This Modern Age

This Modern Age is a 1931 American pre-Code Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer feature film directed by Nick Grinde and starring Joan Crawford, Neil Hamilton, Pauline Frederick and Albert Conti. Plot Socialite Valentine "Val" Winters (Joan Crawford) is a child of divorced parents and has not seen her sophisticate mother, Diane, (Pauline Frederick), in years. Indeed, Diane had all but forgotten about Val, as the courts awarded sole custody of Val to her father, who had recently died. Val travels to Paris for a reunion where her mother is living as the mistress of André de Graignon (Albert Conti). While in Paris, Valentine meets fun-loving and alcoholic Tony (Monroe Owsley), who is in Diane's social circle. When Valentine and Tony are involved in a car wreck, they are rescued from his overturned car by football-playing Harvardian Bob Blake Jr. (Neil Hamilton). Bob and Valentine fall in love, and, when he invites his parents (Hobart Bosworth and Emma Dunn) to meet her, everything goes wrong as they do not approve of Tony and his boisterous friends or of Diane's living arrangement with Andre. Later, Bob overhears a conversation between Diane and André de Graignon during which André complains about his life being on hold for Val and that he is kicking Diane out of his house. Bob tries to rush their marriage plans so that he can take her away from her mother's deception without Val discovering the truth, but when she resists, he tells her the truth about her mother and implores her to forget about her and her friends and abscond with him. Insulted, Val says the allegations about the house not being Diane's are a lie and that she loves her mother over anything, and then she spurns Bob.