Stage Door is one of the most revered movies in the high canon of classic Hollywood comedies, deservedly. Probably the most utopian, non-heterosexist story produced by Hollywood by that time. Read as queer, it works. Read as women’s friendship and solidarity, it works, too. As critique of the whole infrastructure of romantic comedy, also works.
Given the conditions under which it was created, it should have been an unholy mess. Instead, it’s one of monuments of collaborative improvisational work among writers, directors, and actors that the studio system was built to prevent. Begin with casting as leads two empyrean stars with opposite temperaments, acting styles, public personae, and professional trajectories: the patrician thespian Katharine Hepburn coming off a run of unsuccessful films and Broadway plays, and plebe danseuse Ginger Rogers just beginning to stride out of the golden Astaire-Rogers straitjacket. The play on which the script is based, a successful Edna Ferber-George S. Kauffman Broadway comedy, is an unfunny, conventional exhibition of New York chauvinism against the vulgar temptations of Lalaland. Gregory La Cava, fresh after the success of My Man Godfrey, was hired to create order, but a less orderly major director in Hollywood is hard to imagine. Like Leo McCarey, Lacava’s m.o. was to abandon a script almost entirely and to construct a new one, scene by scene, on the go. Accordingly, not one member of the crew from top to bottom was sure at the beginning of a day’s shoot not only exactly what would be shot that day, but where the story was headed. Teamed with Morrie Ryskind, his writing partner on Godfrey, La Cava worked by inspiration and collaboration with his actors, whose brains he picked for ideas, dialogue, and motivation. A noncomformist to the core, La Cava thrived on tearing down the house and building it back up from scratch.
As Elizabeth Kendall tells it in her essential Runaway Bride, La Cava had his many actresses spend two weeks before shooting began, in a simulation of the movie’s Footlights Club boarding house, just conversing, kibbitzing, and sharing professional anecdotes, which La Cava’s secretary jotted down, and much of which he incorporated into the dialogue. That group dialogue is so full of cross-talk you feel you’re watching a Robert Altman film before the letter.
The method was typical for La Cava’s paradoxical genius. On the one hand, on-the-spot creation that depended on the energy and enthusiasm of his acting crew. On the other, an uncanny sense of the exact duration a shot would require, down to the number of frames. Apparently, La Cava’s early experience as an animator gave him an inner frame-clock. It made Zanuck crazy, but he let the process unfold because La Cava delivered excellent rushes on time and the finished project came in under budget and under the clock — and made money. Zanuck had to admit that he trusted La Cava, even though he worked entirely against the grain.
Stage Door‘s story is a revisionist version of the tried-and-true backstage drama going back at least as far as its Hollywood archetype, The Broadway Melody in 1929. The revision works because so many of the archetypal elements are in play: two competing starlets, a sexual-predator impresario, a female innocent melodramatically sacrificed to the gods of success, a climactic Big Show. All these familiar tropes are subverted, however. The two competitors become friends and stick together at the end, instead of one sacrificing her career for the other. (That sacrifice is displaced to a minor character, Kay [Andrea Leeds].)The sleazy impresario turns out to be a non-villain. (Pretty surprising, since he is certainly an indirect cause of the death of innocent Kay .) The big show turns out not to be a musical, but high theater of the sort associated with Hepburn. And most amazing of all: there is no real heterosexual romance. As Kendall notes, the emotional energy of usual heteronormative romantic comedy is transferred to two women, Hepburn’s Terry and Rogers’s Jean. It doesn’t matter whether we view it as an erotic relationship or not. The film simply erases the romantic male as the carrier of phallic power; the phallus game is transferred almost entirely to the women. (The “almost” in that phrase will bring us to Adolphe Menjou’s unusual role — not so unusual for him, but unusual for romantic comedy.) All of these deviations from the archetype were products of La Cava’s and his collaborators’ improvisations — the more he listened to his female actors, the less he retained of the conventional form.
Everything hinges on the odd couple of Terry and Jean, separated mainly by class and its codes: clothes, speech, and money. But it’s clear in the pace of verbal dueling that they share self-assured sarcastic wit as equals. They’re a screwball couple. These sorts of sorties and parries between female characters in most comedies usually happen between a main heroine and a supporting friend or sister. It was extremely rare between female equals — after all, they wouldn’t leave much air for the male lead.
The film’s revisionary perspective of the backstage drama isn’t entirely original. For me, there are striking resonances of — and maybe even a subtle homage to — Gold Diggers of 1933 (a film whose importance is still under-appreciated). Like that Loyd Bacon/Busby Berkeley spectacle, Stage Door shows Depression-era female actors struggling to make a living, rooming together both to save money and provide solidarity, and capable of looking after themselves. Stage Door adds emotional weight by showing a more realistic image of the show-world, including its sexual and class exploitation. And even if Terry comes from money (and ultimately gets her star opportunity from Daddy’s cynically motivated angel-money — he wants her to try and fail), she opts to stay with the grit.
