DANCE, GIRL, DANCE - CRITERION CHANNEL

Dance, Girl, Dance is a 1940 showbiz drama from director Dorothy Arzner set in the world of New York burlesque. Maureen O’Hara (The Quiet Man [review]) and Lucille Ball co-star as Judy and Bubbles, two hoofers with opposite artistic goals--which are also reflected in their morals and business acumen. Judy dances for the love of it, Bubbles for the showcase it provides her natural gifts. Not to mention the opportunities to meet a rich husband. Their work lives and love lives will criss-cross, making for some friction, but also for some fun.

The divide between them is evident from the first scenes. Dance, Girl, Dance opens on the night when a speakeasy where they are dancing is shut down by police. Wealthy playboy Jimmy Harris (Louis Hayward, House by the River) intervenes before the pair is carted off to jail, but he causes more friction than frolic when he hastily discards Judy for Bubbles, all over the color of their eyes. The night also ends badly for Bubbles, however, when Harris dumps her, panicking over his soon to be ex-wife (she of the blue eyes that scare him so), and leaving her with a stuffed Ferdinand the Bull. It’s a sort of fuzzy Cinderella’s slipper, and will be important later. Can you guess whose hands the toy ends up in?

Eventually, Bubbles lands a regular burlesque gig, and she drags Judy along, allowing the ballerina to be her comic foil. It’s an odd idea. Judy’s serious number is inserted between two salacious performances by Bubbles, the testosterone-fueled audience worked into a frenzy over their wish to get the mopey gal off the stage and bring the hottie back. Unbeknownst to Judy, she has also caught the attention of a show promoter, Steve Adams (Ralph Bellamy, The Awful Truth [review]), who books the legitimate theatre. Adams is smitten with her, and he keeps tracking her down, only for the clueless Judy to brand him a creep and brush him off time and again.

Dance, Girl, Dance is a musical about musical theater, and Lucille Ball has a pretty good showcase midway through with a couple of semi-bawdy numbers. There’s also a solid musical number nestled in the center of Dance, Girl, Dance. Judy gets a gander of one of Adams’ productions, and it’s an artful amalgamation of Broadway and Hollywood. It represents high art, whereas everything else the girls do is low.

Because one can otherwise easily pick up on a decidedly feminist streak. It manifests almost from the jump, in Dance, Girl, Dance’s opening scenes. When the cops raid the nightclub and tell the dancing girls to go home, Judy sticks up for her sisters, demanding they get their due wages. The audience all paid their admission to gawk, why should they go home for free? This confrontational moxie will manifest again later when Judy loses her cool onstage; tired of being jeered at and dismissed, she lets loose on the audience. Even if a Hollywood back lot is not the backdrop, Arzner is creating a pretty up-front critique of entertainment and how it’s consumed, particularly when it comes to the exploitation of women. The only bum note is maybe when the horny crowd accepts her screed a little too easily and turns on Bubbles. Given their behavior and intention, it’s doubtful they’d have subjected themselves to such honest self-reflection even in the face of recrimination.

Both O’Hara and Ball at early stages in their careers. Both are crafting the personas that would later make them famous. O’Hara is that fierce fighter that would have no problem going toe to toe with John Wayne, and Ball is all brass and laughs. She is not quite yet as polished in the slapstick as she would later become, nor is she even close to America’s sweetheart in this persona, but that’s more the writing than Ball herself. One gets the sense that if she were allowed to cut loose, she’d show us right quick what she could do.

Overall, Dance, Girl, Dance is an entertaining trifle, full of good performances and driven by a facile script. Arzner’s light touch is appreciated, as it allows her to once again sneak a message into what is otherwise standard Hollywood fare. It’s hard to pinpoint her voice exactly, there aren’t a lot of flourishes that are uniquely hers--or at least, not evident in my quick survey. That said, not many of her male contemporaries were working with the same level of nuance, or daring to explore the social strata of economics and gender--something that is evident in the movies I reviewed previously, Christopher Strong and Craig’s Wife. One assumes that Arzner was not always afforded the freedom her counterparts were and had to play her cards as the table dictated. In which case, the mind boggles at the possibility of what could have transpired had she been dealt from the top of the deck.

CRAIG'S WIFE - CRITERION CHANNEL

“People who live to themselves -- are generally left to themselves.”

What a splendid little film Craig’s Wife is. The 1936 film from Dorothy Arzner is a bit of Trojan Horse, parading as a domestic drama, but smuggling elements of a paranoid thriller.

The Craigs are a wealthy married couple living a seemingly normal upper-middle-class life. Walter Craig (John Boles, Stella Dallas) loves Harriet (Rosalind Russell, Gypsy [review], The Women)--but by some accounts, too much. He is blind to her true nature. And it’s not really like she hides it. The maids are nervous around her, lest an inexact dusting cause wrath; Walter’s aunt (Alma Kruger, His Girl Friday [review]) only lives with them so she can keep an eye on things; and when Harriet and her niece, Ethel (Dorothy Wilson, The Milky Way), are on the train back from visiting Ethel’s dying mother, not only does Harriet lie about the woman’s health, but basically lays out her mercenary philosophy. Walter was a step up for her, a chance for independence and a place in society. All she has to do now is wait for him to pass on. That’s why she’s so exact about the house: it’s her future.

