Girls Gone Wild: Appreciating “Dance, Girl, Dance”

Until recently, I had never heard of Dance, Girl, Dance. This 1940 dramedy about two New York chorines who are roommates and (sometimes) close friends, is hardly Hollywood’s finest hour. It was produced by RKO, one of the less prestigious studios of the industry’s Golden Era, though a place where a number of major talents—think Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn,  and the Astaire-Rogers duo—got their start. Its two female leads were also on their way up: Maureen O’Hara plays the sweet, sensible Judy (though she’s eventually to unfurl a wild Irish temper): all she really wants to do is to burnish her skills as a classical dancer. Her counterpart is Bubbles, played by a blonde and brassy Lucille Ball as a gal who’ll say or do anything to make her way in the world. Of course they both fall for the same guy, though for very different reasons . . . and he turns out to be not worth having. Hijinks (including what we in the Corman world would call a rip-roaring catfight) ensue.

 So why was Dance, Girl Dance inducted in 2007 into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress? Clearly this has to do with the rising reputation of its director, Dorothy Arzner.  Arzner, who from 1927 to 1943 was the only female director in Hollywood, got her start back in the silent era. She entered the industry as a typist, thereby getting a close look into how scripts are constructed, then moved into the editing suite. As director she was responsible for about twenty movies, some of which have been lost. The first woman to helm a sound film, she invented the boom mike (at first a microphone attached to a fishing rod) as a way to improve the sound quality of Clara Bow’s first talkie, 1929’s The Wild Party. She was ultimately the first female member of the Directors Guild of America.

 The Criterion DVD on which I’ve just watched Dance, Girl, Dance pays tribute to Arzner via two fascinating extras. Film scholar B. Ruby Rich (whom I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing about women and sex in the films of the 1960s) hails Arzner as a competent and confident talent who was particularly smart on the subject of gender politics. Apparently skeptical about conventional marriages (the one in Dance, Girl, Dance is a doozy), Arzner seems happiest when focusing on the supportive relationship between women. In this film she also powerfully takes on the ”male gaze” in a scene wherein O’Hara’s character, accustomed to being ogled and laughed at by the lascivious men in her nightclub audiences, turns the tables. Never one to hide her own lesbianism, Arzner—who had cropped her hair short and wore man-tailored suits—made sure we sympathize with her female characters, no matter what they wear and what they do for a living.

 The second featurette on the DVD stars director Francis Ford Coppola, who was one of Arzner’s students after she retired from filmmaking and joined the graduate faculty at UCLA. Coppola  remembers “Miss Arzner” as both smart and gracious: she had a habit of bringing to class cookies that were much appreciated by impoverished film students, and she even once treated him to a simple lunch that felt like a life-saver. This was not the only nourishment she provided. Disheartened and broke, he at one point considered giving up his filmmaking dreams and returning to New York. In the nick of time she persuaded him not to lose heart, that he was going to make it as a film director. And, of course, he did.