A Guide to Dorothy Arzner
The only major female director in Hollywood between the coming of sound and the end of the second World War, Dorothy Arzner is a fascinating case study for a female director project. Unfortunately, few of her films have received official releases.
Dance Girl Dance is widely available and a couple of others (including the Hepburn vehicle
Christopher Strong) are available via Warner Archives. Luckily almost all of the rest are available on backchannels via TCM recordings. Essential films are in red.
Get Your Man (1927) is only partially extant, missing reels two and three out of six. Luckily the remaining reels create a cohesive enough narrative to follow: a dashing young Frenchman (Charles 'Buddy' Rogers) has been engaged to Simone de Valens (Josephine Dunn) since they were babies in order unite the two families. All seems to be going well until he runs into Nancy (Clara Bow) several times in a day and becomes smitten with her brash American attitude. The “proper” European woman can’t hold a candle to the strong and sassy modern woman represented by Bow. The second reel takes place in a wax museum in which Nancy is wonderfully uncouth, mocking the patrons and historical scenes, suggesting that the traditions causing Roger’s engagement are every bit as lifeless as the dummies themselves. When we skip ahead to reel four, she is lounging at Roger’s chateau, having been involved in a car accident right outside the gates (no doubt on purpose). She soon finds out that Simone herself has a lover, meaning that not only is she not the prim and proper woman their families think her to be, but that she and Nancy are in fact allies rather than rivals in trying to break up the marriage. This creates a theme of female solidarity and initiative—“get your man” is spoken by Nancy to Simone—that undercuts the ostensible romantic triangle of the narrative. Nancy cooks up a hilarious scheme in which she will pretend to seduce Simone’s father and demand that he free his daughter of her marriage obligation. Things don’t work as planned, setting up a hilariously great ending. The film is fun and Clara Bow herself is so fucking delightful that I can’t imagine anyone not falling in love with it.
The Wild Party (1929) is a stunningly great early sound film. In large part this is once again because of the incredible Clara Bow, who plays an adorably impetuous college student at an all-girl’s school. Arzner’s camera is obviously in love with her, giving her plenty of glamorous close ups and making her charisma the gravitational pull of the mise-en-scene. She has some incredible outfits here, too: a pretty scandalous dress that get her and some of her comrades kicked out of a school dance and a ridiculous outfit of suspenders and a tie over a sleeveless shirt tucked into a skirt. Fredric March has an early role as the romantic lead, although his character is pretty awful. The film is not really about their relationship, though, but rather the relationship between Bow’s character Stella and the other women at the school, particularly her roommate Helen. Their charisma is ten times that of Stella and March’s character—at one point Stella calls her “you dumb bunny” with such affection that would make anyone melt.
The film is also significant in that it teaches us how to read an Arzner film. While working within the confines of Hollywood’s narrative structures—particularly the requirement of the heterosexual romance as closure—Arzner’s real attention is always somewhere else. I like to think about what is present in an Arzner film that might be missing in an equivalent film: here, it is the close friendship and unwavering loyalty between Stella, Helen, and the other young women. The amount of time that Arzner spends within the all-female world of the dorm room far exceeds the narrative’s requirement. Stella and Helen are never rivals; their goals and desires are always compatible. So while the film develops toward a predictable, arguably sexist conclusion in which Stella realizes how immature she’s been and winds up with March, it does so in a roundabout way that centers Stella’s loyalty to Helen. Indeed, it is her desire to make sure that Helen wins a scholarship that Helen so deserves (and that would allow her to continue going to the school) that actually drives Stella’s act of courage at the end of the film. The romantic coupling is more or less a narrative afterthought. So not only do we have the narratively “excessive” scenes of female bonding that could have been omitted without sacrificing narrative clarity, but the very narrative machinery of the film has actually been re-centered around the relationship between two women rather than a man and a woman.
While I have not read the novel on which the film is based, Judith Mayne argues in her essential book
Directed by Dorothy Arzner that the film completely reverses its representation of an all-girl’s school: whereas the novel represented close female friendships and communities of women as “psychotic,” the film understands them as utopian. Even without the original novel as a point of comparison, the film does indeed represent parts of the school as a kind of utopian space (notably Stella and Helen’s dorm room, where groups of women gather to laugh and joke a collective). Moreover, it imagines how these spaces can forge bonds between women that might extend beyond the school walls themselves: there is a great scene in which several of the girls sneak out to a party with some local men. When one of them starts to drunkenly harass Helen, Stella and several of the others evict him from the party by taking turns twirling him around the room, eventually throwing him out the front door.