Harriet is a bit of a snake in the grass, but she’s a snake who’s in charge of the landscaping. The façade of her life with Walter, one created largely for him, is one she orchestrates entirely. In her mind, people are a means to an end, and any excess number of them should be trimmed. This, of course, means she also trusts no one. Not Ethel’s fiancé, whom she secretly seeks to isolate, and certainly not her husband, whom she thinks is being hit on by everything in a skirt--including the aging widow next door (Billie Burke, The Wizard of Oz). When her snooping causes her to discover Walter might actually be a suspect in a double death, Harriet pulls everything in closer. Never mind the portentous nature of the truth, which might signal to her that these next two days will be her downfall, with everything and everyone converging against her. Walter wasn’t involved, he couldn’t be. The tragedy was a murder/suicide perpetrated by a husband on his cheating wife
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Described as it is above, Craig’s Wife has all the ingredients of a cheap B-movie or even a television soap opera, but as Arzner presents it, it is neither of these things. It’s an animal unto itself, a tad similar to trapped women pictures like Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door [review] or Douglas Sirk’s Sleep, My Love [review], but with the roles reversed. The woman traps herself. If this were Rebecca [review], Harriet would be her own Mrs. Danvers. In terms of drama, Arzner leans away from suspicious shadows and jump scares. There isn’t even a hint of danger or violence. Human emotion is enough. Like a Eugene O’Neill play, their conversations are their own undoing.

Rosalind Russell by far runs away with this picture. Her performance is as flawless and calculated as Harriet aspires to be. She can snap from rigid to tender in a second, and had we not seen her reveal her true colors in other scenes, we’d certainly fall for her routine. Like any villain, you have to like her, at least a little bit, and Craig’s Wife leaves enough room for sympathy so that in the end, you can ‘t help but feel happy for her when she gets exactly what she wished for, and sorry for her in that it’s exactly what she deserved.

CHRISTOPHER STRONG - CRITERION CHANNEL

Dorothy Arzner was a pioneer. She was one the only female film directors in the Pre-code era, having already survived the transition from silents to sound, amassing a solid resume that featured both comedy and drama, ultimately leading to her being the first woman in the Director's Guild of America. Her 1933 picture, Christopher Strong, is definitely in the latter category. It’s a dual romance: a middle-aged husband steps out on his wife at the same time his coming-of-age daughter is learning her first lessons of the heart while pursuing a married man.

And it starred another pioneering woman of cinema. Christopher Strong is only Katharine Hepburn’s second film, the actress may not snag the title--Strong is her lover, not her character--but it’s still her show. Hepburn stars as Lady Cynthia Darrington, an independent aristocrat with a yen for adventure. Cynthia is a pilot whose exploits earn headlines, as she wins races and breaks records. She comes into the orbit of the Strongs by accident--literally. She runs Harry (Ralph Forbes, The Barretts of Wimpole Street), the lover of young Monica Strong (Helen Chandler, Dracula), off the road with her car. He is out looking for an impossible treasure for a scavenger hunt: a woman over 21 who has never had a love affair. Cynthia fits the bill.

At the same time, Monica is rushing across town to grab her father, who is the other prize of the night. Sir Christopher (Colin Clive, Frankenstein) represents a man who has been married more than five years who has never cheated on his wife. Amused by their mutual exploitation, Christopher and Cynthia immediately hit it off. Cynthia also befriends Monica and becomes a bit of a mentor. It’s all seemingly innocent enough. Only Lady Strong (Billie Burke, The Wizard of Oz) sees what’s really going on.

Naturally, Cynthia and Christopher fall for each other. Their growing attraction runs parallel to the Strongs discouraging Monica from dating Harry--one romance goes up, the other is encouraged to go down. It’s only as Sir Christopher indulges his passion for this other woman that he comes to understand his daughter’s emotional turmoil, finally relenting to Monica’s wishes when Harry himself gets a divorce. Ironically, though, once Monica discovers what is going on, she does not approve of her father and her friend making a fool of her mother. The girl’s judgment raises questions of which affair is more hurtful, and forces Cynthia to make a decision.

Hepburn is a vision here. Young and dreamy, and every bit the icon we know today. Decked out in chic pantsuits and exuding an alluring confidence, this feels very much like the performance upon which Cate Blanchett based her Oscar-winning portrayal in The Aviator. Katharine Hepburn already has a natural command of the screen, and her revelations of Cynthia’s vulnerability feel less like a dismantling of the character’s defenses and more of an organic relaxation--falling in love is the one bold adventure she has yet to embark on.

Since Christopher Strong came several years before the Hayes Code, Arzner does little to gloss over or obfuscate the full extent of the scandal that drives the film into its final act. The melodrama is heavy, even if the execution is not. Though the script is sometimes clumsy, the emotion is real. Surprisingly enough, the most effective scene is the one where Arzner and writer Zoe Akins (How to Marry a Millionaire) pull back the most. It’s a two-hander with Hepburn and Burke, where Cynthia must face the woman she’s deceiving but who doesn’t know she’s being deceived. Burke is so understated and yet so knowing in her own way, it’s the only scene that Hepburn has stolen.

Though the controversial plot of Christopher Strong is certainly tame by today’s standards, the authenticity of the heartache means it’s still relatable. People hurt the same, regardless of the era. It’s also kind of refreshing to watch a film that values the romance over the sex. Christopher Strong would never be made now without a few steamy scenes between both couples; hardly anyone has the confidence to play sex and violence offscreen anymore. Granted, Christopher Strong also feels a little slow, it’s at times dialed back too much, but for fans of good drama--not to mention students of early cinema--it still has plenty to offer.