The crackling dialogue, very little of which is from the stage play, probably owes a lot to Rogers’s input. The character of Jean has a minimal role in the play. La Cava and producer Pandro Berman must have known from the outset that they would have to build up Jean’s role to match Rogers’s screen status, an alteration that transformed the script from a snobbish Broadway play into movie brilliance. The verbal pace makes us overlook the many small, rich cinematic details — such as Jean embracing a little doll as she snuggles into bed, contrasting with Terry’s “animal” mink stole in the previous scene; or the fantastical sleep masks deftly embodying shutting out the bright lights while reflecting them to the camera-world.
But what are we to do with Menjou’s Tony Powell? Like so many rich sleazebag movie playboys he makes a play for “the little blonde” as his object of conquest. He is the king of the entertainment world, producer of the Broadway show that Kay and Terry are competing for and part owner of The Grotto Club, where Jean and her dance partner Annie (played by a very young and funny Ann Russell) land their big dancing gig. He arrives on the scene as an appropriately seasoned roué dressed, as Kendall puts it, in Menjou’s characteristic “sartorial splendor.” He’s the Big Man. He makes the little girls nervous. It’s no secret that for a girl to get ahead in the Big City, the first stop is Powell’s “casting couch” (a phrase actually used in the film).
As it happens, Powell’s current paramour is none other than Jean’s in-Footlights Club antagonist, stuck-up Linda (played by La Cava favorite Gail Patrick). Menjou/Powell is, on first meeting, a fine Sugar Daddy — or “Grandfather” as Jean misidentifies Terry’s real grandfather from his portrait. (In the end, she’s not wrong. In that world, women require older men with money to survive. It’s called patriarchy.) Powell has eyes on fresh meat and, tiring of Linda, enjoys seeing her envious of her new rival. In a funny scene rich with Hollywood in-jokes, Powell arranges a rendezvous with Linda at the Grotto Club, where he wants to see Jean and Annie’s dance act (which he has newly contracted). Lots of things going on. Because he’s keeping his arrangement with Linda a secret, Tony has supplied her with a beard, his butler Hammond, played by Franklin Pangborn — the least likely heterosexual beard in town, though he probably knew a lot about beards. Jean, for her part, reprises a female version of Astaire’s cane-as-weapon dance from Top Hat, nearly poking out Linda’s eye, as Annie puts it. I love this scene; note that it’s the only scene in which Ginger does a relatively sustained dance but it violates all the rules that Astaire had set up. We never see the dancers’ full bodies, there are lots of cuts and shuffled angles, making clear that Ginger is only accidentally a dancer in the drama.
Tony’s troubles begin when Terry and Kay arrive at his office to try out for the same role — a role that trained-but-unlucky Kay is right for, but the raw Terry is not. After many previous failures to get her foot in the door, Kay, in despair, faints at the feet of two of her also-waiting housemates, Judy [Lucille Ball] and Eve [Eve Arden]. It’s a wonderful moment in movie history; those two were to become the dominant female comedians on American television in the ’50s and ’60s.
Terry, power-protected and used to being heard, storms into Tony’s office and reads him the riot act for not seeing all the girls asking for a chance. For his part, Tony hears her out before dismissing her. (I don’t know how often this scene was rehearsed — or, whether it was rehearsed at all — but I love the gestures and physical interaction between Hepburn and Menjou. It’s the stuff of theater but La Cava makes it cinematic.) After expelling Terry from his office, Tony welcomes a Mr. Carmichael, evidently a well-heeled lawyer-type with whom Tony is familiar regarding “that other matter,” evidently a sticky situation from which Tony was somehow extricated. After decrying Terry and all the young female nuisances trying to get on stage, Tony learns that Carmichael represents the angel that Tony was longing for. But his munificence will come at a cost. We aren’t told what that is, but we can guess. Altogether a great scene, contrasting Terry’s honesty (which elicits some from Tony, too) and the backroom ethics of the Big Men. And Big Tony is obviously not the biggest man in play.
More architectural beauties and brilliant writing follow as Jean decides to enjoy Tony’s advances after all. Linda enters Jean and Terry’s room in a long sable coat (we know it was one of Tony’s courtesies in the past) as Jean prances around in a white ermine jacket. Black and white, get it? Except that the jacket actually belongs to Terry, and Jean has “borrowed” it for a moment. Or two. The scene reprises, and inverts, the opening scene when Jean in righteous fury pulls the stockings off Linda’s legs, stockings that Linda has appropriated from her room mate. Now it’s Jean who is appropriating. Surprisingly, Linda is somewhat less catty than Jean, and offers her useful advice, less out of jealousy than solidarity with a fellow victim of Tony’s machinations. To top it off, Terry, far from ripping the fur from Jean’s shoulders, simply lets her have it. And it ends with some of the flashier female ensemble repartee in the genre.
