DANCE, GIRL, DANCE (1940)

As the sole female director making mainstream Hollywood fare during the silent-to-sound transition, then more sporadically thru 1943, while openly living in a lesbian relationship (and looking the part in suits, close-cropped hair & a mannish aura), feminist critics & academics have inevitably burdened Dorothy Arzner with cultural & political baggage her small total of films can’t support.  Especially as the bulk of her available films were made during the Early Talkie era, adding obstacles in pace & technique for modern audiences on both progressive & retrograde elements in her work.  It makes this penultimate film (Arzner picking up from dropped director Roy Del Ruth after two weeks) a good starting point.*  And it doesn’t hurt that it’s also her most sheerly entertaining, a more than slightly daffy love triangle (make that love pentagon) among the modern ballet set with serious student Maureen O’Hara and knockout Lucille Ball, a more pop oriented type, rivals hunting up gigs & guys.  Ergo nearly divorced playboy Louis Hayward, passed back & forth while ex-wife Virginia Fields waits in the wings.  Plus, dance impresario Ralph Bellamy as backup for O’Hara.  The plotting is frankly bonkers, but the playing & audacity, especially by the fabulous Ms. Ball, is sublime.  Three more women come into play (dance roommate Mary Carlisle, lost in the shuffle; secretary Katherine Alexander, always a matchmaker never a bride; and dance mistress Maria Ouspenskaya as martyr) before everything gets sorted out in Night Court where wise male judge Walter Abel untangles Lucy from Maureen after their on-stage cat-fight (don’t ask).  All this plus a bit of modern ballet and two bravura strip routines for Ball with a humiliated O’Hara en pointe in-between.  Off the charts entertaining; off the map insane.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Or perhaps start with Arzner’s F. Scott Fitzgerald-like MERRILY WE GO TO HELL/’32.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/01/merrily-we-go-to-hell-1932.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: WARNING: BlackFace couple in the big ballet number.