You see, all of us have been kind of mixed up about each other

rydra_wong, if you're looking for a film by Dorothy Arzner with all of the crunchy gender callout and none of the crushing heteronormative tragedy, I have found it for you; it is Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), it stars Maureen O'Hara and Lucille Ball, and it is only a musical in the way that Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948) is a musical, although that's the category on TCM where derspatchel and I found it. Then again, their one-line summary is also hopelessly incorrect: "A ballet dancer and a burlesque queen compete for a wealthy suitor." The real contest of Dance, Girl, Dance is not over romance and it's between women only because the straight world pretends that men are a non-renewable resource and female friendship is a zero-sum game. Sidestepping the game entirely is a happy ending in Arzner's world and I am delighted to report that it is accomplished in this film without anyone having to fly into the sun.

Directed by Arzner from a story by Vicki Baum and a script by married screenwriters Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis, Dance, Girl, Dance is one of the more frank and explicit movies I have seen about the male gaze, which means that since the '70's it's been a reclaimed feminist classic and on its release Bosley Crowther said he didn't know what the producer was thinking.¹ I agree that it shares some of the coded quality of its times, but it's not like the subtext is all that far beneath the surface. Plotwise, the movie's a backstage musical with an apparent conflict of high and low art and an intermittently entangled love quadrangle which all characters involved mistake for the A-plot when it's really a red herring. Thematically, the lights come up on a line of girls kicking and shimmying their way through a nightclub routine while all around them men drink, smoke, chat up their dates, and generally take for granted the background girlflesh on display. The camera looks at them like individuals right away. Some of them have sore feet, some of them are having fun, some of them have better professional smiles than others, some of them dance better or worse, some of them know the quality of their dancing isn't what they're there for. Art is nice work if you can get it, but paying the bills comes first and that's mediated by the male willingness to shell out cash—blatantly spelled out when the club's sudden shutdown for gambling threatens to strand the NYC-based troupe in Akron, Ohio without pay. Only the whimsical appeal of a gentlemanly drunk to the "well-known generosity" of his fellow citizens and the policeman's amused tolerance of his hat-passing sends the girls home with any recompense for "danc[ing] their feet off for a jaded public" and they're still going to need to hitch-hike. I'll get back to all these people by name in a minute, but the important thing is that there are no illusions about the entertainment business up front. Nearly every scene that follows will revisit some aspect of this intersection of commerce and gender: and dance, which the film is quite seriously about. Some movies make me wish I knew more about gender, some movies race; with this one, it was choreography.

All right, names. The title of Dance, Girl, Dance could plausibly refer to any abstract female receiving encouragement or command, but in practice it is most likely to apply to either Judy O'Brien (O'Hara) or Bubbles (Ball), each in her own way the prize pupil of tiny, butch Madame Basilova (Maria Ouspenskaya, adorable in severe tailoring) who danced in her youth with the Imperial Russian Ballet and now laments the changes in public taste that have reduced her to "a flesh peddler . . . a jellyfish salesman!" Judy is her protégée, a serious student of ballet whose soft-spoken reserve belies the intensity with which she exercises in rented rooms and rehearses her own routines even when there's no venue for them; she dreams of being "discovered" and making her teacher's name famous again. To make ends meet in the meanwhile, she dutifully shepherds the troupe around the hinterlands of the club scene while flashy, brassy, saucy Bubbles sashays off with $25-a-week solos thanks to very little in the way of classical technique but a lot of well-tempered "oomph." Booking agents ask for her specifically: "Where's the hot one?" When both dancers audition for the same job, the difference in their styles is made Freudianly clear by the reactions of the Hoboken club owner and his cigar that is manifestly not just a cigar: it dangles limply from the corner of his mouth while Judy and the rest of the troupe perform their gently undulating, "very classy" hula, perks up and puffs smoke as soon as Bubbles starts slapping her hips and throwing winks over her shoulder with every steel-stringed twang. His dismissal of Judy is brutal and painfully familiar: "What my customers go for, she ain't got." Secretly, Madame Basilova arranges an audition for her best student with the prestigious and modern American Ballet, but when tragedy intervenes, Judy finds herself forced to fall back on a job offer from Bubbles, who has since shaken the dust of Hoboken off her shapely feet and is headlining the Bailey Brothers' burlesque show as up-and-coming stripteaser "Tiger Lily White."² What she claims to want Judy for is a "tony number" to class up her act; what she really wants is a stooge, the dancing equivalent of a straight man to whet the audience's appetite for the entrance of the delicious star. Judy finally gets to perform the "Morning Star" dance she's so painstakingly rehearsed—while the stagehands drop items of underclothing onto her and the patrons heckle her with increasing license and relish, the goody-goody, unsexy, uncool symbol of all things snooty and highbrow whose professional effort to finish her routine in the face of men hollering for her to get off the stage only makes her a better target for derision. In effect, it's the hula audition, night after night after night, and Judy sticks it out for two reasons: it pays $25 a week and Bubbles didn't think she could do it. And we might otherwise end up watching a seriously depressing movie about the way that men play women off against each other and women pull each other down for male approval except for two complicating factors. Funnily enough, both are men. Even more funnily, they're not the expected complications.

