It is a searing, powerful moment—and one which is as much about movie audiences in general as it is about the jeering audience in that particular theater. It’s as if Judy (or perhaps Dorothy Arzner) is confronting all of us, about how we have been looking at and judging the women in the film. It is a comment on how women are seen simply as objects to look at, expected to strip for our viewing pleasure. And it’s important to note that the crowd in the movie are not all men. There are women there too, who squirm uncomfortably during Judy’s speech, also guilty of imposing the “male gaze.” But crucially, it is a woman who is the first to stand up and applaud Judy’s speech.
The film does not, however, make things so simple for its protagonists. Judy has reclaimed her power and is about to leave the stage when Bubbles slaps her. This starts a vicious fight which spills out onstage in front of the crowd. So in the end, the women denigrate themselves for entertainment, just as the audience wanted.
Dance, Girl, Dance is a “backstage” musical that was created almost entirely by women. The original story was written by Vicki Baum, author of Grand Hotel, which was released as a film in 1932. Like that of Grand Hotel, Baum’s concept for Dance, Girl, Dance also features complex women with dreams and higher aspirations. This story was turned into an original script by Tess Slesinger with additional work by Frank Davis. Slesinger was a novelist as well as a screenwriter, and one of her short stories was the first be published in America that featured an abortion. And of course, the director of Dance, Girl, Dance was Dorothy Arzner, the only female filmmaker working in the studio system in the 1930s. She continued to direct until the early ’40s, and Dance, Girl, Dance was her penultimate (but most famous) film.
This is all the more interesting given that Dorothy Arzner was never supposed to be its director. Roy Del Ruth had been hired by RKO producer Erich Pommer because of his experience in the world of musicals, having directed three such films for MGM, all starring Eleanor Powell. But with Dance, Girl, Dance, he struggled to find a clear vision for the story. Soon after filming commenced, he was fired by Pommer and replaced by Dorothy Arzner. Arzner had only limited musical experience, having codirected Paramount on Parade in 1930, but brought with her a talent for crafting feminist films featuring complex women. Once hired, she significantly reworked the script and reshot every scene that Del Ruth had completed.
Arzner made two important changes to the story. First, she enhanced the central conflict by focusing on the difference between the two dancers. “I decided the theme should be The Art Spirit versus the commercial Go-Getter,” Arzner later said. Then she also changed the character of the male head of the dance troupe to a woman—from “Basiloff” to “Basilova.” This added another interesting female relationship to the story, that of student and teacher, which was given further complexity thanks to a few lingering looks Madame Basilova directs at Judy. And with Basilova’s slicked back hair and necktie, the new dance troupe head looked a little like Dorothy Arzner herself.
Arzner was an outlier in Hollywood. The only female director who made the transition from silent film to sound, she dressed in suits and was an outspoken feminist and lesbian at a time when nobody was “out.” She claimed to have been born in 1900, though all her records had been lost in the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. After the earthquake, her family moved to Los Angeles, where her father ran the Hoffman Cafe. The café became a favorite hangout for movie stars, and it was there that she met William C. DeMille, brother of Cecil B. DeMille. William gave Arzner her first job in Hollywood, where she started out as a script typist and later as an editor. But she knew from the beginning where she wanted to end up. “I remember making the observation, ‘If one was going to be in this movie business, one should be a director because he was the one who told everyone else what to do.’ ”
As a film director, Arzner was commercially successful, making movies featuring female protagonists across many different genres. Her movie Christopher Strong in 1933 gave Katharine Hepburn her first starring role, as a female aviator.
The reaction to Dance, Girl, Dance when it was released in 1940 was lukewarm. The film was buried and forgotten, receiving only poor box office results. Reviews were fairly positive, but most of the praise went to Lucille Ball. This was one of her first starring roles, and it was obvious she was something special. “If RKO accomplishes nothing else with the venture,” one reviewer wrote, “it has informed itself that it has a very important player on the lot in the person of Miss Ball, who may require special writing. But whatever the requirements, she has the makings of a star.”
After Dance, Girl, Dance, Dorothy Arzner made just one more film, First Comes Courage, released in 1943. During production, she contracted pneumonia and was so sick that director Charles Vidor had to come on board to finish the movie. Arzner recovered from that illness but retired from making movies. She continued to direct, making fifty Pepsi-Cola commercials for her good friend Joan Crawford. In the 1960s, Arzner began teaching at UCLA, where her students included a young filmmaker by the name of Frances Ford Coppola. In 1975, she was given a tribute by the Directors Guild of America. Four years later, Dorothy Arzner passed away at her home near Palm Springs.
It was only in the 1970s, thirty years after its release, that Dance, Girl, Dance finally found a receptive audience. Thanks to essays by writers such as Pam Cook, Claire Johnston, and Judith Mayne, the movie was rediscovered and reevaluated and became something of a feminist cult classic. During this time, analysis of the “male gaze” in classic cinema was gaining traction. As many of these writers noted, though Dance, Girl, Dance scorned the objectification of women, it was also itself guilty of it—demonstrating the limitations of classical Hollywood, even with a female director behind the lens. Other film critics were simply excited to discover the story of Dorothy Arzner. She was a rare woman in film history who achieved success within an extremely male-dominated industry.
The scene with Judy’s speech to the audience is a scathing commentary on the way women are used in entertainment. Dorothy Arzner’s camera makes it seem as if Judy is talking straight to us, and in a way, she is; she invites the audience to consider how they have been treating the female characters in the movie so far.
★Dorothy Arzner directed four silent films and thirteen talking pictures between 1927 and 1943. She is also the inventor of the boom microphone. On the set of The Wild Party, released in 1929, Arzner placed a microphone on the end of a fishing rod to give her actors more room to move.
★The working title for Dance, Girl, Dance was Have It
Your Own Way.
★Similar to the characters they played, Lucille Ball and Maureen O’Hara had a competitive relationship, though it remained friendly. In her memoir, O’Hara wrote that they “enjoyed a competitive rivalry on petty and harmless things, like fighting over which of us would get the dance stockings without the ladders or runs.”
★Following the filming of their big fight scene, O’Hara and
Ball went to the studio cafeteria for lunch. It was at that moment, with her clothes torn and her hair a mess, that Lucille Ball first laid eyes on Desi Arnaz. It was love at first sight—for Ball, at least.
Sumeyye Korkaya on Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon is a critically acclaimed work in American experimental cinema. After watching it, one might have the urge to spew a number of quizzical expletives. This is not uncommon, given Deren’s incredible usage of the surrealist form to create a dreamlike experience. The intense cut sequences only heighten the audience’s anxiety, and by consequence, portray the distortion of reality. The film is indeed a mesh of the afternoons