And why do you want to dance?
Why do you want to live?!
This season has been a joy and the pleasure has been in
unpicking the Arzner-Angle from each film all of the things that, as Lucy
Bolton, noted cinematic historian, make Dance, Girl Dance, and the
director’s other films unique and such a beacon for modern film criticism.
Arzner’s ability to remain effectively independent within the studio system was
underwritten by her inherited wealth but she was also a director who made money
and played a part in the breakthrough roles of a number of stars.
Maureen O’Hara was only twenty here but had already
over-achieved in Ireland featuring in The Irish Molly (1938) with Charles
Laughton before two further films with him, Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn
(1939) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), her first Hollywood film,
at Charles’ request. After this, she was more intimidated by Lucille Ball in
Arzner’s film as she was not only nine years older but also a former Ziegfeld
and Goldwyn girl with considerable dance experience. If there was a challenge,
Maureen certainly rose to it, as she tended to do. Lucy also, naturally:
two of Hollywood’s strongest women – O’Hara who used to play soccer and learned
judo back in Dublin; Ball, the immovable force who became a cultural icon –
even now, we all love Lucy!
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| Lucy and Maureen |
As an aside, when Lucille Ball married Desi Arnaz in 1940,
she had to lie about her age as she was six years older than him, very much
taboo at the time. Dorothy Arzner would have been sympathetic but this was
exactly the kind of issue she was raising in pseudo-puritanical America.
Dance, Girl Dance and the much earlier Working
Girls (1931) both illustrate the dilemma facing women who were simply
trying to make a living. In the latter film the women are forced into seeking
inappropriate men for financial and societal security only to find themselves
and as a result the men they ought to marry. In this first film, Ball and
O’Hara are also struggling to make ends meet but there’s also a higher ambition
at work, at least for the latter’s character Judy O'Brien who dreams of
becoming a ballet dancer even though she starts the film in the chorus line of
a review playing Akron, Ohio.
You look like a star, the one that keeps shining after
all the others have quit… You know, the Morning Star.
Leading the girls is the exuberant Bubbles (Ball) a been
there, done that, seen it all kind of gal who knows how to get male attention
whether on stage or off it – restaurants, night clubs, department stores. Turns
out their venue is the front for a gambling den and the police duly raid and
the manager makes his escape taking their wages with him, Judy remonstrates
with the police in an innocent way only for a well-oiled, well-heeled, James
'Jimmy' Harris Jr (an excellent, world-weary turn from Louis Hayward) to take up her case.
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| Louis Hayward |
Jimmy’s “celebrating” his impending divorce and even young
Judy can see through his bluff… He’s so happy he can’t bear to look into her
blue eyes even though she looks like the Morning Star and ends up going dancing
with Bubbles only to find another reminder of his marriage in the form of Ferdinand
the toy bull which he gives to her before taking his leave. Bubbles retires
hurt and passes the twice rejected toy to her pal as she practices her
extensions in their hotel room.
Bubbles pities Judy’s classical delusions but, as she
says, ambition is the key and both are driven by a desire to fulfil themselves either
cynically or creatively. The men may disappoint but they’re incidental to these
goals, or at least, not an end in themselves, just a means. You’ll search hard
for a film of this period which doesn’t go all lovey-dovey on this point;
Arzner is, as Lucy Bolton said, standing alone on this issue of feminine self-actualisation.
I’ll say one thing for you Pavlova, you’ve certainly got
ambition, even if it’s dumb. Y’know, I’ve got ambition too, only I don’t have
to crack my joints to get where I’m goin’, I got brains…
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| Bubbles about to bounce back |
Back in New York, we meet another one of the director’s
great women characters, former Bolshoi ballet dancer, Madame Lydia Basilova (the
fabulous Maria Ouspenskaya), who is teaching Judy but also managing the group’s
careers so far as is possible. Lydia’s pragmatism – we need Bubbles to sell
dance to the men – is balanced by her soft spot for Judy who she will give a
chance to become what she was. Even among all the hardship, there has to be
room for dreams and for luck even as Lydia is knocked down by a car as she
takes her long shot to meet New York Ballet choreographer Steve Adams (likeable
Ralph Bellamy).
With her dying breath Lydia urges Judy to see Steve
and a few days afterwards she summons up the courage to see him, meeting
another of Arzner’s competent women, his right-hand woman Miss Olmstead (Katharine
Alexander), who agrees to mention her to him. As she waits Judy watches a
rehearsal of the ballet troupe and the film, before Gene Kelly, before Powell
& Pressburger (see above quotation…), features a whole sequence of
classical dance led by Vivien Fay accompanied by a fifty-piece orchestra.
