When I first began researching the Hollywood comedies of the 1930s and ’40s, Dance, Girl, Dance had an unusually high status among feminist film scholars. The battle of the sexes was inherently interesting for feminist critics, and there was a natural desire to find films that would present powerful, self-fashioning women and challenge the patriarchal structures of traditional comedy. Screwball comedy provided plenty of the former, but the latter were much harder to come by. Dance, Girl, Dance was viewed as an exception. Directed by Dorothy Arzner, one of the very few women directors in Hollywood at the time, it was offered as a rare example of “the female gaze,” a comedy that emphasizes the critical perspective of female characters judging the male spectatorship rather than the almost exclusively male perspective that dominated Hollywood movie-making.
When I first saw the film those many years ago, I was disappointed. I appreciated the gender-ideological positioning of the film, and I recognized that I’m obviously not the feminist interpretation’s target audience. Even so, Dance Girl Dance‘s supposedly female gaze seemed pretty blurry to me. Besides, gender politics was not my main concern, unless it was part of the comic vision. I didn’t feel that’s the case with the film — and viewed in terms of its comic form I didn’t feel it was very well made. I’ve watched it more than once since then, hoping I would become wiser and more perceptive. It looks like I haven’t.
The story: Bubbles (Lucille Ball) and Judy O’Brien (Maureen O’Hara) work hard to make ends meet as chorus girls in a seedy joint. Judy has the higher ambition to become a ballerina and studies with the elderly former diva, Madame Lydia Basilova (Maria Ouspenskaya). Bubbles, by contrast, gets a gig that makes her a headliner in a burlesque revue. Madame encourages Judy to audition for a leading ballet company. Madame is then fatally hit by a car on the way to the audition, and Judy loses her nerve. Meanwhile, Judy must deal with the attentions of a weak-willed, moneyed playboy who is flaccidly coping with divorce proceedings with his refined, class-appropriate wife. Bubbles offers Judy a job in her act, toe dancing in a tutu. It turns out that Judy is a stooge, whose purpose is to elicit the scorn and ridicule of the audience who clamor for Bubbles’s return to the stage. Judy gradually tires of the contempt, leading to an event: from the stage she confronts the gathered spectators, dressing them down for their prurient desires to leer at women (and implicitly their contempt for art). The scolding leads to an onstage catfight between Bubbles and Judy. In the meantime, the director of the ballet company (Ralph Bellamy in an unusually warm role) is overcome with admiration for Judy and together they exit the tawdry world of burlesque queens and stooges for higher things. The playboy suitor is reconciled with wife. The end.
Roy Del Ruth, one of the most prolific musical comedy directors in Hollywood at the time, was originally contracted to direct the film by legendary producer Erich Pommer. And thereby hangs a tale. Pommer had been one of the most influential film producers in Germany, and, after fleeing the Nazis, in France and the UK. His later contracts in Hollywood stipulated that he would produce only prestige films. It’s hard to see how Dance, Girl, Dance could have been considered an A-list project. None of the leads were guaranteed stars — O’Hara had made only a few films and Ball had a poor track-record as a box office draw. Del Ruth was well-respected but basically a contract director whose films smudged the line between A and B. By 1940, he was best known for early Edward G. Robinson gangster classics and the Eleanor Powell Broadway Melody musicals. In the standard account, Pommer fired Del Ruth because the director was trying to shape the film into a conventional musical, a concept at odds with the more elevated original story by Vicki Baum, the author of Grand Hotel. Pommer replaced Del Ruth with Arzner, who promptly discarded all of Del Ruth’s footage and reshot and rewrote everything from scratch. The film was shot by Russell Metty, who would later become a celebrated ACE, but in 1940 was a fresh contract cameraman at RKO. The editor was Robert Wise, whose next film was to be Citizen Kane, but who had by 1940 edited only four films. And one would imagine that a film titled Dance, Girl, Dance would feature accomplished danceuses — yet neither Ball nor O’Hara were that. (It’s an odd aspect of Ball’s career that, though she started out in the chorus as a Goldwyn Girl, she was not a gifted dancer, and was quite self-conscious about it. Her dance sequences at RKO and MGM are few and far between, and they required no great skill. O’Hara at least had some graceful ballet chops.)
The story is basically a variation on the Broadway Melody archetype, a backstage musical that pits aspiring female performers against each other. It was so well trod by 1940 that it required constant variation. In some cases, the genders were reversed, as in Broadway Melody of 1940, which pitted Fred Astaire against George Murphy. It’s plausible (but I really don’t know) that Del Ruth, who had directed both Broadway Melody of 1936 and Broadway Melody of 1938, wanted a variation in which the friction between the aspiring gals would be more gritty than usual. No matter how the competition looked between the aspiring performers in the previous films, there was a tacit agreement that the comic resolution would reaffirm the values of the Great White Way. Arzner changed that by making the conflict not a competition for popular stardom, but between high and low art.
Arzner’s version (as I imagine Baum’s was) was more melodramatic than comic. Only Bubbles gets laughs, and she basically represents exploitation, exhibitionism, and cynicism. There aren’t a lot of laughs, but her routine isn’t without its charms. It’s a fairly tepid version of the “Oops, I Did It Again” hokum routine (that was infinitely better done in a better song by Virginia Gilmore’s [and later, Ella Fitzgerald’s] “Hello Ma, I’ve Done it Again” in Fox’s Tall, Dark and Handsome a year later). It ain’t burlesque, but it has a sort of cartoon charm.
This is what the audience prefers to Judy’s high-art prancing. In the end, Judy’s frustration and resentment at being publicly humiliated reaches the point that she delivers a righteous moral scolding to her tormenters. On the spectrum of anarchic to disciplinary comedy, we are pretty close to the edge at the far end of disciplinary. This scene was regularly singled-out as a moment of feminist resistance by sympathetic critics. It’s followed by an onstage catfight between Judy and Bubbles that was apparently a fun spectacle to behold.
At the end, Judy falls exhausted into the embrace of Ralph Bellamy, who is sure to support her in becoming the prima of his dance company.
It’s puzzling to me why the film is considered such an important one in the development of a feminist canon. Aside from Judy’s rather unexpected and even unmotivated moralizing outburst from the stage, there’s not much material for female solidarity to build on. It seems odd that so many of the theorists who elevated Dance, Girl, Dance into the feminist canon tend to ignore the existence of a film that far surpasses it in depicting the dynamics of women’s competition and co-operation in showbiz, Stage Door. Lucille Ball was in that film too.