As we head back to 1931, we find the initial pairing of two Hollywood legends. Though they’d star together another seven times, that year’s Dance, Fools, Dance became the first time Joan Crawford and Clark Gable worked together.

The daughter of wealthy Stanley Jordan (William Holden), Bonnie (Joan Crawford) grows up spoiled and wild. However, when the stock market crash eliminates the family fortune, Bonnie’s high-flying lifestyle quickly takes a turn.

Bonnie becomes a cub newspaper reporter under veteran journalist Bert Scranton (Cliff Edwards), but her brother Rodney (William Bakewell) turns to an illicit lifestyle as part of the underworld organization run by Jake Luva (Gable). Inevitably these two butt heads as Bonnie investigates crimes in which Rodney plays a part.

Only two years after the 1929 Stock Market Crash, obviously this story packed relevance for circa 1931 viewers – well, to a degree. Few in the audience would’ve been wealthy socialites ala Bonnie, but many could identify with the way financial decline changed their lives.

Not that anyone should expect Dance to provide a hard-hitting look at the early days of the Depression. The film basically offers a mix of romance, melodrama and gangsters of the sort popular in the era.

Does Dance hold up 92 years later? Not really, as it offers more of a stiff morality tale than a compelling narrative.

Characters remain thin and undefined, especially in the case of our lead. Bonnie goes from wildcat to responsible citizen in the blink of an eye, and this makes no sense.

Bonnie accepts her new status in a bizarrely sanguine manner. It seems like a major leap for her to lose lifelong status as a rich kid and just shrug.

In addition, Bonnie makes it clear she lacks education or training, so why does the newspaper hire her? Maybe they want her due to her backstory, but it still seems like a stretch to accept her status as a reporter despite her lack of experience or background.

Rodney’s path to underworld hood – semi-unwitting though this journey may be – makes more sense. We do get some explanation why Jake recruits him.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t make Rodney an interesting character, and substantial chunks of the movie drag when they focus on him. Rodney never turns into an intriguing personality and he becomes a burden.

Crawford overacts relentlessly, as she seems not to have adjusted to the different demands of talkies vs. silent flicks yet. Oh, she shows charisma, and she and Gable display good chemistry, but she still fails to help turn Bonnie into a compelling role.

Gable fares better, perhaps because his silent work almost entirely revolved around bit parts so he didn’t need to unlearn those habits. Gable demonstrates the ample movie star vibe that made him a legend, and he lights up the film whenever he appears.

Unfortunately, Gable finds himself stuck in a fairly dull experience that never quite clicks. The Gable and Crawford scenes give us signs of life, but they can’t redeem the overall spottiness of the film.

Trivia note: technically Dance didn’t offer the first time Crawford and Gable acted in a film together, as both appeared in 1925’s Ben-Hur and The Merry Widow. However, they didn’t interact and both played bit parts in those flicks, so the two didn’t actually co-star until Dance.

Dance, Fools, Dance appears in an aspect ratio of 1.37:1 on this Blu-ray Disc. This was a pretty solid presentation.

For the most part, sharpness seemed fine. Some shots tended to be a little soft but those never created substantial concerns. I felt the film usually exhibited good delineation.

No issues with jagged edges or shimmering occurred, and I noticed no edge haloes. Grain remained light and fairly natural, and print flaws seemed absent.

Blacks appeared quite nice. Those tones showed solid depth, and shadows also exhibited positive clarity.

Contrast looked positive as well most of the time, though some shots felt a bit bright. This was a good representation of the film.

I felt the DTS-HD MA monaural soundtrack of Dance largely matched age-related expectations. Speech tended to sound somewhat metallic, but little edginess appeared, and the lines remained perfectly intelligible.

Music sounded thin as well, but those elements felt reasonably well-depicted overall. Like the dialogue, effects veered toward the bright, slightly shrill side of the street, but they also remained fine given their age.

Moderate background noise crept into the audio, but nothing worse than one would anticipate given the movie’s vintage. The track seemed perfectly acceptable for its era.

As we head to extras, we locate a documentary called Hollywood: The Dream Factory. It runs 50 minutes, 36 seconds.

Created in 1972, narrator Dick Cavett provides all the information as we trace the history of Hollywood during the “Golden Era”, with an emphasis on MGM. We hear a little about the films and participants as we watch a lot of movie clips.

And I do mean a lot, as those snippets comprise the vast majority of the show’s running time. That’s not a bad thing objectively, but unfortunately, we don’t usually get much context for these clips, so they’re left to stand alone. “Dream” has some good moments but acts too much like a compendium of vaguely-connected film snippets and too little like a real examination of the period.

We also find two vintage cartoons. Both from 1931, we get One More Time (7:04) and Smile, Darn Ya, Smile (7:00).

In Time, Foxy the cop runs into struggles to enforce the law. Foxy offers one of many obvious Mickey Mouse clones in this cartoon that presents value mainly as a view of the era’s animation styles.

Now probably best known due to its presence in 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Smile brings back Foxy as a streetcar conductor who sings through his interactions with wacky passengers. Like Time, it offers intrigue as a time capsule and not much more.

As the first pairing of Hollywood legends Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, Dance, Fools, Dance offers obvious historic value. Unfortunately, it fails to give us more than that, as the actual film feels oddly inert and spotty. The Blu-ray comes with good visuals, acceptable audio and a mix of bonus materials. Dance remains notable for its cast and not much else.