DANCE, GIRL, DANCE: The Gaze Pays

March is Women's History Month, so let's continue last year's tradition of highlighting a weekly movie by female filmmakers. With the recent global resurgence of toxic masculinity and fascist norms, it's all the more important to seek gender parity in the director's chair. For the director is as much an embodiment of the soul of a movie as any one person can be, and the souls of men are clearly not good enough.

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Dorothy Arzner
Writers: Tess Slesinger, Frank Davis, Vicki Baum
Cast: Maureen O'Hara, Louis Hayward, Lucille Ball, Virginia Field, Ralph Bellamy, Maria Ouspenskaya, Mary Carlisle
Runtime: 90 mins.
1940

Dance, Girl, Dance is a late career film by Dorothy Arzner, a filmmaker with the distinction of being the only female director working in Hollywood during the 1930s. The only one. She got to such a prominent position simply by being such an essential editor that when she threatened to leave Paramount if she wasn't given the director's chair, they relented. In Arzner's words, "I remember making the observation, 'if one was going to be in the movie business, one should be a director because he was the one who told everyone else what to do.' "

Her career is crucial for several reasons beyond her penetration of an uncrackable glass ceiling. For one thing, her desire for more performer mobility in the early days of talkies led her to invent the boom mic by attaching a microphone to a fishing rod.* Beyond that monumental advancement of the craft, she was a public (if closeted) queer icon,** and she consistently made great films that represented an oasis of female agency in a sexist industry.

*Naturally, it was patented a year later by some other dude.

**Although a queer reading of Dance, Girl, Dance is less obvious than some of Arzner's other films, there is something striking about the homosocial way that Judy and Bubbles relate via their mutual romantic target Jimmy.

Indeed, that is as good a description as any of what Dance, Girl, Dance is all about. Our hero is Judy O'Brien (Maureen O'Hara), a dancer with tremendous potential as a ballerina. Despite her talent, she is continually upstaged by the self-aware, attention-seeking sexpot Bubbles (Lucille Ball). After Bubbles makes it big as the headliner of a burlesque act, Judy's mentor Madame Lydia Basilova (Maria Ouspenskaya) tries to ensure Judy's path to fame by arranging a meeting with the discerning and influential Steve Adams (Ralph Bellamy). A series of unkind coincidences, including the death of Madame Basilova, keep that plan from panning out; Judy instead ends up as the stooge for Bubbles' act. Her purpose is to dance beautifully while the men in the audience jeer and call for Bubbles' return. On top of all this professional tension, Bubbles makes a point of going after Jimmy Harris (Louis Hayward), a rich playboy with whom Judy has developed a promising connection. All of this culminates in a series of media scandals and public outbursts that bloodthirsty reporters are eager to lap up.


The film is fixated with the idea of consumption, specifically consumption of female bodies. Jimmy Harris consumes romantic partners, Steve Adams consumes top tier dancers, the jeering burlesque audience consumes the performers (either eagerly or viciously depending on if they're getting what they want). The whole thing amounts to a grand indictment of the male gaze, spelled out in no subtle terms by Judy in the film's climactic moment. The monologue is on-the-nose but classic, with Judy forcing an entire audience of men (and complicit women) to confront their masculinity, the facade of performative femininity, and the family structures that prop it all up. Yet a far subtler indictment of the male gaze crops up earlier in the film, when Madame Basilova is trying to sell her chorus as a hula act for a club. Bubbles has gone missing so she reluctantly positions Judy as the main attraction. Judy is the better dancer, you see, but Bubbles has that va-va-voom that the club owner is certainly looking for. As Judy's technically competent hula plays out, we see the owner's cigar-chomping listlessness in painful close-up, with inserts of Judy's unmistakable disappointment and Madame Basilova's anxiety. Once the dance is over and the owner is about to leave, Bubbles shows up right on time (as usual) in order to steal the show. Her hula dance is dripping with sexuality, and we see the owner's expression come to life. The entire sequence is a masterful piece of storytelling without dialogue, and its incisive depiction of the male gaze reminds me of nothing more than The Neon Demon.

Much of the film centers around Judy's continual dismay that the world of men wants Bubbles' vulgar talents more than her own artistic ones. It would be easy to portray Judy as a sanctimonious idealist, but Arzner and O'Hara never let Judy become reductive or ignorant. Her relationship with Bubbles is complex, and it helps that the film never condemns Bubbles like any lesser movie would.*** In fact, Dance, Girl, Dance makes sure you know how little it blames Bubbles during its detente, a court scene that is probably the low point of the film. It serves mostly as an excuse to get all the characters into one room so that Judy can summarize the ways that she has learned and grown.

***And like many contemporary reviews did: one such review from the New York Times describes Lucille Ball's character as "the sort of woman that other women describe in a single word."

At any rate, the film has a tremendous facility with engendering sympathy for its characters. On the page any number of them could be construed as villains, but on the screen everybody is likable enough, warts and all. That goes for the manipulative Bubbles, that goes for the stubborn Judy, that goes for the ignorant Steve, and that even goes for the spiraling narcissist Jimmy. This indicates that Arzner wields that greatest of talents in characterization: her film is about the social forces working on her characters rather than the successes or failures of any individual. For an artist working under the Hays code and the considerable sexist constricts of Hollywood melodrama, this takes a tremendous amount of craftsmanship and self-awareness.

This distinction between scapegoating and social commentary is all-important, one that is too often lacking in the ruling class of straight white men. Take the first burlesque scene, for example. Bubbles performs a song and dance number that ends with her hiding behind a tree onstage as "the wind" ostensibly blows pieces of her clothing off one by one. Immediately thereafter, she is replaced onstage by Judy, who doesn't yet understand that she is the stooge. She performs her beautiful ballet as the crowd grows hostile. We see their sneering ravenous indignation, and we see her shock and horror. Just as we think it can't get any worse, the clothing that was whisked away from Bubbles in the previous act begins falling from the rafters, to the uproarious approval of the crowd. So Judy's art is invaded by the tawdry symbols of Bubbles' act. Any other director could have made Judy the butt of the joke, just as the men in charge of the showcase did. Yet Arzner's staging and careful attention to the emotional state of Judy, as well as the roiling libido of the audience members, paints a tragic picture instead. A portrait of a society that gobbles up young women whether they are trying to avoid the system like Judy, or play the system like Bubbles. This social consciousness is the great triumph of Dance, Girl, Dance, one that firmly sets it apart from its peers.

3.5 / 5  BLOBS