Sarah and Son (1930) marks Arzner’s first collaboration with writer Zoe Akins, who would remain with her over the next few films. The film also replaces Clara Bow with Ruth Chatterton, who Paramount hyped as the next big leading lady. At the beginning of the film, Chatterton’s character Sarah is the complete opposite of Bow’s Arzner characters, who were glamorous, reasonably wealthy, and just a bit frivolous. Sarah is an immigrant struggling to make ends meet alongside her lazy, cruel husband. While she isn’t as good as Bow (who is?), I think Chatterton gives a strong performance as a worn down parent focused on trying to make it on the stage. The narrative is filled with melodramatic irony: for example, the film opens with her trying to make enough money on the stage to send for her sister to come to America. Opening night, she receives a telegram that her sister has died. Soon her husband becomes actively cruel, running away and giving their son up for adoption purely to spite Sarah. The main plot of the film is her attempt to track her son down and get him back, a process which takes many years. While not one of Arzner’ stronger films, it is an okay early 1930s melodrama.
Anybody’s Woman (1930), the second Zoe Akins-penned script starring Ruth Chatterton that was directed by Arzner in 1930, is one again distinguished on the basis of Chatterton’s performance. She plays Pansy, a nightclub performer who gets married to a recently divorced lawyer named Neil (Clive Brook) when he’s on a drunken bender. She knows that he can be a decent guy: he had previously defended her after she was arrested on a morals charge for not wearing enough at a burlesque performance, losing respect from some of his upper class clients in the process. After he wakes up the next morning, however, he becomes a drunken louse who verbally abuses her. Much of the film is about the friction between Pansy and Neil’s upper-class society friends, which is complicated by Paul Lukas’ character who falls in love with her.
The film is well worth watching for a couple of reasons: first, the class critique is sharper here than in any of Arzner’s previous extant films. Much of Pansy’s problems stem from moralism and class snobbery: when Neil hosts a dinner party to introduce Pansy to his friends, all of the women pretend to be sick so that they don’t have to meet her. Then, the men are all lecherous toward her, allowing Arzner to interrogate the fundamental hypocrisy in upper class morals: women like Pansy are both desired and denigrated because they are desired. When one of her husband’s friends tries to touch her at the dinner party, Pansy yells at him, shattering this hypocritical façade of upper class society. Indeed, the main reason that this film works is that Chatterton’s forceful performance allows Akins and Arzner to unpack the sexual politics of the upper crust without making Pansy a victim. When Neil regrets having married Pansy, she responds to his attempts to buy her off by saying “I’m not dirt. I’m not going to be swept out like I was!” Later she flat out tells him “you’re not good enough for me!” While there are structural limits to how far this critique can go within Hollywood form, these are impressive moments that make the film work despite its shortcomings.
Working Girls (1931) is a tremendous achievement, both as a great film in its own right and a summing up of the thematic preoccupations of Arzner’s early films, much like her other masterpiece
Dance, Girl, Dance with do for the end of her career. Mae and June and sisters who move to New York for work, moving into a hotel for working girls. The film follows both their careers and their love lives, which become intertwined and hopelessly complicated for both women as the film goes on. The hotel itself is a great site that functions very much like the dormitory in
The Wild Party: a kind of utopia in which the women are freed from the various performances they have to undertake on the outside. Here they can decompress from the tensions at work, dish on their various lovers, and enjoy each other’s company. It also opens up the possibility for same-sex eroticism: there is one scene in particular in which the women gather together in one of the shared rooms and do a bit of dancing with each other. This echoes a female-only dance in the dormitory of
The Wild Party (which Clara Bow and three of her friends get kicked out of for dressing too provocatively). But the scene in
Working Girls also has some incredible eroticized looks between the women, creating a “female gaze” that prefigures some sequences in
Dance, Girl Dance.
