After Dance With Me, Henry I screened Charles a great film whose title also began with the word “Dance”: Dance, Girl, Dance, a 1940 movie that became an icon among feminist critics in the 1970’s when they were rediscovering the work of director Dorothy Arzner, the only woman to have a major career as a Hollywood filmmaker in the 1930’s. (There had been some quite significant female filmmakers in the silent era, notably Alice Guy and Lois Weber, but after Arzner dropped out of feature filmmaking there wouldn’t be another major woman director until actress Ida Lupino tried her hand at making a few films as director in 1949-1953.) Arzner’s rediscovery was helped by the fact that she was still alive, willing to be interviewed about her career and also open about being a Lesbian — in fact, she said, her sexual orientation towards women helped male directors accept her as “one of the boys” and thereby be more tolerant of her than they’d have been towards a straight woman attempting a directorial career — even though quite a few of her movies involved her taking a project over from a male director who’d been either fired (George Fitzmaurice on Nana,1934), died (Richard Boleslawski on The Bride Wore Red, 1937) or quit (Roy Del Ruth here; he left Dance, Girl, Dance after two weeks because he couldn’t get along with the producer, Erich Pommer, the former UFA studio head who’d fled the Nazis in 1933). Dance, Girl, Dance got seized on by feminist critics even more than Arzner’s other films because they read it as a movie about female bonding — even though the female leads here, Maureen O’Hara and Lucille Ball, spend a lot more screen time battling than bonding and the film’s big climax is a cat-fight scene between them. (Ironically, O’Hara and Ball were best buds off-screen; they formed a friendship while making this film that lasted until Ball’s death nearly 50 years later.) The film opens in Akron, Ohio with a scene screenwriters Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis, working from a story by Grand Hotel author Vicki Baum, clearly ripped off from the 1933 MGM musical Dancing Lady: dancers Bubbles (Lucille Ball), Judy O’Brien (Maureen O’Hara) and Sally (Mary Carlisle, who gets lost in the shuffle even though she’s supposed to be rooming with the other two) are part of an eight-person chorus line in a sleazy nightclub that gets raided because it’s really a front for an illegal casino.
They’re bailed out by Jimmy Harris, Jr.
(Louis Hayward), son of the owner of “Harris Tires” (read: Goodyear), who’s
just coming off the failure of his latest marriage to Elinor (Virginia Field)
when he successively dates Judy and Bubbles and gives Bubbles a stuffed toy of
Ferdinand the Bull, which he picked up years before at the Club Ferdinand in
New York when he and Elinor were dating. His interests first run to Judy until
he notices that she has blue eyes, which immediately turns him off because — as
we learn much later — Elinor had
blue eyes. Then he takes up with Bubbles, though he soon dumps her and it’s
another sugar daddy whom Bubbles gets to take her back to their home base, New
York City, while Judy and Sally have to hitchhike. It turns out that all three
girls are part of a ballet troupe being trained by Madame Lydia Basilova (Maria
Ouspenskaya), former star of the Russian Imperial Ballet who’s hoping to make a
comeback in the U.S. as a choreographer and dance teacher. (Charles questioned
why Lydia and her students seemed to have so much space available in a tenement
building in New York, but the establishing shot of the building showed a “For
Sale” sign and I guessed we were supposed to assume the other tenants had
already moved out.) Lydia regards Judy as her prize student (something we’re
going to have to take on trust because the one extended sequence we see of her
dancing has her mostly with her back to the camera — obviously Maureen O’Hara had a dance double) and wants to
place her with the New York ballet company of impresario and choreographer
Steve Adams (Ralph Bellamy), only while the two of them are on their way to
Adams’ office Madame Lydia is struck by a car and killed. Judy hangs around
Adams’ office but then leaves before the Great Man can see her, and he offers
her a ride home in the rain but she virtuously insists on walking. This gives
her a cold and she’s nursed back to health by her roommate Sally. The two of
them wonder where Bubbles has gone, and it turns out her latest sugar daddy has
got her a job doing burlesque in New Jersey, and she’s been so good at
stripping that now she’s a star at a major New York burlesque house. What’s more,
she’s willing to offer Judy a job for $25 per week doing a ballet dance as part
of her act — though what Judy doesn’t know until the first night she goes on is
that Bubbles, who now calls herself “Tiger Lily White” (the writers’ obvious
takeoff on Gypsy Rose Lee), only wants her as a stooge, someone the audience
will laugh at and heckle until Tiger Lily retakes the stage and gives them the
sort of dancing they really want.
