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1.7.03 - 2.9.03
DIRECTED BY DOROTHY ARZNER Dorothy Arzner remains arguably the woman with the longest continuous career as a director in Hollywood. From early stints as a typist, editor and screenwriter, Arzner went on to direct 16 features in about as many years, a record still unrivalled by any female director in Hollywood more than 60 years after Arzner's professional heyday in the 1930s.
Arzner began making silent films, which sadly seem to have disappeared. But with THE WILD PARTY she made the transition to sound, a technological change she embraced and reportedly even advanced: to put Clara Bow at ease and moving naturally in her first talkie, Arzner is said to have devised a microphone on a pole, the first "boom." Subsequently, she gained a reputation as a star-maker of up-and-coming actresses.
Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, even stage actress Ruth Chatterton and the young (though hardly a film novice) Lucille Ball, all were cast by Arzner in breakout roles.
 By the early '40s, professional setbacks had precipitated Arzner's retirement from Hollywood. Nevertheless, she continued to be active, directing Women's Army Corps training films during WWII and Pepsi-Cola commercials for Joan Crawford in the '50s. Eventually she landed at UCLA, where she taught filmmaking from 1959 to 1963; Francis Ford Coppola has spoken fondly of the encouragement she gave him as a student. In an echo of her career-long "exceptionalism," she occupies a special niche at UCLA today: she is the sole film school faculty member to be memorialized with a bronze sculpture, in the northwest corner of the lobby outside the James Bridges Theater.
Arzner's films were rediscovered in the '70s feminist reappraisal of classical Hollywood, and this rediscovery was given further life by Judith Mayne's 1994 book, Directed by Dorothy Arzner, which examines Arzner's career in light of her lesbianism. Arzner's works today appeal as much for their subversive interrogation of women's communities and female behavior as for their drop-dead wit, sparkling double entendres and playful gusto. If the sight of Clara Bow giddily chatting about "hard-boiled maidens" in all-female company connotes a certain gayness and gaiety, well, that's the prismatic marvel of Arzner.
Special thanks to: Mike Schlesinger—Columbia Repertory; Grover Crisp—Sony Pictures; Judith Mayne—Ohio State University.
With the cooperation of Paramount Pictures and Universal Studios, the UCLA Film and Television Archive has preserved Arzner's six extant films for Paramount from nitrate projection prints or acetate master positives. None of the original negatives has survived. These films will be presented in new prints that will tour North America later this year.
This program has been funded by Jodie Foster and a grant from the  Saturday January 25 2003, 7:30PM
THE WILD PARTY
(1929) Directed by Dorothy Arzner  Paramount's first sound feature, THE WILD PARTY was conceived as a vehicle for silent superstar Clara Bow—indeed the film was expressly designed as the "It" girl's talkie debut. A light-hearted comedy set at an exclusive women's college, the film features Bow as the most popular party girl in a dorm full of high-spirited flapper coeds. Critically acclaimed and a box office success, THE WILD PARTY confirmed Arzner's reputation as an exceptional director of actors, even something of a "star-maker," and established her as a resourceful and reliable practitioner in the new medium of talking motion pictures.
Preserved by
Funding by The David and Lucile Packard Foundation Paramount. Based on a story by Warner Fabian. Screenwriter: E. Lloyd Sheldon. Cinematographer: Victor Milner. Editor: Otto Lovering. Cast: Clara Bow, Fredric March, Shirley O'Hara, Marceline Day. 35mm, 77 min. WORKING GIRLS
(1931) Directed by Dorothy Arzner  This rarely seen gem is a subversively funny film laced with Arzner's characteristically ironic view of marriage, work and class. Judith Mayne calls it "perhaps the most daring and innovative film Arzner ever made." Two Indiana sisters come to New York City to look for work. They learn how to be single girls in the big city and, after some intervening travails, find love and the right men. What makes the film tick, however, are the winks and double entendres the script (by key Arzner collaborator Zoë Akins) keeps throwing our way—from the brazenly suggestive title to wisecracks insinuating gender confusion. Anticipating DANCE, GIRL, DANCE, the film distinguishes the "ladylike" and the "hardboiled" woman only to embrace both at the end.
