Both sides now… Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)/Working Girls (1931), BFI Dorothy Arzner Season

 

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!

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.

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…

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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)

Dorothy Stickney

When Buddy met Mary … My Best Girl (1927)

This was Mary Pickford’s last silent film and was produced at the technical high point of the form with Sam Taylor directing and Charles Rosher’s camera generating those smooth “european trick shots” Hollywood had come to love. Like all films of the late period, they feel more modern than they should do given our exposure to the dulled ice age of early talkies which left events stuck in studio, actors huddled around immobile microphones… But here, the camera swoops, travels on speeding motorcars and, most importantly, shows us two people falling in love.

Whether or not the two stars began their relationship with this film is open to debate and it would be a full ten years before they tied the knot to begin their 42-year marriage, but it feels like it.

The future Mrs and Mr Pickford...

Now, for the sums… Mary Pickford was 35 – just a little older than Zooey Dechannel and a little younger than Amy Adams – and still able to carry off the shop girl ingénue. Charles “Buddy” Rogers was just 22… considerably younger than Mary’s hubby Douglas Fairbanks who was 44 at the time.

Regardless of the events off-set, the film stands as one of Pickford’s best and most enduring: a thousand rom-coms have followed in its footsteps including those still featuring Zooey and Amy.

Pots and pans

Pickford produced and it’s hard not to imagine that she also co-directed parts of the film. Our first glimpse of her is of her feet as she attempts to carry too numerous a collection of pots and pans in the department store in which she works. As one pan is picked up another falls to the floor until she has to resort to sticking her feet in them to lift them along – it’s inventively daft and shows us all we need to know about the brave and gutsy shop girl, Maggie Johnson.

Maggie works in Merril’s Department Store – I have a penchant for films set in 1920s department stores: think of Clara Bow in It! or Brent and Brooks in Love ‘em and Leave ‘em… places where society mixes almost on a level and where there’s always the possibility of unexpected dalliances across the class divide.

Are you being served?

A young man sidles up to Maggie’s counter and starts to ask her flirty questions about the various items for sale… turns out he’s the new guy 'Joe' Grant (Rogers) who eventually gets assigned to Maggie for ad hoc induction to the world of the store.

The two get on well and soon share their lunchtimes sitting cosy in a packing crate in the staff room. It is here where we see Mary’s first prolonged screen kiss: a side-on affair that conveys much delicate passion.

Maggie invites Joe home, where he gets to meet the family: Pa Johnson (Lucien Littlefield) a man disorientated by the curious position in which life has left him, not least of which is his easily-shocked and narcoleptic wife (Sunshine Hart) whom he frequently has to rouse with smelling salts.

Then there’s sister Liz (Carmelita Geraghty) a jazz baby hanging around with decidedly-dodgy men and, as a result, in constant conflict with her parents.

Sunshine Hart, Carmelita Geraghty, Mary, Pat Harmon and Lucien Littlefield

Maggie is ashamed of their bad humour and pretends that they are rehearsing for a play, leaving Joe waiting on their porch for their first date.

But she’s not the only one hiding something… “Joe” is actually Joseph, the son and heir to the Merrill fortune who has been assigned to the shop by his father Robert (Hobart Bosworth) in order to learn the business without his name giving him advantage.

His mother Esther (Evelyn Hall) also has ambitions and wants to see him married off to the winsome and wealthy Millicent Rogers (Avonne Taylor). Joe doesn’t appear to have any strong feelings about this social arrangement, at least not yet at any rate.

Buddy Rogers

Joe does well at the store and is soon being promoted but he’s also getting closer and closer to Maggie. To two spend a blissful journey in the back of a truck after walking through traffic as if it wasn’t there: totally absorbed in each other’s presence. This section reminded me strongly of the closing sequence of Sunrise (made some months earlier…) with the couple walking through the staged street traffic…

Joe and Maggie go on a rain-sodden date as he ignores his parent’s request to dine with them – they are planning to announce his engagement. He persuades Maggie to venture to the Merrill’s house to see if the family’s oft-pronounced equal treatment would extend to their being offered dinner.