Arzner also features routines of burlesque with a
25-piece orchestra, the Leon Taz South American tango band for the nightclub scenes
and a "Negro jive band of 12 pieces" for the Palais Royale chorus
number at the beginning. The trade press at the time couldn’t see beyond what
they thought were standard storylines, but Arzner was looking for artistic and
emotional authenticity and was presenting these well-worn tropes for the women’s
perspective and, daringly, without the need for a romantic conclusion.
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| You'll never beat the Irish. |
What follows is a series of near misses and misadventures
as Judy loses faith in herself after seeing the professionals dance, ending up
as Bubble’s stooge ballet dancing at the nightclub, getting barracked by an
audience that only wants to see the star. It’s cruel but as Bubbles says, $25 a
week is nothing to sniff at. In dramatic terms it gives Judy the lowest of her
low, humiliation on a level with James Murray’s in The Crowd or Joel
McCrea in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. As with those two
character’s redemption comes in the way they realise the power to arrest their
fall is within themselves: accepting their situation and renewing their resolve.
How this happens for Judy is extraordinary and one of the
highlights of Arzner’s cinema which simply has to be experienced in the context
of the film. It was a real treat to see this play out on the BFI’s big screen
and from their 35mm print. If you missed it, Criterion have a gorgeous Blu-ray
which has now filled the yawning Dance, Girl Dance gap on my shelves. So much
to see in this film… its reputation has understandably grown over the years;
Arzner was ahead of some of her audience but especially the studios she worked
with.
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| Dorothy Hall and Judith Wood |
Talking of which, nine years earlier, and in a demi-monde
far removed, Arzner filmed similar themes in Working Girls a more
down-to-Earth tale of the loves of two sisters, June (aged 20) and Mae Thorpe
(aged 19) as played by Judith Wood and Dorothy Hall. Scripted by Zoë
Akins, this was based on the play Blind Mice, written by two other
women, Vera Caspary and Winifred Lenihan and concerns the girls’ attempts to
find work and romance after moving from Indiana.
Arzner later stated that this was one of her favourite
films and there is a sense of fun throughout especially the quick-fire
bickering of the two sisters, the elder June constantly trying to make the
extra twelve months carry more weight than they should with her less knowing
and more broadly comic sister. The two rent a room at a home for young ladies
and there’s a brief flicker of something when June winks at the eccentric
Loretta (Dorothy Stickney) who acts as doorwoman for the building.
The girls find work, Mae as a secretary for a scientist
repeatedly described as an older man, Dr Joseph von Schraeder (Paul Lukas) and
June as a telegraph operator at a department store. Relationships soon follow
as June is impressed by an easy-going saxophonist, Pat Kelly (Stuart Erwin) who
lavishes her with orchids, chocolates and jewellery whilst a deeper love is
formed between her sister and Boyd Wheeler (Charles “Buddy” Rodgers) whose
father owns the company she works for and who she has already met when he sent
a telegraph.
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| Charles Buddy Rogers and Frances Dee |
Mae calls Boyd Big Frog whilst he calls her Little Frog –
it’s an in-joke based on their first meeting and it does allow me to deploy the
following pun as it looks as if their relationship might croak when he agrees
to marry a woman of his own class and not the one he – perhaps – loves. Mae
finds out and calls him up only for him to hang up… at which point our feeling
is surely that she can do better than this.
She’s already had a proposal from ol’ man von Schraeder
(Lukas was all of 36 at the time, with Wood and Hall both 25…) who promptly
fired her when she confessed her love for another but she goes back and
reluctantly agrees to accept his original proposal. As with most Hollywood
films, the romantic happy ending was an ending in itself but Arzner makes it
clear that Mae’s doing this out of desperation.
Are women simply defined by their marital status and what
choice should they have in a tough World in which “working girls” aren’t always
paid the respect they deserve? Arzner pulls together some resounding answers in
skilful ways that may be convoluted but are ultimately satisfying, especially
if you read between the lines and try to decipher her true meaning.
Every film’s an education in a one-woman cinematic
sub-culture from Pre-Code to Post-Code, she delivers more than it may seem and
certainly more than you expect from the period which she clearly transcends.
I've looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It's love's illusions I recall
I really don't know love at all…
Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now (1967)
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| Dorothy Stickney |
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