Tony begins his usual seduction routine in his big white apartment, and Jean is not averse. He delivers his usual schtick that he will be her Pygmalion and make her career. Drunk on champagne, Jean misunderstands the allusion, and ignores (or forgets) Linda’s warnings. She’s eager to rise above her hardscrabble hoofer status in a borrowed ermine jacket. The story doesn’t moralize about it. But matters take an unexpectedly comic moral turn when Tony tries the same tried-and-true seduction technique on Terry to explain the leading role he has given her — which the audience has no trouble figuring out is because her father, via Mr. Carmichael, has insisted that she be given the starring role if Tony’s to get the financial backing. Terry, as is her wont, subverts all of Tony’s plans, asking interminable questions about his motives, refusing to play along. (Most commentators, including Hepburn herself, believed that La Cava transformed Terry’s original role by incorporating Hepburn’s own irritating traits as an actor at the time. Just as Cary Grant and Irene Dunne felt that Leo McCarey liberated them to play uninhibited comedy in The Awful Truth by making them improvise from their own neuroses, Hepburn felt La Cava did the same in Stage Door.)
In this wonderful scene, La Cava and his team create a sublime moment. You have to watch it. It’s a hilarious reprise and transformation of the office scene, where Tracy and Tony are suddenly (from Tony’s perspective) equals, in the classic screwball vein. (Keep in mind how young screwball is at this moment.) Not only does Terry puncture Tony’s phallic status and appropriate it to herself, she reveals that his posture as a libertine rogue is just a sham. In one of the wryest, and gentlest, moments of phallic deflation in Hollywood comedies of the time, she reveals that she knows the photos of Tony’s wife and son are shams chosen from advertisements; they’re just beards that allow him to court young starlets while being unavailable for marriage. In a single reveal, she demolishes his patriarchal jam: no wife, no son. Tony’s just a guy. What’s more, after going back and forth with Tony about whether she actually can act at all, she performs her own perfect real-life sham to save Jean from Tony. After the hilarious debunk (all based on Terry’s social knowledge, so superior to all the other victims of Tony’s casting couch), Terry and Tony have their Hollywood clinch, but in a handshake, not a kiss.
The most intense, and borderline incongruous, scene in the film is Kay’s descent into suicidal madness at missing out on the role that she believes was made for her. It’s brilliantly composed. Kay is the sacrificial victim apparently required of all stage dramas. After giving Terry selfless, affectionate encouragement — a core transaction in backstage dramas at least since The Broadway Melody — she ascends the Club’s staircase as if she were ascending into mad heaven. I’m not in a position judge, but this strikes me as one of the great Hollywood mad moments. The mix of the Club lobby’s piano singalongs, the spectral agentiat’s encouragement, the applause (destined for Terry, not for Kay), and the near-expressionistic camerawork is as good as anything in Hitchcock.
Kay’s sacrificial tragedy leads to Terry’s maturation from a smug, overconfident wannabe actress into the real thing. It’s a singular sign of La Cava’s genius that he suggested, apparently from scratch, that Hepburn reprise as her cathartic moment a scene from The Lake, a recent play that bombed on Broadway; Hepburn’s performance in it was so roundly panned that her career was in jeopardy. La Cava interpolated into the script one the most melodramatic scenes from the denouement of the play, word for word. Before Kay’s demise, Terry — who has never acted on stage before — is abrasive, argumentative, and obstructive in rehearsal, a transparent parody of Hepburn herself, whose reputation for those very traits was legendary. With Kay’s suicide, Terry is so filled with guilty grief that she refuses to perform what she now too believes was Kay’s part. But persuaded in one of those “you can’t back out now, too much depends on it” backstage speeches, she delivers a heartbreakingly good method-performance, bringing her sisterhood to tears. It’s extraordinary to me that Hepburn would have agreed to all this. But she did, and she claims she agreed immediately, considering it artistically brilliant. Some film historians believe that La Cava, who underwent Freudian analysis for many years, was profoundly influenced by it in his film-making. He apparently had the gift of transforming his actors’ traumatic experiences and nagging neuroses into comedic shticks — and they enjoyed it. Someone ought to write something about how much more successful psychoanalysis is as comic technique than a soul-healing practice.
The play proves to be a success, and Terry can see her name in lights. And yet she stays among her sisters at the Footlight Club. The ending is faux classical. There’s a sort of wedding; not for Jean or Terry, but for the practical Judy, who is sent off with love to her marriage with an Oregon lumberman. Once again, La Cava subverts form. The hitch-up that traditionally concludes a romantic comedy is mentioned at a distance, and precisely to underline that neither of our heroines is remotely interested in romance or marriage, or even success. They have the friendship of their theatrical sodality, and the scene returns to its beginnings, all cross-talk and joking, but this time without jealousy or rancor. And the circle remains unbroken: a newbie arrives into the gay chaos with the same questions Terry arrived with in Scene 1.