film fatales #188: dance, girl, dance (dorothy arzner, 1940)

There's no denying the historical importance of Dorothy Arzner, a pioneer film maker who was the first woman to join the Directors Guild of America. For most of her career, she was the only woman directing mainstream Hollywood movies. All of the Arzner films I've seen are solid efforts (admittedly, I've only seen three). Some find Dance, Girl, Dance her best work, while I find a consistency in the movies I've seen, where none is notably better than the others.

Dance, Girl, Dance is ripe for analysis of its feminist subtext. Some of this comes from our knowing about Arzner's importance ... we want to find that subtext. She only made one more movie after Dance, Girl, Dance, and while she lived until 1979, her films were not rediscovered until the burgeoning feminist film theorists of the early 70s. It's good that she was rediscovered, and I've liked her movies. But I think there's a tendency to overestimate work that is noteworthy for its place in film history. That Arzner was a pioneer doesn't guarantee that she was an elite director. We should be thankful for the general quality of her movies, without thinking we need to praise them as classics on their own.

Here is the defining scene from Dance, Girl, Dance ... the feminist subtext moves to the front:

Maureen O'Hara plays a dancer with dreams of being a successful ballet dancer. Lucille Ball is a dancer whose dreams are more about money than art. Arzner is not critical of her female characters ... we understand the motives of both women. There's an imbalance in the movie, though, because while O'Hara is OK, Ball steals the film. When she appears, we root for her, even though I don't think we are expected to prefer her dreams to O'Hara's.