E-Mail This Article to a Friend One woman’s world ‘Directed by Dorothy Arzner’ at the MFA BY STEVE VINEBERG

Dorothy Arzner came into movies at the very end of the silent era, in 1927, and made 17 films (including the 1930 Paramount on Parade, which she directed with several other Paramount filmmakers), a mere handful by studio-system standards. After retiring, in 1943, she lived for another three and a half decades but never directed another Hollywood feature, only training films for the Women’s Army Corps until the conclusion of the war and Pepsi commercials for her friend Joan Crawford in the ’50s. Her career was brief enough, and most of her movies were marginal enough, to relegate her to a footnote in film history were it not that she was the first woman to be accepted into the Directors Guild — because she was the first woman to make a career as a commercial director. (Lillian Gish and Mabel Normand had both tried their hand, but Gish didn’t like it and Normand’s directing always remained second to her silent-comedy performances.) Since the late ’70s, film scholars have attempted to make a case for Arzner as a subversive feminist voice in the Hollywood system. She’s even been called a subversive lesbian voice, but unless you want to make a big deal about the ballet-school teacher played by Maria Ouspenskaya in Dance, Girl, Dance, whose adoration of her most gifted student (Maureen O’Hara) might be read as sexual and whose mannish outfits imitate Arzner’s own choice of wardrobe, there isn’t much of an argument to be made for the latter.

The seven-film series the MFA has borrowed from UCLA (where Arzner taught between 1959 and 1963) wants to present her as a purveyor of dramas about vivid, independent-minded women, but the movies themselves don’t always bear out that interpretation. True, three portray communities of women. The Wild Party (1929; October 2 at 5:45 p.m. and October 9 at 3 p.m.) is set at a women’s college populated by romance-minded flappers, most of whom seem to have crushes on the new anthropology prof (Fredric March). (Clara Bow plays the lead, in her first talkie.) In Working Girls (1931; October 9 at 4:30 p.m. and October 11 at 12:30 p.m.), the two protagonists, sisters played by Judith Wood and Dorothy Hall, live in a boarding house for employed young women that has some resemblance to the hotel for struggling actresses in the later Stage Door. And then there are the dancers trained by Ouspenskaya in Dance, Girl, Dance (1940; October 3 at 6:15 p.m.). True again, Arzner depicts with sympathy women who are ill treated by society, like the Ruth Chatterton heroines of Anybody’s Woman (1930; October 4 at 1:15 p.m.) and Sarah and Son (October 5 at 11 a.m.), the first a burlesque performer whose marriage to an aristocrat (Clive Brook) is disdained by his friends and family and undervalued by him, the second a mother deprived of her infant son.

But you could make the same case for almost any women’s melodrama of this era, such as Madame X, that much-filmed chestnut about mother love (and the property that made the stage-trained Chatterton a movie star). Most of these movies don’t rise much above that kind of morality-play sensibility. Anybody’s Woman pits Chatterton’s true-blue scarlet woman against Brook’s ex-wife (Virginia Hammond), who leaves him for a wealthier man but doesn’t mind continuing to sleep with him. Its twin, Honor Among Lovers (1931; October 12 at 12:30 p.m.), features a woman (Claudette Colbert) who sacrifices herself repeatedly for her husband (Monroe Owsley), but it pivots on the contrast between the two major male characters: her ex-boss (March), a bachelor with several mistresses, behaves far more honorably toward her than her dishonest, ne’er-do-well spouse.

In fact, Arzner’s pictures tend to take an ambivalent position toward the independence of their women characters. Here are two examples, the first from a pretty good movie, the second from a pretty bad one. In 1932’s Merrily We Go to Hell (October 8 at 6 p.m.), an heiress (Sylvia Sidney) marries a weakling (March), a reporter with a drinking problem and an unresolved attraction to his former girlfriend (Adrianne Allen). Sidney has kept March off the booze long enough so he can turn out his first play, but he falls off the wagon when the producer hires Allen to star in it. March becomes involved with Allen again, and Sidney decides that rather than turn herself into a cliché of a scolding wronged wife, she should play the role of the modern woman and permit him to live his own life while remaining married to her — provided that she can do the same. But she isn’t cut out for sexual freedom; her heart isn’t in it, and her health won’t support it. In the final reel, she wins back her philandering husband when she gives birth to his child and the baby dies; they reconcile tearfully in the hospital. The movie is an often fascinating, decidedly mature pre–Hays Code drama with a well-drawn hero and heroine, but it reverts to moralistic melodrama at the end, punishing March for his weakness by killing off his child and turning Sidney into a damaged, bed-ridden wife whose pitiable state — and unabated devotion — bring him back to her arms. (Working Girls has a parallel conclusion: having left Dorothy Hall for his old fiancée, Charles "Buddy" Rogers returns to her at the end, when she’s carrying his child.)

Dance, Girl, Dance is considerably nuttier. Maureen O’Hara gets a job executing ballet steps for laughs at a burlesque house, where her buddy, a hootchie-koo dancer alternately called Bubbles and Tiger Lily and played by Lucille Ball, provides the main attraction, a number that climaxes when a fan blows her skirt up and various parts of her clothing catapult into the flies. (Arzner lifted the skirt-blowing idea from The Awful Truth.) Off stage the two friends lock horns over a rich drunk (Louis Hayward). One night — when the ballet-company director (Ralph Bellamy) she’s dying to work for happens, unknown to her, to be sitting in the audience — O’Hara stops the show cold by castigating the male spectators who pay their money to laugh at her and leer at Ball. O’Hara’s speech might be taken as a righteous (if somewhat preposterous) explosion over the crass behavior of the men in the audience (there are, one might note, far more women around to applaud her eloquence than we saw in the previous burlesque scenes) were it not that the sequence ends with an on-stage catfight between the two women. If there’s anything a burlee-cue voyeur will enjoy more than a comedy strip number, it’s a catfight.

It’s telling that the series omits the most infamous of Arzner’s movies, Christopher Strong, which has one of Katharine Hepburn’s earliest screen performances. (It came out in 1933.) Hepburn plays an Amelia Earhart–like aviatrix who has an affair with a British politician. When the romance threatens his career, she removes the obstacle by crashing her plane.

Except for Dance, Girl, Dance (which has gorgeous black-and-white cinematography by Russell Metty and a vivacious, hard-boiled performance by Lucille Ball), the movies in the series all come from the early talkie period. Arzner liked to work with people who had come to Hollywood from the New York stage — Chatterton, March, the playwright Zoë Akins, who wrote Anybody’s Woman and Sarah and Son as well as Christopher Strong. Chatterton is often a very peculiar presence (her performance in Anybody’s Woman is indecipherable, but so is the film), but March comes off well in Honor Among Lovers and better in Merrily We Go to Hell, where he plays a role that might be a blueprint for a far more famous March character, Norman Maine in A Star Is Born.

And Sidney, a delicate, naturalistic actress whose career is overdue for reassessment, is superb. She isn’t really right for a blueblood heroine; she was always a natural proletarian. But her acting transcends the miscasting; she breaks your heart in scene after scene. My favorite is the one I’d remembered from seeing the film for the first time about 30 years ago. Having recently announced her resolution to live the life of a modern woman, she shows up at a jazz party where her husband and his girlfriend are in evidence below a long staircase. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and descends; you can feel her muting her own better instincts as, not so merrily, she plunges into Hell. It’s the performance of the series.