1940's Watch: Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

Watched:  05/19/2025

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Dorothy Arzner

I basically threw Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) on because I saw it starred Lucille Ball and Maureen O'Hara, and, in the end - and to my surprise-  the movie wound up kind of blowing me away.  

What starts off feeling like any of a few hundred other Depression-era movies about showgirls trying to make it (which is how contemporary reviews started and stopped with the movie), the well-worn story is repurposed as a criticism of the business of show, burlesque, the male gaze, and the position of women in society and the flack they take for making money.

I'll back up here and mention, two of the three screenwriters on this movie were women.  It also seems a male director started the film and immediately quit, handing the reigns to Dorothy Arzner.  

Arzner was, in 1940, the lone female director still working in the studio system.  She'd started directing in the 1920's and helped usher in the sound era.  According to TCM's Dave Karger, she may have invented the boom pole and mic. She was also an intellectual, a feminist, and very driven.  And you can feel those ideals branded across the movie.  But I also am not shocked that the ideas the movie is conveying may have bypassed some audience members who would just read the movie as having been made incorrectly.

The film casts O'Hara as a would-be ballerina dancing with a troupe (including co-star Lucille Ball) in legally-gray nightclubs.  Ball is not as technically proficient, but has "oomph" that can make a headliner.  She's there for fortune and glory.

They get mixed up with a wealthy scion of a tire-producing family in Akron - who is miserable as his wife is leaving him, headed to Reno for a divorce perhaps neither of them really wants.

Ball is whisked away to join a nightclub act in Hoboken, and fearing that O'Hara will waste her talents in nightclubs, O'Hara's teacher takes her to a prestigious ballet for a try out. But, seeing modern ballet, she gets imposter syndrome and dashes out.  

Ball recruits O'Hara into her new show, promising her she can perform classy dancing, but it turns out O'Hara's role is to offer a subject of ridicule with her dancing, tucked into a burlesque show.  Making money she's never seen, O'Hara stars as the show which takes off in popularity, making a farce of her dream.  

SPOILERS

As events come to a head, O'Hara snaps and walks to the edge of the stage - a stage where she's been mocked and humiliated for doing what she loves - and stares down the audience before mocking them for what they're even doing here.  

I don't think I've seen anything like it in any other movie pre-1980's or 1990's.  It's literally our lead standing there saying "fuck you for having no class and making a mockery of art and me.  And for thinking that coming to a burlesque and seeing women in their delicates makes you a big man.  I know you're not, and so do your wives".  It is absolutely brutal.

And it really does feel like a movie with characters pulled from a different era, although the concerns very much reflect the reality of being a woman in America during the Depression. I don't think it's too hard to understand that the professional opportunities were very limited for women, and the push was to reach for marriage and stability (a tough sell based on the ten years pf actual history preceding this film).  It was cheap to show oneself like a showgirl, and yet you could be richly rewarded for doing the things that you weren't supposed to do.  But to want things like being a ballet dancer - that was simply a pipe dream to be abandoned when you had a chance at marriage and riches.  And I think it impacted the reviews by those expecting the sugar-coated ending.

The movie was more or less panned, if not eviscerated, when it came out.  And people stayed home in droves.  It was, truly, ahead of its time, for a major studio release.  It would be like Vin Diesel stopping at the end of a movie now and saying "hey, maybe all of this racing around and punching and shooting isn't really the best way we could be solving problems or spending our lives.  Maybe the thing to do with family is share a meal and make sure people know you love them.".  Like, America is not ready for that.  Anymore than they were ready to see Maureen O'Hara throw away romance and riches for a chance to fulfill her dream of dancing.  Or Ball throw away a sham marriage (with a nice separation fee).

The film is also beautifully shot and choreographed.  It seems it had a DP and a Cinematographer, Russell Metty and Joseph H. August, and it really does look great.  Choreography was by Marion Morgan, director Arzner's partner.  So there's some real feeling about passion for your art here between the two.  And a young Robert Wise was Editor.

Anyway, it's almost a shock to see a woman calling out men on their bullshit in a movie from a studio, and a weird fit for the Hayes Era which was policing movies, and probably was mad that they ended up agreeing with the destination if not how the movie got there.

One thing about film is that sometimes enough people just keep watching a movie over the years, if it remains in circulation, that the initial impressions fall away and the film gets serious critical reconsideration.  And, so it's been with Dance, Girl, Dance, which was seen again in a very different light once feminism hit the zeitgeist in the 1970's.  Today, for it's treatment of women and women's issues, the movie is considered a classic, in its way, at least among a sect of film scholars.