O’Hara and Ball shine in Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance Dance, Girl, Dance The Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) $39.95 Judy O’Brien (Maureen O’Hara) and Bubbles (Lucille Ball) are dancers in the same struggling troupe, and both have big ambitions: Judy wants to be a professional dancer, scripting her own ballerina routines in her spare time, and Bubbles is looking to land a rich suitor who can give her a more comfortable lifestyle. A fter the troupe loses their gig at the Palais Royale in Akron, Ohio, when the cops raid the joint for illegal gambling, both women return to New
York City looking for a new way to fulfill their dreams. The two women end up linked when Bubbles adopts the persona of the Tiger Lily at a burlesque club, and offers Judy a high-paying opportunity to do her ballet routine – as a stooge that the audience boos and jeers until Bubbles returns to the stage. Judy needs the money, but being the punchline to Bubbles’ act weighs on her. When a rich suitor with a crumbling marriage named Jimmy Harris (Louis Hayward) starts courting Judy, only for Bubbles to try and swoop in, it’s the last straw.
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Bubbles (Lucille Ball) with a stuffed Ferdinand the Bull in Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance. Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance is an impressive balancing act between its two protagonists, using their differing desires and differing views on what they do for a living to illustrate the challenges of women working in an artistic industry. Bubbles may be antagonistic toward Judy, but she’s not villainous – both women are presented as having sensible goals, and the screenplay, by Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis, weaves a careful story that puts the two of them at odds with one another without it being a battle of who’s right and who’s wrong. The friction between them is one of the many elements that help the film feel relevant even 80 years later, and no doubt a contributing factor to the film being preserved by the National Film Registry, as well as being inducted in to The Criterion Collection. I Love Lucy looms large, not just as part of television history, but within pop culture history in general. Ball’s movie career, on the other hand, gets far less attention. Dance, Girl, Dance finds Ball in top form, vamping it up as the sassy, takes-what-she-wants kind of gal who’s sympathetic to the struggles of the women around her but who is also looking out for herself first and others second. When she offers Judy the job in the burlesque act, she doesn’t mention that the role is essentially a punching bag for the audience, feeling that Judy needs $25 a week more than artistic fulfillment (a question that many female artists no doubt ask themselves today). She bails on Jimmy, who they first meet in Akron, when he behaves strangely on their would-be date, but immediately concocts a way to win him back when she learns that he’s loaded and interested in Judy. Arzner makes great use of Ball’s natural comic charisma to make the character sympathetic even when she’s
behaving callously. The burlesque routine itself, set to the song “Mother, What Do I Do Now?”, is a good showcase for Ball’s physical comedy talents (and feels like a foreshadowing of some of Barbra Streisand’s performances in Funny Girl). There is an equal deftness in the casting of O’Hara as the “plain” girl to Ball’s “sexy star.” O’Hara is great in the role (especially near the end, when she gets multiple monologues), and of course, unquestionably beautiful, and yet there’s a truth to a scene where a scuzzy promoter doesn’t like the troupe’s hula act until he sees Bubbles do it. It’s not that the troupe’s version is bad or that Bubbles’ is good, but Arzner uses Ball’s brassy personality to the movie’s benefit. There’s also a sharp bit of commentary when the promoter goes onto hire Bubbles alone, which brings to mind thoughts of womens’ solidarity, and how the charisma of one woman can make or break the careers of several others (Bubbles had hoped her success would benefit all of them). Self-confidence issues also play a big factor in the story, with Judy constantly struggling to assert herself or objectively assess her own talents. Early in the film, the girls’ elderly manager, Madame Basilova (Maria Ouspenskaya), tries to put Judy in contact with Steve Adams (Ralph Bellamy), who runs an important ballet troupe. When Basilova dies before their meeting with Steve can take place, Judy talks herself out of speaking to Steve, convinced she’s not talented enough. No doubt struggles with self-image have existed forever, but mass media has undoubtedly only enhanced them since 1940, not to mention, the thread can just as easily be extrapolated into things such as filmmakers who seem unconvinced that women could act without being tricked into it, or the