Preserved by
Funding provided by Jodie Foster Paramount. Based on the play Blind Mice by Vera Caspary, Winifred Lenihan. Screenwriter: Zoë Akins. Cinematographer: Harry Fischbeck. Cast: Judith Wood, Dorothy Hall, Charles Buddy Rogers, Paul Lukas, Frances Dee. 35mm, 77 min. Sunday January 26 2003, 7:00PM
DANCE, GIRL, DANCE
(1940) Directed by Dorothy Arzner  Maureen O'Hara and Lucille Ball star as dancers pursuing dramatically different paths to success: while O'Hara struggles to make good as a ballerina, Ball achieves celebrity in a burlesque club. A concise staging of the classic "art vs. commerce" dilemma, the film complicates this familiar opposition through Arzner's typical empathy for both her female protagonists. Notable for elevating supporting player Ball to star status, DANCE, GIRL, DANCE is most widely esteemed today for O'Hara's daring confrontation of an all-male burlesque audience. This stirring scene, which explicitly critiques the male gaze and its objectification of women, made this film an important part of Arzner's recent rediscovery. The film's heartfelt quality may also owe something to her decades-long relationship with dancer/choreographer Marion Morgan.
THE BRIDE WORE RED
(1937) Directed by Dorothy Arzner  Joan Crawford was notoriously labeled "box-office poison" for her role in this Cinderella story about an ingenuous barmaid who poses as an aristocratic lady at a posh hotel in the Alps. After winning the heart of upper-crust Robert Young, she is torn when she falls for an earthy mailman played by Franchot Tone (Crawford's off-screen husband at the time). A commercial and critical failure, THE BRIDE WORE RED was a terrible disappointment for Arzner, marking the beginning of the end of her career in Hollywood. Despite its poor initial reception, however, the film can now be recognized as an eloquent commentary on the use of costume and performance in building social class and sexual identity.
MGM. Based on the play The Girl From Trieste by Ferenc Molnár. Producer: Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Screenwriter: Tess Slesinger, Bradbury Foote. Cinematographer: George Folsey. Editor: Adrienne Fazan. Cast: Joan Crawford, Franchot Tone, Robert Young, Billie Burke. 35mm, 100 min. Saturday February 1 2003, 7:30PM
MERRILY WE GO TO HELL
(1932) Directed by Dorothy Arzner  This pre-code comedy opens with Fredric March, as dissolute writer Jerry, wooing and wedding Joan, a naïve young socialite played by Sylvia Sidney. Their idyllic marriage heads south once Jerry's play becomes a Broadway hit and he reverts to the self-loathing libertine he was before he met Joan. A bitter comedic pill, essentially cynical about the prospects of modern romance and unblinking in its critique of soulless, pseudo-sophisticated high society, the film was nevertheless a great commercial success. It was Arzner's last film at Paramount, whose support of her had grown tepid; she went on to work as an independent rather than take a pay cut.
Preserved by
Funding by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Myra Reinhard Family Foundation Paramount. Based on the novel I, Jerry, Take Thee, Joan by Cleo Lucas. Screenwriter: Edwin Justus Mayer. Cinematographer: David Abel. Cast: Sylvia Sydney, Fredric March, Adrianne Allen, Skeets Gallagher, Cary Grant. 35mm, 78 min. HONOR AMONG LOVERS
(1932) Directed by Dorothy Arzner  A secretary (Claudette Colbert) rejects her boss's advances in favor of marriage to a young stockbroker, only to discover that her former boss (Fredric March) is a man of character while her husband (Monroe Owsley) is an unprincipled weakling. The story is distinctly pre-Production Code—March announces at the outset that he is against marriage, and at the end of the picture it is not clear that he has changed his mind; Owsley openly takes a mistress after he and Colbert have been married less than a year—but Arzner demonstrates her skill at extracting dramatic gold from potentially lurid material.
Preserved by
Funding by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Myra Reinhard Family Foundation Sunday February 2 2003, 7:00PM
SARAH AND SON
(1930) Directed by Dorothy Arzner  Ruth Chatterton shared with Arzner a disdain for conventional ideas of what a woman could and could not do. In the 1940s she directed a play on Broadway and once piloted her own plane across the country. During the early years of sound, her stage-training and assured technique won her the title "Queen of the Talking Screen." In SARAH AND SON, she played a woman trying to reclaim the son from whom she was unfairly separated while he was still an infant. Her performance in this highly emotional drama (her first for Arzner) was rewarded with an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.
Preserved by UCLA
Funding by the National Endowment for the Arts and Universal Studios Paramount. Based on the novel by Timothy Shea. Cinematographer: Charles B. Lang. Editor: Verna Willis. Cast: Ruth Chatterton, Fredric March, Fuller Mellish, Jr, Gilbert Emery, Doris Lloyd. 35mm, 86 min. ANYBODY'S WOMAN
(1930) Directed by Dorothy Arzner  Arzner reunited with screenwriter Zoë Akins and actress Ruth Chatterton in this story of a working-class woman's painful unease in high society. Chatterton plays Pansy Gray, a chorus girl out of work after being arrested for "revealing too much at a burlesque show." She meets a well-to-do lawyer (Clive Brook) who is slumming it since his wife dumped him, and after a night of drunken debauchery they wake up sober—and married. Soon Pansy must adjust to her new life where even the servants look down on her. Chatterton's character, like many of Arzner's heroines, may have been hard up, but not helpless.