Winking his way past the doorman and butlers he gets them to lay on a meal whilst Maggie looks around in nervous amazement: even more delighted by her dazzling young man than before. But, they are rudely interrupted by Joe’s parents as they arrive back home with the decorative Millicent in tow… the game’s up!

Meanwhile, Liz’ fella has really dropped her in it and they are being processed before the night court. Unable to contact the brains of the family, the Johnson’s are helpless to prevent their younger daughter from being locked up.

As luck would have it, Maggie, having tearfully made her excuses and left, encounters Ma and Pa downtown as they enter the court: she goes into battle for her sister in front of a Judge played by Mack Swain.

But Joe isn’t done yet and goes out in search of his “best girl” – he’s not going to be swayed. A helpful hobo spots events and directs him to the court where he is in time to see Maggie’s eloquent defence and to end up in clink after thumping Liz’s no good boyfriend.

Maggie brings order to the court

It makes the papers and there’s a big stink but, will class barriers be broken and will true love run smooth… We been here before my friends and I have no intention of revealing what happens.
 
My Best Girl is a lovely film and one to file under heart-warming. Rogers is good in the same way he was in Wings: wholehearted and sincere… my teenage daughter recognised those regular features instantly!

But he’s not the one you watch. It’s Mary’s show and she demonstrates an undimmed intensity with a face and a voice that can almost be heard… so close is she to the talkies. She performs particularly well in the ending section I’m not mentioning and there was hardly a dry eye in our living room: how can she do that when we can almost see it coming!? Amazing skill: a wizard and a true star!

The look of love...

I watched the Milestone DVD which comes with some precious home movie footage showing Mary and Buddy’s wedding and their honeymoon – a nice touch. Whatever the ups and downs of the decades to follow this was one of those Hollywood marriages built to last. It may have started here in front of our very eyes.

My Best Girl is available direct for institutional use from Milestone or from Amazon’s second hand sellers – seems it’s out of print and becoming collectable. Hopefully the good folks at Milestone have a Blu-ray in the works, this is indeed amongst the very best of Pickford.

Trivia: Carole Lombard has an uncredited appearance as a Flirty Salesgirl whilst Charles Rosher deservedly received an Academy Award nomination for his cinematography. He shot so many of Pickford’s films not to mention his other projects with Herr Murnau.

Carole Lombard and Buddy

Wild Bill keeping it real in… Wings (1927)

“Wild” Bill Wellman is described as being one of the minority of Hollywood directors who had “lived a life” before they began to make movies, having been a professional hockey player, a lumberjack and a fighter pilot in the First World War. This could explain his attempts at realism and his toughness with actors and crew alike. You can certainly see that on Beggars of Life but, before that, he made the astonishing Wings.

The film famously won an Oscar for Best Production whilst Sunrise won Best Artistic Achievement, which pretty much says it all. Wings was an outstanding production, not a great story but a great adventure made under the most difficult of circumstances and featuring incredible bravery from its makers.

If the action in Wings looks real that’s because it pretty much is. Wellman figured that the only way to get the genuine feeling of combat flight was to throw his cast up into the air and film them there. As a result, Richard Arlen, who could already fly having also served in the Great War, and Charles "Buddy" Rogers, who couldn’t fly but quickly learned… are both seen acting their socks off as their planes climb, dive and otherwise career violently through the sky.

Rogers in particular earned his director’s respect for braving the 100 flying hours it took even though he was invariably sick on landing.

Electrical cameras were fixed onto the planes that could be controlled by the actor-pilots as they flung themselves into carefully choreographed dog fights. Stuntmen flyers were also used and some pushed the envelope as far as possible with one filming himself spiralling towards near death (he pulled out at the last moment) and it is a miracle that no one died making this film.

The reward was one of the earliest and best films about aerial combat and one which surpasses Hells Angels and the many similar films that followed in terms of realism and suspense. It is genuinely amazing as I said before.

