The pioneering filmmaker who broke the mould for… | Little White Lies

Women In Film

The pio­neer­ing film­mak­er who broke the mould for women in Hollywood

30 Jun 2020

Two men in formal clothing operating an old-fashioned film camera.
Two men in formal clothing operating an old-fashioned film camera.
Dorothy Arzn­er gave Gold­en Age female stars like Katharine Hep­burn and Ros­alind Rus­sell intel­li­gent, com­plex roles.

I know you want me to tear my clothes off so you can look your 50 cents’ worth. Fifty cents for the priv­i­lege of star­ing at a girl the way your wives won’t let you.” Mau­reen O’Hara’s bristling speech in Dorothy Arzner’s 1940 film Dance, Girl, Dance is a land­mark exam­ple of a Gold­en Age Hol­ly­wood movie attack­ing the con­cept of the male gaze. O’Hara’s char­ac­ter Judy is a dancer who per­forms as a com­ic warm-up act for her friend Bub­bles’ bur­lesque num­ber. One night, sick of the jeers and the lech­er­ous stares, she lets rip.

Dance, Girl, Dance, now avail­able as part of the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, appears late in Arzner’s fil­mog­ra­phy. After her direc­to­r­i­al debut in 1927, she made 16 fea­tures before quit­ting in 1943. Dur­ing those years she was one of pre­cious few female direc­tors work­ing in Hol­ly­wood, and the first to join the Direc­tors Guild of Amer­i­ca in 1936.

Many of the films made by Arzn­er, a les­bian who lived with her part­ner Mar­i­on Mor­gan for four decades, revolve around the theme of courage: the brav­ery to make dif­fi­cult choic­es or sac­ri­fices for a moral code, the strength to be one’s own, uncom­pro­mised self in pub­lic, or in Judy’s case, to give a the­atre of men a les­son in fem­i­nist thought. I’m sure they see through you. I’m sure they see through you just like we do!”

Woman in vintage fur-trimmed coat and hat, holding a cigarette, looking pensively out of a car window.

Arzn­er had worked her way up from the ground floor. Dis­card­ing an ear­ly ambi­tion to become a set dress­er, she entered the busi­ness as a typ­ist before going on to be a respect­ed edi­tor and screen­writer. Edit­ing was a job she enjoyed, as she told Kevin Brown­low in 1979: Nobody could both­er you and you could do things with the actors. You could cut them off if they were no good and you could cut off their long drag­gy exits and cut through the oth­er side into some­thing else so that you’d get them out of the room.”

Arzn­er rel­ished cre­ative con­trol. When she first stepped on to a set she was struck with an impor­tant real­i­sa­tion. 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,” she said in a 1977 inter­view. In fact, he was the whole works.’”

Before long, Arzn­er demand­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty to be the whole works”. Her first film, 1927’s Fash­ions for Women, was silent, but she took the com­ing of sound in her stride, and has even been cred­it­ed with invent­ing the boom mic, when she direct­ed Clara Bow’s first talkie, cam­pus com­e­dy Get Your Man co-star­ring Fredric March.

Woman in a hat speaking on an old-fashioned telephone, with a rotary dial telephone and a framed artwork behind her, in a black and white image.

In the 1930s, Arzner’s films gave female stars intel­li­gent, com­plex roles cen­tring around moral dilem­mas and a cyn­i­cal atti­tude to mar­riage. In 1933’s Christo­pher Strong, Katharine Hep­burn stars as a dash­ing avi­a­tor in love with a mar­ried man; in 1936’s Craig’s Wife, Ros­alind Rus­sell plays a house­wife whose fierce­ness masks her vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty; and The Bride Wore Red fea­tures Joan Craw­ford as a cabaret singer caught in a Cin­derel­la romance. As So May­er has writ­ten: Love and mar­riage weren’t even close sec­onds to courage and self-deter­mi­na­tion for Arzn­er and her pro­tag­o­nists”. You rarely have to look too close­ly to find the queer subtext.

Arzn­er direct­ed her final film, First Comes Courage, with Mer­le Oberon in the Nor­we­gian resis­tance, in 1943, but she con­tin­ued to work. She made World War Two train­ing films and Pep­si adverts for her friend Craw­ford, as well as teach­ing film­mak­ing at UCLA, where her stu­dents includ­ed Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la.
We can mar­vel at her achieve­ment now, but Arzn­er hat­ed peo­ple draw­ing atten­tion to her excep­tion­al sta­tus as a female director.

Nev­er­the­less, her films have not been cir­cu­lat­ed, stud­ied, praised as much as those of her male peers, and they are far more inter­est­ing than her rar­i­ty val­ue, so see them when­ev­er you can. Dance, Girl, Dance is an invig­o­rat­ing place to start.

Dance, Girl, Dance is out now on Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion Blu-ray.

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