Dorothy Arzner (1940)
Dorothy Arzner was one of the very few female directors in Hollywood in the inter-war years and (just) beyond: her first feature was Fashions for Women (1927) and her last First Comes Courage (1943). Dance, Girl, Dance, Arzner’s penultimate feature, is also her best known. Its two main characters are diametrically opposed performers: conscientious Judy O’Brien (Maureen O’Hara), who wants to be a ballerina and an artist, and brassy Bubbles White (Lucille Ball), who wants to be a success. At the start, both are members of a dance troupe whose teacher-manager, Madame Basilova (Maria Ouspenskaya), seems to accept the financial imperative of artistic compromise: we first see her troupe as a chorus line performing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ in a club in Akron, Ohio. It’s after police raid the club, which houses a backstage gambling den, that Judy and Bubbles meet the rich and rakish Jimmy Harris (Louis Hayward), currently in the process of getting divorced. The action switches to New York, where Bubbles gets a job as a burlesque dancer and Madame Basilova arranges an audition for Judy with ballet impresario Steve Adams (Ralph Bellamy). As they make their way there, Basilova is knocked down by a car and dies of her injuries. Judy still turns up for the audition but loses her nerve and exits before meeting Adams. She doesn’t realise he’s the man who, as they both leave the building in pouring rain, offers her an umbrella, then a taxi ride, and whom she crossly rebuffs. A while later, Bubbles – now a burlesque headliner, known as Tiger Lily White – offers Judy a role in her show. As hard up as she’s naïve, Judy accepts. She becomes Bubbles/Tiger Lily’s stooge, performing a piece of straight ballet in between Lily’s numbers. Judy’s chaste routine soon has the male audience impatiently roaring for Judy to get off stage and Lily to get back on it. Bubbles can’t understand why Judy is upset by this arrangement: it’s good money.
It’s not surprising that Dance, Girl, Dance has enjoyed an afterlife in feminist film studies. Dorothy Arzner was a highly unusual Hollywood figure, in what she did and in how she looked: Madame Basilova’s mannish clothes and hairstyle in the film appear to be modelled on Arzner’s own appearance. In their polar opposite ways, Judy and Bubbles are both determinedly ambitious; each does work that puts her body on public display. A climactic sequence in the burlesque club features two important elements, catalysed by Jimmy. After drowning his sorrows when his ex-wife Elinor (Virginia Field), as soon as they’re divorced, promptly remarries, Jimmy, blind drunk, weds Bubbles. He arrives at the club midway through Judy’s act and, not understanding the stooge set-up, gets on stage to remonstrate with the jeering audience. The hitherto demure Judy, at the end of her tether, suddenly finds a voice. She excoriates the club’s punters for their leering voyeurism, derides them as sexually inadequate. The tirade gets a powerful audience reaction that infuriates Bubbles and leads to an onstage catfight with Judy. In the dock at a night court, the latter is keen to take responsibility for her actions. Jimmy offers to pay the fine that the judge offers her as an alternative to a few days in prison but independent-minded Judy refuses. Before she goes down, she and Bubbles exchange conciliatory words. It’s crucial to the scheme of the film that, in spite of their differences, the two are friends – and sisters.
Dance, Girl, Dance (the title echoes Madame Basilova’s dying words to Judy) is undoubtedly interesting as a piece of cinema history. It’s also, unfortunately, a mostly mediocre film. Arzner was brought in to direct after the original (male) director left the project. She, Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis reworked the script, based on a story by Vicki Baum, to foreground the feminist aspect but the result is an awkward concoction. The cynical elements are discomfiting partly because you’re not sure if they’re meant to be. Steve Adams sees Judy again only when her face appears on the front page of newspapers, as Jimmy’s companion in a restaurant where he assaults ‘Puss in Boots’, his disparaging name for Elinor’s new husband (Sidney Blackmer – Roman Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby many years later). The heedless change-partners of the very wealthy – after the restaurant altercation, Elinor instructs Puss in Boots to get a marriage annulment – is less amusing than acrid. (Jimmy and Elinor end up back together; Bubbles is happy with that – at a price, that she sets.) Judy’s antipathy to Steve Adams until the very end of the film is a feeble contrivance: it’s impossible to understand how she could see him as a wolfish pest, which seems to be the idea, when she’s charmed by the creepy Jimmy. In the final scene, Judy, out of prison, joins Adams’s company and puts her head gratefully on his shoulder. His embrace is a paternal one but this moment too is remarkable in screen history. Ralph Bellamy, whom romantic heroines regularly rejected in favour of a more exciting man, gets the girl – and perhaps twice (professionally and personally).
Arzner’s direction of the main actors is sometimes shaky and not just in the sense that she allows Louis Hayward to play Jimmy in such a phony theatrical style. Several scenes badly lack rhythm and pacing in the delivery of lines. For the most part, Maureen O’Hara’s face is more expressive than her voice. When she speaks in her early scenes, she sounds less Irish-American than straight out of an elocution class and straining for sensitive tone. Even though O’Hara’s better when she gets angry (and more Irish), Judy is a rather dreary complement to Lucille Ball’s Bubbles. Ball’s less-than-graceful verve makes Tiger Lily’s burlesque routines the most entertaining bits in Dance, Girl, Dance. Her straightforwardness helps avoid the sentimentality implicit in the script’s conception of Bubbles as not only a gold-digger but a heart of gold too. The cast also includes Mary Carlisle, as Judy’s roommate, and Katharine Alexander, quietly witty as Steve Adams’s observant secretary.
26 February 2018
