The Hollywood Theatre

I’m no longer physically able to participate in protest marches, so I missed the March for Palestine on March 2. It was cold and raining the whole weekend, so Sue and I thought a movie was more our speed. Dance, Girl, Dance was filmed in 1940, directed by Dorothy Arzner, the first woman director in Hollywood. It was screened Sunday as part of a special “feminist” series at our local hundred-year-old theater, first operated as a vaudeville venue, the Hollywood. Sue and I were there. 

In some ways, it’s a film of its era: the two times Black people appear in minor roles, they are stereotyped or ridiculed. Men run theatres and dance venues. Women depend on men financially, and women manipulate men to survive. We were disappointed by all that. 

In other ways, it’s ahead of its time. Lucille Ball plays a burlesque dancer who rejects conventional morality and ideas of romance and campaigns successfully for her financial freedom as a single woman. Maureen O’Hara’s character is more conventional and “romantic,” though her wish is for a career in ballet, not a husband. The protagonists are women in a world controlled by men, in a business created for the titillation of men, but the women are aware of what is now called “the male gaze.” O’Hara’s character delivers a speech about the ways men look at women dancers that might be the beginning of a course on representation and is still relevant today.

The brilliant actress and teacher of acting Maria Ouspenskaya, who trained with Stanislavski in Moscow and brought his methods to the USA, appears for about fifteen minutes as a women’s dance troupe manager/instructor. I could have watched her much longer. Her acting is a marvel.

I enjoyed a thoughtful review of the film and its gender politics after I’d seen the film, and I learned more about Arzner from it than I had known before.

The historic theatre has an upstairs lounge with red velvet curtains, carved wooden tables, and antique movie projectors, and I couldn’t resist making a portrait of Sue up there (Extra). Note: she's no longer wearing glasses! She is still dealing with inflammation that followed her cataract surgery, but she's better. She can't get prescription reading glasses until the inflammation resolves, but she has no trouble with distance vision now, and no trouble watching a movie.