The perils of the air battle overshadow the rest of the film which never-the-less has good moments and great performances.

Rogers plays Jack Powell, a small town petrol head who is young and naïve. The girl next door, Mary Preston (Clara Bow) loves him more than he loves his car but he’s too busy longing for the unobtainable Sylvia (Jobyna Ralston) to notice.

As it happens, Sylvia loves another, well-to-do David Armstrong (Richard Arlen) who reciprocates.

The two enlist for the flying core and leave the girls behind with Jack mistakenly believing that the picture he took from Sylvia was meant for him when it was intended for David. David knows this and takes care never to let on. David takes his old toy bear with him for luck… never a good sign in this kind of film!

The two men undergo their training with the obligatory moments of slapstick (largely provided by El Brendel with his stars and stripes tattoo) intermingling with more serious precursors of what is to come.

One of the more experienced airmen, Cadet White, is a tall good-lookin’ fella (played by young Cary Cooper) who seems to be at peace with the whole business. He has a few minutes of enigmatic screen time but never returns after his plane crashes on a training run. Death is close for all these characters even before they get to the front.

The scene shifts to France where the boys encounter their first action from a more experienced groups of German pilots – they survive their baptism of fire thanks to the chivalry of their opponents: something Wellman carried with him from the conflict?

Meanwhile, Mary has also enrolled and resolved to follow Jack to the war as a member of the Women’s Army Corps. She is seen driving a truck behind the lines, knocking over and knocking out some of the men.

She is next seen in a bizarre sequence when the boys are on leave in Paris. Jack is drunk as a skunk and obsessing with bubbles. He decides Mary has more bubble than his French companion even though he doesn’t recognise her dressed in burlesque party gear. She drags him back to his room but before she can sober him up and tell him all the things she’s bottled up, the MPs arrive to collect him – the big push is about to start and all leave is cancelled.

The two men head back and are to take part in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel. This is the film’s massive set piece and utilised thousands of US Army soldiers on foot and in tanks. The crew had dug up acres of land near the airbase they had taken over and it passed for bomb smashed northern France. Explosions were remote controlled and the whole battle conducted with pin-point timing. Compared to something like the Big Parade, Wings was a step-forward in battle-front realism even if its story is not as strong as Vidor’s.

The battle rages and David is believed killed after he has crash landed behind enemy lines… Jack swears vengeance as things escalate toward a fateful climax. Will David fight his way back, will Jack find him and will Mary ever get to tell Jack that she loves him?

You can guess at some of the answers but this was one of the first films to raise those questions and they have been asked a thousand times since. Very rarely as successfully.

Bow gives a strong performance making a lot of the relatively small time she has on screen. Naturally she acts with wit but she’s also called upon to make serious emotional commitments in many scenes and does so believably and movingly.

Yes she’s the light relief, and the sex appeal (appearing topless in one very brief moment after being interrupted in Jack’s hotel room… how very daring Mr Wellman!) but she’s also the tragedy waiting to happen: one of the many who stayed at home and who stands to never have the love she deserves because of the war.

In addition to flying admirably and so very bravely, Arlen is the more expressive of the two male leads and leaves more in check than Rogers. You can see why Wellman was so keen to work with him again in the following year’s Beggars of Life.

I know less about Charles “Buddy” Rogers but he gives a good performance as the younger man and he is the character most transformed by events. The emblem of a million men who enrolled for glory and found the bitter disappointment that only survival could bring. That Wellman knew this from his own experience gives the film added authenticity.

Wings is presented in superb quality on the recently-released DVD and Blu-ray sets - available from Amazons all over. Both come with an excellent documentary on the making of the film which includes an interview with Welman’s son.

It looks pristine - I mean knock-your-socks-off, amazingly pristine! - and held the attention of my teenage daughter for the whole two and a half hours – yes, even when The Big Bang Theory was on. At the end she had a tear in her eye… that says it all about the enduring truths of love and war as well as the durability of great filmmaking.