The hotel also provides a pedagogical space in which June (who is more experienced in these matters) can coach Mae in how to navigate relationships with men. For example, how to “say yes and no at the same time” and how to maximize gifts. Indeed, like the close friendship between Clara Bow’s character and her roommate in
The Wild Party, the film’s real central relationship is the one between the two sisters. It is often very sweet, especially when June is comforting Mae after her boyfriend leaves her.
The class concerns from
Anybody’s Woman also return in Mae and June’s romantic partners: Mae is dating a “Harvard Man” while June is in a relationship with a saxophone player. While Mae thinks she’s doing better on this front, June is actually far more adept at extracting value from her date (there is a hilarious scene in which she cons him into buying her candy, an orchid, and perfume on their first date). Indeed, the “Harvard Man” is in an on-again-off-again relationship with a proper society lady, creating one of the central plot developments. The actual narrative structure of the film is a bit strange: several last-minute plot twists upend where we think the film is going but are pretty fun. There is an attempt to force a marriage at gunpoint and an incredible final line of the film—“why June, you always told me you didn’t like petting”—that is a great example of pre-code naughtiness.
While one could critique Akin’s writing for the haphazard plot developments towards the end, I actually think the occasionally strange narrative structures of Arzner’s films—
Dance, Girl, Dance is another great example with the bizarre love triangle forced into the film’s third act—is a result of how she values different things than most directors. Perhaps the final fifteen minutes of this film feels busy precisely because Arzner spent so much time setting up the relationship of the sisters and the utopian community of the hotel itself. There is also something perfunctory and even a bit random about how the heterosexual couples are formed, like in
The Wild Party. It is the required narrative trajectory of the Hollywood film, but Arzner’s interest in elsewhere. This is also Zoe Akin’s strongest script for Arzner in terms of dialogue, with plenty of snappy banter between the sisters and clever double-entendres among the rest of the working girls as well.
In short, this is an incredible film that deserves much greater recognition. It has tragically never received a home video release and only circulates in a poor-quality, washed out print. Hopefully some label will eventually rescue this forgotten masterpiece.
Honor Among Lovers (1931). Like
Sarah’s Son, this is a fine but undistinguished melodrama bolstered by some strong central performances. Claudette Colbert plays Julia, a personal secretary for Jerry Stafford (Fredric March, in his third Arzner film). Both Jerry and an up-and-coming stock broker Phillip Craig are in love with her and much of the film is her juggling their affections. It is largely about class and finance: Craig wants to make it big so that he can finally impress Julia so he makes a risky stock bet with collateral belonging to Jerry Stafford. Craig’s anxiety about his relationship with Julia is expressed through class difference: after Julia marries Craig, he has to move into her apartment whereas he knows that Stafford is wealthy and can afford to buy Julia expensive gifts. The final section of the film is a bit ridiculous but, like
Anybody’s Woman, the film offers an interesting look at the sexual politics of marriage. The real draw is the performances, though: not only is Colbert amazing, but Charlie Ruggles steals every scene he’s in (as usual), playing another stockbroker who starts the film with this incredibly gaudy fur coat. Ginger Rogers has a small role, too.
Merrily We Go to Hell (1932) isn’t a great film, but it is an interesting mixture of genres. Fredric March plays a drunken newspaper reporter trying to get over an old ex. In the beginning, his alcoholism is a running joke as he meets and falls in love with Joan, the daughter of a wealthy manufacturer. These opening scenes play almost like a primitive screwball comedy with the cross-class romance and assorted mishaps on their journey to marriage: he passes out drunk at their engagement party and loses the wedding ring during the ceremony, neither of which help to ingratiate him with her father, who is already suspicious of him. While the comedy is always bittersweet, there is a lightness to these scenes that would not be out of place in a mid-30s screwball.
