DANCE, GIRL, DANCE: Blu-ray (RKO, 1940) Criterion

By now the secret is out about director, Dorothy Arzner; that, she was a very rare breed – and not just by Hollywood’s Benzedrine-driven standards. A determined and passionate film-maker who, arguably, possessed a man’s temperament for the picture-making craft, also to have made no bones about her sexuality, favoring a 40-yr. ‘relationship’ with dancer/choreographer, Marion Morgan, - not only a lesbian, but 10-yrs. her senior (shocking!) Arzner would later be linked ‘romantically’ to the likes of Alla Nazimova and Billie Burke – also, perhaps, Joan Crawford, though much of this remains purely speculative as, with the passage of time, the principals involved are long gone. So, nobody’s talking. At a time when women in general were still expected to remain the decorous appendages of their male counterparts, the San Franciscan-born Arzner, afforded a privileged youth, was surrounded by fabulously wealthy and famous people – among them, Maude Adams, Sarah Bernhardt and David Warfield. Initially, she set her sights on a medical degree, while becoming extremely well-versed in architecture and art history.  Her aspirations to become a film director, likely, did not entirely ferment, even at the outset of her tenure with Paramount Pictures, working as a cutter; the studio, promoting her within a year’s time to a 2-year contract to direct. And although she accepted, when the contract was up, Arzner chose to go rogue as a freelancer, rather than renew her option – a very gutsy decision.

In Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), Arzner’s second to last effort on celluloid, and, a colossal flop, showing a $400,000 loss on RKO’s ledgers, her affinity for telling female-centric stories expressly from a woman’s perspective emerges fully formed. The plight of a pair of penniless chorines – the first, Bubbles, played strictly as camp by a young Lucille Ball, presumably lacks any great talent but oozes sex appeal, while the other, top-billed Maureen O’Hara, who, as starry-eyed Judy O’Brien – leads with her chin, possessing the gifts, if not the hardened temperament of a trained dancer, doomed to have her heart’s desires crushed. Arzner’s indictment here is pointedly clear - that in the real (even reel) world, talent is never enough, and, in these male-dominated spheres of influence, sex sells more and better than raw ability any day of the week. Despite its title, and a few forgettable songs peppered in, Dance Girl, Dance is a melodrama with a creaky premise, the screenplay by Vicki Baum, Frank Davis, and, Tess Slesinger, rather insincerely focused on the careworn ‘shop girl makes good’ scenario, ever so slightly tweaked. Now, it’s the chorine, Judy O’Brien who rises to the top of her profession after enduring her inevitable share of detours. Judy loses her mentor, the mannish ballet mistress, Madame Lydia Basilova (Maria Ouspenskaya) in a fateful accident – struck and killed by an oncoming truck – mistakes Broadway producer, Steve Adams (Ralph Bellamy) for being a wolf with only one thing on his mind, and, twice loses her would-be lover, Jimmy Harris (Louis Hayward) – first, to rival, Bubbles (a.k.a. Lily White), who weds Jimmy on the sly, and then, to his first wife, Eleanor (Virginia Field) to whom Bubbles tosses him back – for a cool $50,000. Despite Jim’s loose morals and frequent run-ins with the bottle, Eleanor loves him dearly.

Dance Girl, Dance traverses a fairly pedestrian ‘rags to riches’ story. What marks it refreshing, if hardly original, is Arzner’s quiet approach from behind – the tale told mostly from the girls’ perspectives, and, with more than a modicum of empathy for the varied concessions women make in order to succeed in a world not of their own design. For Bubbles, it’s a sell-off. She eagerly trades sex appeal and sex itself for an affluent benefactor and the fleeting popularity afforded a statuesque Burlesque queen who, with perhaps a tad too much optimism on Arzner’s part, takes her crude pantomime from a seedy Akron speakeasy to the bright lights of Broadway, going legit. The act Bubbles procures to get her name up there in lights bears mentioning – a very bawdy display in which wind machines chronically threaten to tear off her diaphanous gown in front a full house of leering men while she belts out two pop tunes co-written by Chet Forrest and Bob Wright – ‘Mother, What Do I Do Now?’ and ‘Jitterbug Bite’. Knowing Judy is desperate to dance, Bubbles gets her a cameo in this gaudy spectacle. Alas, what Judy perceives as an offer to perform legitimate ballet at $25 a week, turns utterly rancid when the male audience caterwauls her off the stage. This humiliation is made complete when Bubbles is a hit and Judy must continue on with this nightly degradation, billed as her ‘stooge’.

Here, Arzner is principally sympathetic to Judy, even affording her a crucial moment of redemption when, after one exceptionally hellish performance, she suddenly pauses to severely censure the male audience for their disgusting display, suggesting their objectification here is only because they cannot get away with such crass behavior at home. She challenges the patrons to reconsider their low opinion of her. How would they feel if the girl on stage was their mother, sister, sweetheart or wife? Neither Arzner nor the screenplay makes this moment anything more than a heartfelt smack-down. The point is made and the moment resolved with a show of applause – show-biz respect owed and paid in full. The last act of Dance, Girl, Dance is much too optimistic for these hard-knock and shadowy illusions about women forced to prostitute themselves for money, fame and love. Having sworn off Burlesque, blackened Bubbles’ eye in a public brawl and landing in night court to accept her punishment for being ‘a bad girl’, a reformed Judy learns the stage door Johnny she has narrowly avoided for weeks and the Broadway producer she has been desperate to meet, are, in fact, one in the same. A sheepish Judy melts into tears and is gingerly embraced by Steve Adams in his office, presumably, having taken her lumps, and, thus ready to begin the real start of her formal dance career.