Preserved by
Funding by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Myra Reinhard Family Foundation Paramount. Based on the short story "The Better Wife" by Gouverneur Morris. Screenwriter: Zoë Akins. Cinematographer: Charles B. Lang. Editor: Jane Loring. Cast: Ruth Chatterton, Clive Brook, Paul Lukas, Huntly Gordon, Virginia Hammond. 35mm, 80 min. Saturday February 8 2003, 7:30PM
CHRISTOPHER STRONG
(1933) Directed by Dorothy Arzner  Arzner's first film as an independent director after leaving Paramount, CHRISTOPHER STRONG features Katharine Hepburn as a strong-willed aviatrix who falls hopelessly in love with the eponymous married man, an English aristocrat played by Colin Clive. A woman's story despite its title, CHRISTOPHER STRONG pivots around Hepburn, whose charismatic performance transcends the cruel hand dealt her character by the conventions of '30s Hollywood melodrama. Hepburn's first leading role here established her as a movie star; the image of Hepburn swaggering about in androgynous costume would prove no less than iconic. In fact, the film was integral in limning the essential contours of Hepburn's distinctive screen persona.
RKO. Based on the novel by Gilbert Frankau. Producer: David O. Selznick. Screenwriter: Zoë Akins. Cinematographer: Bert Glennon. Editor: Arthur Roberts. Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Colin Clive, Helen Chandler, Billie Burke, Ralph Forbes. 35mm, 72 min. FIRST COMES COURAGE
(1943) Directed by Dorothy Arzner  Arzner returned to Columbia for what would prove her last Hollywood film, FIRST COMES COURAGE, a WWII espionage drama starring Merle Oberon. Based on a novel by Elliott Arnold, the film reverses the genre's central convention—Oberon is here the heroic Allied spy, while the ostensible leading man, Brian Aherne, plays a supporting role. Set in Nazi-occupied Norway, the story finds Oberon sleeping with the enemy (Carl Esmond) and passing on privileged info to her Allied contact—and erstwhile lover—Aherne. Overshadowed by CASABLANCA, its more famous contemporary, FIRST COMES COURAGE is a patriotic adventure yarn that remains underappreciated for its briskness and cool proficiency.
Columbia. Based on the novel The Commandos by Elliott Arnold. Producer: Harry Joe Brown. Screenwriter: Lewis Meltzer, Melvin Levy, George Sklar. Cinematographer: Joseph Walker. Editor: Viola Lawrence. Cast: Merle Oberon, Brian Aherne, Carl Esmond, Isobel Elsom, Reinhold Schunzel. 35mm, 86 min. Sunday February 9 2003, 7:00PM
CRAIG'S WIFE
(1936) Directed by Dorothy Arzner Arzner lived up to her rep as a "star-maker" by launching the career of Rosalind Russell with this smart, ironic and ultimately tragic prestige picture for Columbia. Adapted from George Kelly's play by the screenwriter Mary McCall, CRAIG'S WIFE features Russell as a control-freak housewife so obsessed with maintaining absolute order in her home that she cuts herself off from all meaningful human contact. A critical favorite that earned respectable box office returns, CRAIG'S WIFE was hailed as a "quality" picture in its time; retrospectively it can be seen as a proto-feminist "woman's film" and a stinging critique of marriage and the bourgeois household. Columbia. Based on the play by George Kelly. Screenwriter: Mary C. McCall, Jr. Cinematographer: Lucien Ballard. Editor: Viola Lawrence. Cast: Rosalind Russell, John Boles, Billie Burke, Jane Darwell, Thomas Mitchell. 35mm, 75 min. NANA
(1934) Directed by Dorothy Arzner  Arzner replaced George Fitzmaurice as director on NANA, a vehicle for Russian actress Anna Sten, whom producer Samuel Goldwyn was grooming for stardom in the Dietrich/Garbo mode. Based very loosely on the classic novel by Émile Zola, the film features Sten in the title role as a prostitute-cum-actress caught between two aristocratic brothers in nineteenth-century Paris. Though Variety crowed that Sten "has beauty, glamour, charm, histrionic ability … and s.a.," and praised Arzner's use of the "Sternberg-Mamoulian technique" in directing her female star, NANA performed only modestly at the box office, and Anna Sten never did become the next Marlene Dietrich.
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