The film switches gears when he finally gets one of his plays produced and the pair move to New York, where they discover that his ex is the leading lady for the play. Now, his alcoholism is played for melodramatic pathos as the film moves from comedy to downbeat drama. As a whole this shift doesn’t work very well. There are some cool ideas but they are underexplored: for instance, once Joan realizes that he’s been cheating on her with his ex, she decides to become a “modern wife” and take a lover of her own (the ever-charming Cary Grant in an early role). While this has the potential to expose the double standards around fidelity and assert women’s sexual autonomy, the plot strand is abandoned before the film could develop any of these meaty issues. While the final half of the film isn’t successful, it is interesting to think about why it needed the shift into melodrama. Perhaps it would take the screwball comedy genre as it developed within the next couple of years to be able to resolve these kind of tensions around class and sexuality within a comedic framework. Without the benefit of this narrative structure, the tensions take over the film and drive it toward melodrama, in which these tensions are never actually resolved (despite the genre’s tendency for a nominally happy ending). So the film is worth looking at in relation to both pre-screwball comedy and the 1930s “woman’s film,” it isn’t successful in its own right.
Christopher Strong (1933) is one of Arzner’s best known films thanks to an incredible Hepburn performance as an aviator who enters into an affair with a married man. In many ways the story of the film can be discerned through her varied wardrobe: while donning a white dress for an important sequence in which the pair go on a romantic boat ride after leaving a party, she spends most of the film in masculine garb befitting her job as a pilot. This tension is central to how the film reworks the tired cliché of the married man who has an affair with an exciting new woman. The film reverses the typical Classic Hollywood gendered distribution of narrative: while it is usually the male character who must balance romance with his career, here it is Cynthia whose love of aviation comes into conflict with Christopher’s demands on her. We never see him at work, but there are scenes in which he is at home, nervously waiting by the radio for news of her flight around the world. Here, Cynthia is associated with the public sphere and work outside the home while Christopher is associated purely with the private space of the home. In another reversal of a standard Hollywood trope, he begs her to give up her dangerous job because he worries about her too much. In terms of standard gender roles, Christopher is more like the neglected wife who has an affair with a dashing young man while Cynthia is the masculine figure who whisks the woman off to enjoy all kinds of new adventures. The fact that she spends most of the film in masculine clothing helps the film to fuzzy up all the gender roles in interesting ways.
The film also departs from the standard infidelity plot through the amount of time spent with Christopher’s wife and daughter, who both experience a great deal of mental anguish when they suspect or learn of the affair (the daughter’s anguish, in fact, is all for the mother). The daughter, Monika, is also a central character in that it is her close friendship with Cynthia that allows Christopher and Cynthia to get close and her ongoing relationship with a married man that shakes up Christopher’s bourgeois morals. However, I am most interested in how Monika and Cynthia’s own deep friendship functions outside of Cynthia’s relationship to her father. After Cynthia and Christopher temporarily break off their relationship for a bit and Cynthia severs contact with the entire family, Monika storms into Cynthia’s apartment, upset that she hasn’t returned her calls. It is almost as if Cynthia broke up with her rather than Christopher. The scene that follows is incredibly important in that it is a lengthy scene with just the two of them, in which Cynthia comforts Monika and prevents her from making a terrible decision after her own relationship fails. This close female friendship is a crucial component of the film which becomes very significant for the ending.
Finally, I think it is interesting to read the film in a way that temporarily brackets all the romance plots: we are left with a story about a female pilot who flies around the world and eventually breaks a world record for highest altitude. While these events largely serve as the backdrop to the romances, this is still a remarkable narrative structure for Cynthia. There is a small moment late in the film that hints at this significance: an adoring young female admirer asks for Cynthia’s autograph, telling her what a hero she has been to her and other girls at her school. This hints at the broader significance of Cynthia’s actions quite apart from her life with Christopher and his family.
How to read the ending?
On the one hand it is tragic and awful that someone so tough and powerful would kill herself over a relationship with a man. On the other hand, it is significant how this suicide is framed: she is not killing herself for Christopher, but rather for his wife. He doesn’t know she is pregnant, but promised to leave his wife if she was. Memories of her and Monika are part of the superimposed montage representing her final thoughts. So in a weird way, it is her solidarity with these women that causes her to kill herself. Even in death, her most important relationships are with women.
(1934) is a bit of a departure from Arzner’s other films in its period setting (it’s a Zola adaptation) but maintains a focus on gender and class that fits in with the rest of her work. Nana is a prostitute who is “discovered” by a theater director who falls in love with her and quickly makes her a major attraction in the Parisian theater. Like many of Arzner’s heroines, Nana is placed in a community of women with her friends Mimi and Satin, who remain prostitutes while Nana ascends to the ranks of the upper classes. The early parts of the film explore the tension between gender and class: while Mimi and Satin initially think that Nana has abandoned them through her improved place in the world, she embraces them after her first major performance, even inviting them along with her when she goes to dine with the Grand Duke. Later she brings them along with her out to her country villa.