She continues in this humiliating employment for some time until, just when
we’re starting to wonder why Louis Hayward got second billing (behind O’Hara
but ahead of Ball), he turns up midway through the running time and starts
seeing Judy after crashing the theatre where she and Bubbles work and chewing
out the people who are heckling her. By then he and Elinor have divorced and
Elinor has got remarried to the attorney that handled her divorce, but she’s
still stalking Jimmy and obviously wants him back — though Louis Hayward is
such a pathetic weakling (he even admits this to Judy at one point) one wonders
why any woman would put up with
him (or, for that matter, why his father back home in Akron hasn’t disowned
him). Jimmy takes Judy on a date to the Club Ferdinand, breaking his promise to
Elinor not to take any subsequent girlfriend there, and of course Elinor shows
up with her new husband and an entire entourage and catches him. Jimmy punches out the new man in
Elinor’s wife, Judy slinks home in disgust, and Jimmy ends up in the mercenary
ministrations of Bubbles, who whisks him off to Virginia and marries him,
seeing him as her ticket out of ever having to work again. Bubbles shows up at
the burlesque theatre for what she says is her last performance, and Judy gets
tired of stooge-dom and chews out the audience in a speech that’s been quoted
by virtually everyone who’s written about this film: “Go on, laugh, get your
money’s worth. No one’s going to hurt you. I know you want me to tear my
clothes off so you can look your fifty cents’ worth. Fifty cents for the
privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives won’t let you. What do you
suppose we think of you up here, with your silly smirks your mothers would be
ashamed of?” Spotting some well-dressed society types in the audience, she goes
on, “We know it’s the thing of the moment for the dress suits to come and laugh
at us too. We’d laugh right back at the lot of you, only we’re paid to let you
sit there and roll your eyes and make your screamingly clever remarks. What’s
it for? So you can go home when the show’s over, strut before your wives and
sweethearts and play at being the stronger sex for a minute? I’m sure they see
through you. I’m sure they see through you just like we do!” Fortunately for
her, among the people in the audience that night are Steve Adams — ya remember Steve
Adams? — and his assistant Fitch (Ernö
Verebes), and Adams, whom she’s been avoiding or narrowly missing all movie,
finally introduces himself to her and the two walk together. (Ralph Bellamy as
the winner in a romantic triangle
was as much of a surprise to 1940 audiences as it would be to film buffs today
— though in the end, as in the beginning, the writers were ripping off Dancing
Lady again, pairing the female lead with
someone who can be her professional and personal partner instead of the rich wastrel who was his rival.)
Judging from the films of hers I’ve seen so far — The Wild Party (1929), Christopher Strong (1933), The Bride Wore Red (1937) and this one — I’d say Dorothy Arzner’s great
strength as a director was her ability to put fresh “spins” on old, clichéd
situations and make them seem fresh and original. I particularly like Christopher
Strong because the edgy direction of Arzner
and the anti-“type” casting of Katharine Hepburn (in her second film) and Colin
Clive gives a marvelous air of complexity to what is otherwise a pretty
standard and even stodgy soap-opera plot. The situations of Dance,
Girl, Dance are pretty familiar one by one,
but the story as a whole is a nervy mixture of screwball comedy and soap opera,
and Arzner brings weight and power to otherwise overly familiar movie tropes.
