Our Blushing Brides is another Anita Page/Joan Crawford pairing, and I believe their last together. It's also a relatively early movie for Robert Montgomery, who also joined Anita in a rather poor Buster Keaton movie, Free and Easy, which came out the same year. Brides is a very strange movie, that doesn't quite know where it wants to go. It starts out as a realistic, and promising, look at working girls in a big department story. Then we have sort of a long, boring fashion show. And then it turns into a dull rich boy woos working girl love story between Joan and Robert.
Switch again to a maudlin cautionary tale, where Joan's two friends, Anita and Dorothy Sebastian, rush into marriage to escape their working-class existence, only to discover that one has married a philanderer and the other a crook.
The low point in this film is Anita's all-too-obvious suicide attempt while listening to a radio broadcast of her former husband getting married. Yi! Fodder to Joan to chew on though, and chew away she does. This is another one of those films where Joan is acting extremely butch. As in several other movies, she's got the masculine nickname, "Gerry", and she's far, far more over-the-top consumed with her close girlfriend than the male romantic lead.
Insanely, Joan rushes off to snatch Anita's ex, right in the middle of his wedding, to bring him to Anita's side. He doesn't want to go, but his brother, Montgomery, who is supposed to be Joan's love interest (if she could only distract herself from Anita) forces him to go.
The brother does a good job of lying to Anita, but it's all for naught and she dies in his arms. Joan cracks up, and this is probably the only think that could drive her back to Robert. A solid 3 rating, worth watching only for eye-rolling.
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