While the theater offers Nana an opportunity to improve her finances and even take up with a wealthy soldier, it is also a place of oppression that the film suggests is not much different from her previous life as a prostitute. Indeed, at one point Nana says that she preferred prostitution to having to deal with the controlling and sleazy theater director. This tension between exploitation and advancement for women in the entertainment industry prefigures
Dance, Girl, Dance, although here this narrative strand is largely abandoned for a rather uninteresting romantic melodrama. The second half of the film is then not nearly as interesting as the first half, especially once the film loses interest in the comradery between Nana, Mimi, and Satin.
A few notes on the ending, which is interesting in relation to
Christopher Strong:
the suicide of the female protagonist in both films reflects an irresolvable contradiction under patriarchy (in Strong, it is the fact that Christopher would feel the duty to leave his wife to care for Cynthia despite the fact that she could easily support her child by herself while in Nana it is her sense of duty to her lover). But Christopher Strong is far more interesting in that Cynthia’s sacrifice is for other women while here it is just a self-sacrifice for the benefit of wealthy men.
(1936) is a nice melodrama about a woman named Harriet Craig who rules her house with an iron fist (the amazing Rosalind Russel). She is an interesting character because of the contradictory ways in which we can read her: as a whole, we are clearly meant to dislike her because of the cruel way she treats everybody, notably the servants and the sweet lady who lives next door and tends her flowers. An early conversation with her niece reveals that there is a bit more to this, however: she describes how she grew up poor and that the only way she could ever become rich is through marriage. For her, marriage is paradoxically a form of “emancipation” that allows for independence from even her husband, who is a bit of a sad sack. Later, we also learn of Harriet’s own family background and her father’s cruelty to her mother, once again providing nuance to her character. So while the audience is supposed to cheer Craig’s rebellion later in the film, the film’s complex representation of both Harriet complicates such a reading.
The key to the film, I think, is to understand them as both trapped and the social system itself as the culprit. Such a critique would not be out of place in the 50s family melodramas of Sirk, Ray, or Minnelli, but it seems to go a bit further than most of the 1930s “woman’s films” in its creation of a complex moral universe in which all the characters have been warped by the brutal social system in which they live. The focus on mise-en-scene also reminded me a bit of Sirk: Harriet is obsessed with the placement of all her knick-knacks in her living room, allowing Arzner to explore her character through the way in which she relates to household items.
The other key to the film is all the class-related stuff, something that I’ve noticed is just as central to Arzner’s films as her focus on gender. Here the servants, led by Jane Darwell’s character, both take the brunt of Harriet’s brutality and also forge a resistance that strikes me as more interesting than Craig’s belated temper tantrum. Throughout the film we spend plenty of time in the servant’s kitchen as they mock that latest of Harriet’s recommendations and suggestions to keep the house looking exactly the way she wants it. Their final rebellion is just as central to the narrative as Craig’s, especially when Jane Darwell finally has enough.
There are a couple of odd touches to the film, including a crime subplot that has only a vague relationship to the main plot (it allows for an argument between Craig and Harriet) but produces an interesting thematic echo of the central fighting couple.
The Bride Wore Red (1937) is a solid Joan Crawford vehicle in which she plays a bar singer offered a strange deal by a count: he will pay for her to stay two weeks at a posh hotel and integrate herself into the upper crust. He is trying to win an argument with Rudi, a young and well-placed society gentlemen who doesn’t know about the plot but argued with him about whether the rich are intrinsically different than the lower classes. It is very similar to
Nana, Arzner’s previous story about a poor woman given the chance to become wealthy. Crawford’s character Anni decides she will use her two weeks to find a rich husband and settles on Rudi, the very same person who previously argued that he would be able to tell the difference between a rich person and a poor person in rich person drag.
