. Crawford had completed 21 films and had leading roles in 17 of them before she hit the big time as a dancing daughter.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said Crawford was the film actress who best embodied his vision of the flapper. Card would agree. "No other actress of the time," he wrote, "could have remotely combined the sense of Amazonian, sexual aggressiveness with complete probity of character in the way that Crawford, with her sincere portrait of 1920's decency, was able to present."

Card added that the film "captured accurately the fact of youthful, confused integrity as opposed to the helplessness of parents in guiding their children through uncharted territories...The three principal young ladies (Page, Sebastian and Crawford) are such elementary types that any young girls who saw the movie could readily fit every one of her own acquaintances -- and perhaps even herself -- into the situations and thus be forwarned and instructed."