The other thing I particularly like about this film is the excellent acting of
Lucille Ball as the hard-bitten Bubbles, who works her ass off for success that
only makes her bitchier. Lucille Ball was a woefully underrated actress with a lot of potential she barely touched on, and one of the
things she could do surprisingly well was spoiled-brat diva. In films like this, The Big Street (1942) — a marvelous showcase role that should have
made her a dramatic star — and DuBarry Was a Lady (1943) she’s utterly convincing as a bitch. Alas,
after The Big Street she left
RKO, where she’d clawed her way up from being a fashion model in the finale of Roberta (1935) to at least the “B-plus”-list, and went to
MGM, where she was just a small fish in a really big pond. Aside from DuBarry — her first MGM film, her first film in color and
the one for which MGM hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff concocted the shrieking
red-hair dye that became one of her trademarks for the rest of her life — and
arguably Easy to Wed (the remake
of Libeled Lady in which Ball
took the Jean Harlow role), Ball got sucked into a lot of dreary roles at MGM
that almost anyone could have played, and it was only on loanouts like Lured (1947) — which cast her convincingly as an
undercover operative out to catch a serial killer — and Easy Living (1949) — that she got to show the acting chops she
still had. Ball’s career changed when she signed with Columbia and they gave
her two slapstick comedies, Miss Grant Takes Richmond and The Fuller Brush Girl, and then CBS asked her to do a TV version of her
radio series My Favorite Husband,
in which she was the scatterbrained wife of sportswriter Richard Denning. Only
Lucy didn’t want to do the show unless her husband Desi Arnaz could be her
co-star, and so after a series of reworkings the show ended up casting Lucy as
the scatterbrained wife of small-time Florida bandleader Ricky Ricardo, it was
shot on film in front of a live audience, its title was changed to I
Love Lucy, Desi ended up not only as Lucy’s
co-star but the show’s producer as well, and it was a smash hit that made
Lucille Ball a member of the odd list of talents — Jackie Gleason, Milton
Berle, Phil Silvers, Jack Webb — who’d achieved only minor fame in movies but
became superstars on television.
I got Dance, Girl, Dance as part of a Turner Classic Movies reissue that
included four films in one package by the rather tacky expedient of just
stacking the discs, one on top of each other, on an unusually tall spindle, and
the disc Dance, Girl, Dance was
on contained a couple of bonus items from the days when Warner Home Video was
attempting to package movies as you might have seen them “in the day,” with a
live-action short subject and a cartoon along with the feature. The live-action
short was Just a Cute Kid, a
20-minute weirdie in which Speed (Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards just before his
sensational comeback as the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Walt Disney’s feature Pinocchio),
a hapless man who went $200 in debt to buy an engagement ring for his fiancée
Hortense (Dana Dale), literally sells his body to mad scientist Dr. Clump (Olin
Howland) and has to be saved from death at the madman’s hands by Hortense and
his friend Benny (Frank Faylen) — it’s better than it sounds and the high point
is when Hortense substitutes aspirin for the poison pills Dr. Clump wants Speed
to take, and not knowing this he thrashes around “under the influence” as if
he’s about to die anyway (a gag they ripped off from Laurel and Hardy’s Blotto, in which Laurel and Hardy get drunk on what they
think is bootleg Scotch but is really just cold tea courtesy of the great Anita
Garvin as Mrs. Laurel). The cartoon, one of Warners’ “Merrie Melodies” (when I
was a kid that misspelling really
bothered me!), is called Malibu Beach Party and depicts “Jack Bunny” and his Black servant
“Winchester” hosting the titular celebration and drawing other famous stars of
the time, including obvious caricatures of Bob Hope, Greta Garbo (shown using
her big feet as surfboards), Clark Gable (shown paddling through the water with
his ears) and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (dancing up and down the furniture
like the real ones did in The Gay Divorcée). The climax comes when “Bunny” plays a violin rendition of
“Träumerei” that’s even worse than Jack Benny’s real playing — and by the time
he’s done all the guests have left and he’s sitting on “Winchester” to make
sure he can’t walk out on him!
