NFR Project: 'Dance, Girl, Dance' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘Dance, Girl, Dance’

Dir: Dorothy Arzner

Scr: Frank Davis, Tess Slesinger

Pho: Russell Metty, Joseph H. August

Ed: Robert Wise

Premiere: Aug. 20,1940

90 min.

It’s a rags to riches story, involving two women, one the victim of the other, both oppressed by their sexuality. It was directed by the sole female director in Hollywood in the 1930s, Dorothy Arzner (1897-1979). It is her best-known and most studied film.

Arzner made 20 films between 1927 and 1943. Her primacy as a director was such that she was not penalized for her sexual orientation – she was simply another among a crowd of studio directors. Her skill is evident, and the film is no better or worse than the typical studio output of the day.

It is interpreted as a feminist document by many film scholars. (It tried to arouse the potential audience's interest by proclaiming on one poster "NOT SUITABLE FOR GENERAL EXHIBITION/") It deals with two dancers, the innocent and aspiring young ballerina Judy (Maureen O’Hara) and the popular, cynical sexpot Bubbles (Lucille Ball). They are both looking for opportunity – but Bubbles, with her burlesque-level bumps and grinds, finds popularity much sooner. (Don’t miss the diminutive character actress Maria Ouspenskaya as Judy’s teacher.)

Soon, Bubbles is packing them in the burlesque theater. Judy goes on after her act, doing ballet and being thoroughly razzed by an unappreciative audience. She is the “good girl,” Bubbles’s “stooge,” employed to whet the appetite for the ensuing Bubbles. Meanwhile, both of them interact with a charismatic but moody millionaire Jimmy, still in love with his ex-wife  (Louis Hayward), Judy gets fed up with being objectified and berates the audience of horny males over their catcalls. Bubbles and Judy fight over Jimmy.

The two end up in court, where Judy gets ten days. She is bailed out by a beneficent ballet impresario, Steve (Ralph Bellamy), and told that she is a brilliant dancer and that he is going to elevate her to star status.

It is what was termed a “woman’s” picture – though Arzner took over the project from Roy del Ruth, who got fired – in the sense that it deals with emotions and questions of identity. Bubbles is happy to market herself like a side of beef, so she succeeds immediately. Judy holds on to her integrity and, by implication, her virginity, almost saintlike in her pursuit of her art. Bubbles gets the guy; Judy gets the career path she merits.

It's in some ways a comedy of manners, and at other times it veers into melodrama. It is all over the place, but it is firm in its address of the peculiar status of women in America at that time. Ultimately, these two women's fates are in the judgmental hands of men. The gulf between Judy and Bubbles, what makes them oppose each other, is not so remote from the dichotomy between the virgin and the whore.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Down Argentine Way.

NFR Project: 'Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort South Carolina, May 1940'

 

NFR Project: ‘Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort South Carolina May 1940’

Dir: Zora Neale Huston

Recorded 1940

42 min.

This is one I know only reputationally. I have no access to the actual footage. Therefore, I must point you to Fayth M. Parks’ excellent essay on it here.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a prominent and influential anthropologist and folklorist. She was recruited to go to this congregation in Beaufort, South Carolina, and to record their social and religious activities. This she did on May 18 and 19, 1940 – generating non-synchronous sound recordings at the same time. Prayers, songs, and sermons are documented.

It is thought to be invaluable for its insights into Black American vernacular culture. No one paid attention to the lives of ordinary people, let alone Black American people, on film; evidently this footage provides a rare glimpse into the social life of a certain race and class in America, and does so honestly. That in itself is a minor miracle.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Dance, Girl, Dance.

NFR Project: 'The Bank Dick' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Bank Dick’

Dir: Edward F. Cline, Ralph Cader

Scr: Mahatma Kane Jeeves aka W.C. Fields, Richard A. Carroll

Pho: Milton R. Krasner

Ed: Arthur Hilton

Premiere: Nov. 29, 1940

73 min.

W.C. Fields (1880-1946) was a juggler, first and foremost. (For a brief replication of some of his old juggling tricks, see The Man on the Flying Trapeze [1935]). He made his reputation as a “tramp” juggler, a downscale clown who didn’t speak. He moved on to other ideas, incorporating a trick billiard table into a classic vaudeville pool-hall routine, then moved on to skewering golf on Broadway in variety revues.

The sarcastic dialogue came later. He began to comment on what he was doing, and on the state of things in general. His sketches were wildly popular, and he began to drift into film work during the late silent era.

But it was, significantly, working in sound that made his career. On film, he usually played a male martyr – a henpecked man who snuck smokes, drinks, and peeks at the Police Gazette when not under his wife’s baleful gaze. In this film, he is Egbert Sous-say (read”Souse”), and his harridan wife, her mother, and their youngest daughter despise him. Only his oldest daughter (Una Merkel) loves and appreciates him.

Fields holds everything in contempt – home, family, fame, fortune. He knows that the ways of the world are not his, and longs constantly to float through the day on a gentle tide of alcohol. He commiserates with himself at the Black Pussy Cat Café (which all the characters refer to pointedly as the “Black Pussy Café”. The great Shemp Howard, soon to rejoin the Three Stooges, is the bartender)

Fields is visibly ailing in this film, genuinely an alcoholic who was drinking himself to death. His countenance is swollen, and his body is more rotund. He ambles through town aimlessly and is called upon, oddly, to take over the direction of a film when its director shows up drunk. For no particular reason, he abandons the shoot.and accidentally captures a bank robber, leading to his being nominated for a job as the bank’s guard. This he accepts, cautiously.

In the meantime, he falls for a swindler who wants to sell him worthless mine stocks. Fields convinces his daughter’s chinless boyfriend (the inimitable Grady Sutton), a bank clerk, to embezzle $500 to pay for it. Suddenly, the bank examiner (Franklin Pangborn) shows up, and Egbert has to do everything he can think of to dissuade him from examining the books.

Then, it turns out that the stock certificates are valuable. The day is saved – but then suddenly, as was usually the case with a Fields ending, a rather arbitrary last-second robbery takes place, and culminates in a comical car chase. Fields gets the $5,000 reward, cashes in his stock, and lands a $10,000 contract with the movie company. Resplendent in formal wear, he leaves his family in their mansion and walks back to the Black Pussy Café.

Fields has lots of fun abusing the proprieties. He mutters out of the side of his mouth at everyone, unable to assert himself until the deux-ex-machina chicanery of the happy ending he imposes on himself – a bit of wish fulfillment many can identify with. He has no endearing qualities. He suspects the world is out to get him, and he is right. Egbert could just have easily wound up dead, or a bum. He is fortune’s fool, a very intelligent and articulate and skeptical fool indeed.

Fields’ lack of logic in what takes place in what is more or less a plot in his film is a hallmark of his consistently breaking the fourth wall in his films – in The Fatal Glass of Beer, for instance, and in his last feature, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. He has no respect for continuity, internal logic, finesse. He is there, he delivers the gags, and moves on. If you don’t like it, too bad.

This bristling approach to comedy makes him an acquired taste. You have to be able to share in his sense that everything was a sham, and that that best you can be is somewhat benumbed to it all. Oddly, this cynical posture underscores the heartache that must have prompted him to pick up the comic cudgel in the first place.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort South Carolina (March 1940).