Most of the film is about the overlapping romantic triangles between Anni, Rudi, and Rudi’s fiancé and between Anni, Rudi, and the local postman Giulio, who spends most of his time sharing obnoxious salt-of-the-earth wisdom. He does have a startling amount of class consciousness, though, making this another Arzner film to explicitly interrogate issues of social and economic class. Arzner also gives us a nice female friendship as well: the maid in the posh hotel is Anni’s old best friend Mary, who has secretly forged her way into the maid service. Her scenes with Anni are a highlight of the film (if only they could have ended up together). A lot is made of Crawford’s red dress she wears near the end of the film, an interesting symbol in that it both combines her desire for wealth and her lower-class tastes: it is too expensive for her to afford on her own but a bit too scandalous to wear in front of the society people. So wearing it allows Anni to assert her independence, at least temporarily. It is also contrasted with both her proper society clothes and the peasant garb she wears during a festival in which the wealthy dress up like locals.
Dance, Girl, Dance (1940). Arzner’s most well-known film,
Dance Girl Dance is most remembered for the scene in which the lead character Judy (Maureen O'Hara) stops a dance performance to yell at the (mostly male) audience after they leer and jeer her. This scene allegorically ruptures the voyeuristic pleasures of the cinema which, according to the influential essay by Laura Mulvey, is dependent upon a visual logic in which men look and women are looked at. Without taking away from these readings of the film (or this scene in particular), I think that
Dance Girl Dance is Arzner’s masterpiece for other reasons. One of the problems with Mulvey’s essay—and the reason that feminist and queer film theory has moved on from it—is that it is an attack on pleasure in the cinema. At one point she explicitly says that the purpose of her essay is to “destroy” the pleasures of the cinema by investigating it. Arzner’s film takes a far more interesting and, I think, more satisfying approach: instead of destroying (heterosexual male) visual pleasure, she introduces alternative modes of visual pleasure that allow for the proliferation of viewing positions and kinds of sexual desire.
In fact, the scene that best captures the traditional male gaze is not actually Judy’s dance sequence mentioned above, but an audition earlier in the film in which dance troupe instructor Madame Basilova is trying to place her dancers in a “hula” show for a different burlesque promoter. Bubbles (Lucille Ball) hasn’t showed up yet, so Basilova has to make due with Judy in the lead. Arzner cross cuts shots of the male promoter’s gaze with shots of the women dancing, Judy trying her best to be sexually alluring. Yet the performance fails: the man’s cigar is comically flaccid as he watches Judy, his face completely unimpressed. Arzner reminds us that there is always the chance for the failure of visual pleasure. The promoter’s critique of the performance is also interesting: he calls the dance “classy,” which he uses as an insult. The problem with Judy is that she isn’t sleazy enough for him to sell; it is not a matter of his own sexual desire, but the imagined sexual desire of his audience.
This is actually a huge point: what Arzner is interested in here is how visual pleasure is constructed through forms of performance and entertainment. She has pulled back the curtain on what Mulvey assumes to be the natural psychoanalytic process of cinematic visual pleasure. By showing us how the sausage is produced (so to speak), Arzner is already complicating the power relationship between the woman being watched and the man watching. If it is all a knowing performance designed to produce visual pleasure in the audience, who is really in charge?
We get our answer when Bubbles struts in, responding to the promoter’s charge of “classy” by telling him “I ain’t got an ounce of class, sugar.” She does her bump and grind, again with cross cuts to the promoter, this time with his eyes wide and eagerly puffing on his cigar. But now we understand that Bubbles knows what she’s doing: she has the promoter eating out of her hand because she can perform the role of the sleazy sex kitten. The key is that everyone knows that it’s a role. Arzner is interrogating the economics of visual pleasure, setting up an opposition between the high-class act that Judy performs and the low-class performance of Bubbles. Madame Basilova laments her position as a “flesh peddler” (again confirming the film’s interest in the economics of sexualized spectacle) but Bubbles knows how to use this performative mode to get what she wants. Later, she recounts how she was discovered by a “capitalist” who invests in her and eventually sets her up with her high-paying gig headlining a burlesque show. The capitalist’s day job? Selling artificial limbs! He is in the business of buying and selling body parts, but Bubble’s limbs come with a brain attached that knows how to exploit men’s desire for her own financial ends.
