Dorothy Arzner Double Feature: DANCE, GIRL, DANCE (1940)

(Dorothy Arzner, 1940, 90 min, 16mm)

Running throughout was the first-ever retrospective of the films of Dorothy Arzner, a maverick who challenged stifling gender norms to be the only female studio filmmaker working throughout the 1930s and 40s. Working up from typist to editor to screenwriter to director, Arzner mastered the vocabulary of Classical cinema across more than a dozen features that spanned—and often married—comedy, melodrama, morality and immorality tales.

High among Arzner’s most celebrated works is DANCE, GIRL, DANCE (1940), a vivid melodrama about two ambitious women striving to succeed as dancers on the burlesque circuit. Drawing sharp contrasts between her two magnetic leads, the boisterous showgirl Bubbles (Lucille Ball) and demure aspiring ballerina Judy (Maureen O’Hara), Arzner crafts a rigorous, yet wildly entertaining study of friendship and rivalry that explicitly interrogates the ways that women must adapt and conform themselves to get ahead in the male-dominated world of show business. Poorly received upon release—perhaps its daring implication of lewd male audiences may have soured touchy critics and exhibitors?—but the years have proven DANCE, GIRL, DANCE to be one of the most significant and enduring feminist statements in American cinema.

For this presentation, Block Cinema will reproduce one of the 1974 festival’s most trenchant pairings, preceding DANCE, GIRL, DANCE with experimental filmmaker Gunvor Nelson’s classic TAKE-OFF (1972, 10 min, 16mm), a witty and irreverent deconstruction of striptease.

DANCE, GIRL, DANCE print courtesy of the MCM Archive at Brown University; TAKE-OFF courtesy of Canyon Cinema.

Host or Publisher The Block Museum of Art