Arguably, if not for Arzner, Dance, Girl, Dance would not enjoy the renaissance its reputation has today. Arzner was the only woman to have broken into the boy’s club of Hollywood directors back in the day (and looking the part too, with severely cropped hair, sans make-up, attired in pants, and, frequently, double-breasted suits – a gender-bending shocker), having made her mark on the picture-making biz, only to leave it just before post-war conservatism kicked in, and likely would have, at any rate, kicked her out for testing these sexual mores. Lesbianism, like homosexuality, was not to be tolerated – at least publicly, though it decidedly had its proliferation and flourish once the cameras stopped rolling. Yet, Arzner had an added problem here: most of the female stars who populated her pictures made rather ‘uncomfortable’ – a word of varied meaning. Katherine Hepburn famously disliked Arzner, perhaps - in part - because the picture she made for Arzner – 1933’s Christopher Strong – in which Hepburn became Arzner’s androgynous surrogate on the screen, had branded Kate ‘box office poison’. Lucille Ball otherwise found Arzner ‘amusing’, in her later career, to poke fun at Arzner’s mannish looks.  And realistically, Arzner’s reputation, held in high regard today, is not so much based on her body of work – nor, did Hollywood take much notice of either her or it then, even as its only woman director. No - Arzner’s accolades today are heavily weighed on a sort of retrospective astonishment, only partly based on the merits of the work itself - that she competently directed 17 movies, or, in fact, was allowed to within a very brief ascendance, and seemingly, without opposition, to direct at all.

Viewed today, Dance Girl, Dance lacks the forward-propelling trajectory of a good screenplay to make it truly memorable. Arzner’s approach to the material is, of course, always fascinating – at a glance – as she makes every endeavor to illustrate a woman’s intellectual ballast, too often confined, even obfuscated, by the male perspective, overly hung up on residual physical beauty to see its worth. The dance sequences are marked by each chorine’s unapologetic cognizance they are being diminished by this insidious male gaze. Arzner’s ethos on the objectification of women, and a woman’s ability to, if not reform it, then distinctly confront it, even use it to her own advantage, gives way to a naïve triumph, as the picture’s finale’s diffuses much of the ‘point’ into just another rank Hollywood ‘happily ever after’. Relying on the company of women, instead of the company they keep, and, a woman’s passion to pursue life, love and liberty on her own terms, Dance Girl, Dance is firmly situated in that creative chasm between first and second wave feminism. That is should appeal to these women-identifying narratives today is, therefore, no great surprise.

That the picture should also be considered a cornerstone in that pantheon, made by and for women, is perhaps a stretch. After all, Judy’s berating of the male clientele, paid to see a ‘tits and ass’ kind of show, is likely Arzner’s most transparent indictment on the Hollywood establishment who - let us be fair and be very clear to reconsider herein - have made an art of equal opportunity sexism, indiscriminately creating archetypal sexpots and he-men. Women in the audience, circa 1940, were not going to the movies to see a Clark Gable, Cary Grant, or Tyrone Power to improve their minds! So, if anything, Dance, Girl, Dance is equal opportunity sexism, and, does for women what the ‘buddy-buddy’ picture usually did for men. Alas, there are far better examples of this aphorism in pictures like Stage Door (1937). Despite its shortcomings, Dance, Girl, Dance has a sort of seedy charm, the variant of its Cinderella-themed premise, complete with tacked on fairy-tale ending in the arms of a Prince Charming, is, I suspect, Arzner’s knee/jerk attempt to realign the picture with audience expectations of the day, thus to ensure its box office. But does it work? It certainly did not in 1940. And even if time does strange things to movies, this one has not altogether improved with age.

Criterion’s Blu-ray is culled from a strikingly handsome and fully restored 4K remastering effort, curated by Warner Home Video – the current custodians of the old RKO library – albeit, in 1080p and, is immaculate from start to finish. The B&W image is razor-sharp, with excellent contrast, exquisite amounts of fine detail and a light smattering of grain looking very indigenous to its source. Certainly, nothing to complain about here. Were that Warner could have spent the extra coin to do such a bang-up job on The Philadelphia Story, and infinitely more rewarding and better movie from this same year, given short-shrift on Criterion’s Blu-ray release from nearly a year ago. The PCM 1.0 audio on Dance, Girl, Dance is as impressive, with exceptional clarity. This disc is fairly lightly on extras. Derived from an interview for Criterion’s digital streaming channel, critic, B. Ruby Rich waxes for 15-informative-minutes on Arzner’s career, with film clips culled from some of her more higher profile projects, including Craig’s Wife (1936) and Christopher Strong – both movies looking as though they have been fed through a meat grinder. The other newly recorded featurette here is 10-mins. with Francis Ford Coppola, who recalls his youth in film-school, a disciple of Arzner, who not only taught him the craft of editing/directing, but bought the struggling student a club sandwich besides. Decades later, Coppola’s vineyard marketed a straight rye whiskey in Arzner’s honor. Aside: not having seen Coppola for some time, I was alarmed by his gaunt appearance. He looks considerably more than a little frail and considerably more unwell than his 81-years. Finally, we get liner notes from critic, Sheila O’Malley – an interesting, though hardly comprehensive read. Bottom line: Dance, Girl, Dance is an ‘okay’ movie, mostly buoyed by Arzner’s newly unearthed cache as the only woman auteur from Hollywood’s golden age. Personally, I do not think Dance, Girl, Dance is a great film, regardless of who made it. It’s a passable entertainment. There are better ones out there. The Blu-ray is perfect, however. So, judge and buy accordingly.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

3

VIDEO/AUDIO

5+

EXTRAS

2