This remarkably sophisticated analysis of the economics of visual pleasure is paired with another, completely different kind of visual pleasure: the female gaze. In the scene right after the hula audition, Judy practices a ballet dance she designed herself upstairs. Madame Basilova tiptoes up the stairs to watch her without being seen, Arzner cross cutting between shots of Judy dancing and Basilova watching just like in the earlier hula scene. Yet now it is a woman holding the gaze, taking visual pleasure in another woman’s physical performance. While this could be read in complete opposition to the Hula performance (the high class/ low class dichotomy), we should not discount the sexualized component here, either. Basilova is coded as butch after all, and the queer sexual subtexts running throughout Arzner’s films requires that we always pay attention to these moments. A bit later in the film, Judy gets a chance to participate in her own visual pleasure as she watches a sophisticated ballet performance. While she is the object of the gaze in some sequences, here she is owns the gaze, creating a fluidity that is not present in Mulvey’s account of visual pleasure. Moreover, the ballet itself has some distinctly queer images, including shots of two women dancing together, a visual motif that recurs in some of Arzner’s best films (
The Wild Party, Working Girls).
The other reason that I am fascinated with the film is its narrative structure. Intermixed with all the performance narratives, there is a well-developed side plot about a wealthy married couple, Jimmy and Elinor Harris. They cross paths with Bubbles and Judy throughout the film, eventually creating a romantic triangle (or square, I suppose, since Elinor is always in the mix). Judy hardly participates in this narrative strand, though, as she is always one-upped by Bubbles, who is a better distraction for a man still in love with his soon-to-be ex-wife (when Jimmy and Judy seem to get close, she always reminds him of Elinor). This side plot is necessary precisely because Judy’s main narrative lacks a strong romance plot. We have Ralph Bellamy’s character, of course, but he is a mentor rather than a love interest. Not only is Bellamy decidedly not a romantic lead, but there is absolutely no passion or attraction in their scenes together. They never kiss or signal that their relationship will be anything other than professional. While their interactions have the formal structure of a romantic narrative—including the ending closure—the actual “content” of the romance is missing. Jimmy is real romantic lead, but his romance is displaced onto a side plot so that it won’t interfere with Judy’s narrative. The reason that this is so important is that it makes the main narrative of the film solely about Judy’s art and work. While we usually have to look at side plots and characters to find our uncompromising women while our strong heroines are “tamed” by the hero (see
The Wild Party or
Christopher Strong), here Arzner reverses the magnitude of the plots.
Finally,
Dance Girl Dance has the most fully realized version of the close female friend and confidant that Arzner almost always pairs with her heroines. The character of Sally is absolutely remarkable in terms of narrative structure: she has no overt “purpose” in the sense that she never has a bearing on any of the storylines nor does she have any side plots of her own. She “does” as little as the nameless chorus dancers but yet Sally gets several scenes, all of which are with Judy and/or Bubbles. Most notably, there is a distinctly domestic scene in which she feeds Judy soup after Judy gets sick from being out in the rain. Sally is in the film purely in relation to Judy; she is a woman in a Hollywood film defined completely by her relationships to other women. Once the main plots take off and there is no more time for relaxed domestic scenes in their apartment, she vanishes from the screen.
So I agree with the consensus that
Dance Girl Dance is Arzner’s masterpiece, but I think that it is great for so many reasons that far exceed its relationship to 70s film theory about “the gaze.” It is a grand auteurist work like
Rio Bravo, coming near the end of Arzner’s career and providing perhaps the most brilliant iteration of almost all of her central themes and preoccupations.
First Comes Courage (1943), Arzner’s final film, is an interesting wartime drama about a Norwegian spy who is engaged to the Nazi commandant at her village. The film has some effective espionage sequences involving both her and an English soldier who lands in the village and is promptly captured, risking their entire underground network. It is wartime propaganda of sorts, although this was never distracting. I like how it centers the role of women in the fight against the Nazis, which is a refreshing twist from most wartime films. It deals with both collaborationism as well as the difficult place the spy finds herself: hated by the loyal villagers she is actually trying to help and having to cozy up to those she hates. It also seems to prefigure Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil argument: the Nazis are not presented as evil or even particularly malicious, just cowards following orders and trying to save themselves. It is very different from most of Arzner’s films but a fine conclusion to a distinguished career
