Good girls and bad girls

Dorothy Arzner film series delivers her mixed messages

By Ty Burr, Globe Staff, 9/28/2003

Dorothy Arzner: trailblazing feminist director or faceless studio pro?

Such was the scholarly spadework in rediscovering Arzner during the 1970s that many cinephiles still assume the former -- that not only was she one of the very few women in early Hollywood to make it to the director's chair but that her films stake out protofeminist positions of independence, assertion, identity, and pride.

If only matters were that simple. The seven films screening at the Museum of Fine Arts from Thursday through Oct. 12 under the title "Directed by Dorothy Arzner" present a more complicated, if not compromised, picture. All but one hailing from the early sound era, and many in prints restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the films unquestionably share a fascination with female characters stepping outside traditional roles of domestic helpmate or romantic goddess.

But many movies of the Roaring Twenties and early Depression years did the same; the various social forces in play after World War I served to completely redefine the status of women in reality and in the media. What's startling about many of Arzner's early talkies is that they often offer only lip service to the notion of the new emancipated woman -- occasionally stooping to poke fun at her and always sending her into the arms of the protective male who, from a modern vantage point, is precisely the wrong guy.

It's a mistake to interpret old movies using current cultural assumptions. But there's more than context at work here: Mervyn Le Roy's "Three on a Match" (1932) and Lloyd Bacon's "Marked Woman" (1937) are but two examples of early Hollywood films that follow through on the often problematic choices women are forced to make. Both were made by men; perhaps more important, both were made at Warner Brothers, the most hard-nosed of the studios. Arzner made most of her 16 credited films at Paramount, which specialized in elegance and high-spirited panache, and her work poses questions that either the director or the front office seems too skittish to answer.

Raised in Hollywood, where she met her first movie people while working at her father's diner, Arzner worked her way up from script department stenographer to film editor at Famous Players, catching attention for her creative cutting on such silent classics as Rudolph Valentino's "Blood and Sand" (1922).

She was hired by Paramount in 1927 to direct "Fashions for Women" and became a key talent as the company made the wrenching adjustment to sound. Indeed, 1929's "The Wild Party" is both the studio's first all-talkie and one of Arzner's most remarkable films -- playing on Thursday and Oct. 9, it's the highlight of the MFA series.

Arzner wasn't the only woman director in early Hollywood -- Alice Guy, Lois Weber, and Margery Wilson all had varying degrees of success -- but she may have held her own better with her male peers. She had a seat-of-the-pants inventor's streak, attaching a microphone to a fishing pole to ease "Wild Party" star Clara Bow's talkie jitters and thus helping to create the boom mike. She also had a reputation for on-set toughness, and she may not have been above the casting couch: Arzner's companion of decades was choreographer Marian Morgan, but actress Esther Ralston has spoken of rejecting the director's amorous advances. Still, if Arzner arguably had her boorish side, she was in good company -- few early directors were saints.

Her films, however, exhibit a toughness that is continually and curiously tempered by convention. A Dorothy Arzner movie often shows an independent working woman falling for a powerful man in ways that would be seriously actionable today. "Honor Among Lovers" (1931, at the MFA Oct. 12) presents Claudette Colbert as a capable private secretary to a Lothario businessman (Frederic March) who eventually wins her heart after her broker husband (Monroe Owsley) has proven to be a cad. "Anybody's Woman" (1930, Saturday), the most class-conscious of the director's early films, casts Ruth Chatterton as a kindhearted burlesque dancer who marries a rich lush (Clive Brook) on a bender and fights to win his approval and love. "Merrily We Go to Hell" (1932, Oct. 8) features Sylvia Sidney as a naive heiress who even the script acknowledges is a "doormat" for her adulterous, alcoholic newspaperman husband (March).

Because she was working before censorship restrictions were imposed by the Hays Office in 1934 and during the tumultous, anything-goes transition to sound, Arzner was able to get away with a lot. All these films are frank about premarital and extramarital sex, yet they view their heroines' qualified independence without irony or comment, and their humor can have a brutal edge.

The central woman in an Arzner movie is often contrasted with a bad-girl double -- a cynical, sexual, often stupid predator who's a figure of derision. In "Honor Among Lovers," she's a chippie, "a little dumb but all right," played by a young, brunette Ginger Rogers. "Working Girls" (1931, Oct. 9 and 11) makes sisters of these two sides of the female coin, with the simpering, immature, younger May (Dorothy Hall) chasing a callow Harvard man (Charles "Buddy" Rogers) and the older June (Judith Wood) finding security with a middle-age professor (Paul Lukas).

1940's "Dance Girl Dance" (Friday) is the only late-period Arzner at the MFA, and it's the film that the director's early academic supporters hold up as a critical pre-feminist text. Yet even this enjoyably campy melodrama pulls its punches: "Good girl" ballerina Maureen O'Hara gets off a unique monologue in which she berates a burlesque theater full of ravenous men -- talk about interrupting the male gaze -- but Arzner undermines the scene by immediately throwing O'Hara into a comically sped-up catfight with "bad girl" stripper Lucille Ball.

Only "The Wild Party" views the college hellion played by Bow with anything like sympathy, and only because she saves her gentle, studious roommate (Shirley O'Hara) from expulsion and ends up married to her handsome anthropology professor (March again). Bow, a silent-movie sex goddess whose talkie career faltered after this, is over-the-top vivacious and fascinatingly weird to behold, but "Party," even more than "Working Girls," shows Arzner's real strength during the dormitory scenes. Here she offers a rich and hidden world of female behavior that almost, but not quite, moves beyond notions of "good" and "bad." It's the most telling evidence that this director was something more than one of the boys.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@

globe.com.