It's not that the men in this movie are irrelevant, but they are very definitely not the motive forces of the plot. Handsome Jimmy Harris, Jr. (Louis Hayward) won the liking of the audience and the troupe with his sloshed but kindly intervention at the Palais Royale in Akron, but his interactions with women in New York City repeatedly demonstrate that he's no Prince Charming in waiting: he ping-pongs passively between Judy's shy attraction and Bubbles' self-assured flirtation and in either case he is so obviously still on the rebound from his newly ex-wife Elinor (Virginia Field) that he probably shouldn't be talking to women outside of legal offices and maybe not even then. It is doubtful that he ever appears onscreen sober, except in occasional moments of horrified waking; his boyish haplessness is appealing until it becomes clear that, at least in his current farblondjet state, he can't turn it off. He functions most effectively as a distraction—the cavalier way that Bubbles picks him up and drops him and scoops him up again only when she sees him interested in other women is a decent reason for Judy to be upset, but it's not what she's really angry about. Steve Adams (Ralph Bellamy) has a more potentially central position as the director of the American Ballet where Judy missed her audition and where the audience is hoping she'll finally get the chance to fulfill her dreams, but the way she catches his attention without a formal introduction means that not only does she not know who he is and therefore feels no need to impress him, he's forced to become a regular patron of the Bailey Brothers in order to get a good look at her dancing. "Something rather depraved about you, Steve," his choreographer Fitch (Ernő Verebes) teases, "hiding a yen for burlesque under cover of the ballet," but after a moment studying the "little stooge"'s technique, he admits professionally that "her footwork isn't bad at all." Even without connecting the girl who didn't keep her appointment with the girl who looked so unhappy in the elevator the day it rained, Steve's eye for a dancer is solid—he got his first inkling from the way she darted across the wet pavement into the crowd as lightly as if she were en pointe. Given that their initial interaction and his later attempt to catch her at the stage door have left Judy viewing him as a persistent masher rather than a respectable mentor, however, he doesn't look like he'll get much chance to present a happy ending on bended knee, either.³

( The best gag on Broadway. )

I've been awake for thirty-six hours now, so I'm heading for bed. You can find this movie on DVD thanks to The Lucille Ball Film Collection (2007), which puts it ahead of most things I recommend; I have to say that I liked it orders of magnitude better than The Wild Party (1929), my sole previous experience of Dorothy Arzner's filmmaking. I really think it's because Dance, Girl, Dance, while it also recognizes when things about gender in this country are terrible, does not feel the need to make its protagonists fall prey to them anyway when alternatives exist. It makes a change. This non-zero-sum game brought to you by my starry backers at Patreon.

1. Since the producer was Erich Pommer who, in his capacity as head of production at Decla and Ufa between 1919–1926 and 1927–1933, essentially gave us German Expressionism and other high points of Weimar cinema—look at his filmography, it's ridiculous—I'm inclined to assume he had some idea. The original director of Dance, Girl, Dance was Roy Del Ruth, who had previously directed such successful musicals as Broadway Melody of 1936 (1936), Born to Dance (1936), and Broadway Melody of 1938 (1937), all of which I can recommend, especially if you want to see the opportunity and in a real sense the talent that was lost when a dangerously stupid makeup idea knocked Buddy Ebsen out of The Wizard of Oz (1939). Pommer didn't want another musical in the MGM house style, however, and after repeated clashes with Del Ruth took the first opportunity to replace him with Arzner. It is my impression that none of Del Ruth's footage even survives in the finished film.

2. I know we're talking striptease that could get past Joseph Breen, but Ball does a fantastic job of suggesting what her costumes won't let her show. "Give 'em all you got, baby!" her sugar daddy enthuses as she waits in the wings. She murmurs coolly, "They couldn't take it," and sails past him onto the stage. She slings her gloves into the audience as if she's got all night.

3. It genuinely doesn't seem to occur to him that a man repeatedly offering to share an umbrella and a taxi with a woman he just met in an elevator could be read as unwanted overtures rather than a neutral, platonic offer from one person who has an umbrella and a bank account to another who is clearly having a terrible day and just lost her last dime down the storm grate; that's nice as far as knowing his motives goes, but it probably loses him a lot of chance acquaintances. After the stage door incident, I started shouting at him that he should stop trying to leave her his name and number and start carrying business cards like any impresario with half a brain.