This early Joan Crawford vehicle is a very uneven production, primarily due to the dialogue. Johnny Mack Brown reads the script like a high school thespian. Though Crawford's performance is nothing to write home about either, one wonders how much better this production might have been if Brown had been able to portray his character in a convincing fashion.

The best part of this film is the music. There are range ballads sung by a competent male chorus, and some pleasant (though somewhat out of place) solos by Cliff Edwards (aka the voice of Jiminy Cricket) and his ukulele.

But the plot is too simplistic and predictable. The characters are mostly caricatures. And the action is uneven.

Still, this film has some interest for its use of Crawford.

... but if you are searching for raw entertainment value, I'd look elsewhere. My 7/10 rating is for film history value.

This is Joan Crawford's second starring role in a talking film, and her character is basically the same as in "Our Dancing Daughters" and "Our Modern Maidens" - a wealthy carefree flapper type. Her acting is fine, pretty much proving the point that in Joan's career her being box office poison was the fault of the movies not her performance.

Released in March 1930, it was probably written and filmed at the end of 1929, so you have two things going on here. MGM is still trying to adapt to talking film since they were the last of the studios to do so, and The Great Depression hasn't started yet, so the roaring 20s are still roaring into the first part of 1930.

The film starts with Mr. Prescott, owner of a big ranch in Montana, taking a train out west to inspect his ranch, accompanied by his two flapper daughters Joan (Joan Crawford) and Elizabeth (Dorothy Sebastian). This appears to be a private train, and for some reason Prescott is letting his daughters bring along about two dozen of their partying friends. Believe me the WHY of the trip and the FROM of the trip I am having to make up, because at no point is it clear why the all business Mr. Prescott is in Montana in the first place!

Elizabeth confides in Joan that she knows Joan is used to taking men away from her, but that she really loves Jeff (Ricardo Cortez) and to please stay away from him. On the train Jeff constantly makes the moves on Joan, yet is affectionate towards Elizabeth. Joan hides this flirting from Elizabeth - again - WHY? - Wouldn't she want her sister to know this guy is a snake?

Instead, Joan gets off of the train in the middle of the night in Leland, Montana (that is what the sign says), sends a telegram to her family to let them know she is OK, buys a train ticket back to New York from Skeletor (the guy is really bizarre looking), and then just forgets all about the train when she runs into cowboy Larry (Johnny Mack Brown). Again, WHY? She ends up "riding fences" with him for three weeks - that is Larry's job - without him knowing that she is the boss' daughter. At some point he must find out though, because they marry and go to the Montana lodge where her family is staying along with all of those partiers she inflicted on her father and then abandoned, and the trouble for the newlywed couple begins as a real clash of cultures and values.

This will get really long if I talk about everything that is wrong with this film, but for one it is just too long and slow. It is a 90 minute film I could have easily placed into a sixty minute running time. There are also a bunch of left over silent characters that MGM still can't figure out what to do with, some actors they hired specifically for sound but then found out that they didn't work out, and the problem that all of the studios had thinking musical numbers would improve any film. One problem rather unique to MGM - what they thought would be funny in their early sound films simply isn't. For example, Benny Rubin is playing a doctor from the east here. I guess he is supposed to be doing some kind of comedy routine with Cliff Edwards, because his reason for being in this film is just a great big unfunny question mark.

Among the tragedies is silent film star Karl Dane playing a bit part here - his heavy Danish accent made him unintelligible. Johnny Mack Brown's deep southern voice did not go with his already established film persona, and letting him cover it here with a Western accent I guess was a last ditch attempt to keep him on the A list at MGM. it didn't work as he was replaced with Clark Gable in several planned roles the following year.

And even then, all of this might have worked out if the screenplay had not been incomprehensible. Sylvia Thalberg, Irving Thalberg's sister, was responsible, and after this she didn't go very far in screenwriting. Nepotism doesn't always work out as well as it did with Norma Shearer's brother, Douglas, who was the Oscar winning head recording engineer at MGM from the dawn of sound until he retired in the 1960s.

So there's plenty to see for the student of early talking film. For all others I would find something else to occupy your time.