Background
Dorothy Arzner was born on 3 January 1900 in San Francisco, California, United States. The daughter of a Hollywood restaurateur.
(The subject could have provided the basis for scathing cr...)
The subject could have provided the basis for scathing criticism of a woman’s demented domestic energy, but instead she is regarded as a misfit. The Bride Wore Red was a Joan Crawford vehicle, about a former prostitute who is on the point of respectability.
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Dorothy Arzner was born on 3 January 1900 in San Francisco, California, United States. The daughter of a Hollywood restaurateur.
She dropped out of the University of Southern California and worked her way up at Paramount from typist to cutter to editor to director’s assistant.
As an editor, she worked on Blood and Sand (22, Fred Niblo), The Wild Parti/ (23, Herbert Blache), The Covered Wagon (23, lames Cruze), and Inez from Hollywood (24, Alf red E. Green).
She was writing scripts, for Paramount and Columbia, and when she was on the point of going over to the small studio to direct her own work, Paramount promoted her, first as Esther Ralston’s director.
Her early films were conventional, saucy comedies about love and marriage: Get Your Man is Clara Bow angling for an aristocrat husband, and in The Wild Party Bow forms a “hard-boiled maidens ” group at a college to plague Professor Fredric March.
Merrily We Go to Hell is a comedy, with March and Sylvia Sidney, in which humor barely conceals the desperation of the brittle rich.
She left Paramount and free-lanced: Christopher Strong is Katharine Hepburn as an aviatrix, with hints of a superwoman persona emerging as the woman kills herself rather than have an illegitimate child—more romantic agony than feminist self-determination.
Nana was a turgid Goldwyn spectacular built around Anna Sten.
But Craig's Wife is a remarkably severe picture in which Rosalind Russell plays a monstrous housewife.
Dance, Girl, Dance, at RKO, is Arzner’s best film: a study of working girls and feminine career strategies, with Lucille Ball and Maureen O'Hara exemplifying the robust and the demure approaches.
Her long retirement saw her doing some teaching at UCLA, and making TV commercials for Pepsi-Cola for her old friend Joan Crawford.
The Wild Party Bow
(Sarah and Son is a Ruth Chatterton weepie about a mother ...)
(The subject could have provided the basis for scathing cr...)
She was not a great filmmaker, and her pioneering should not inflate her reputation. But she turned out some fascinating pictures and clearly was able to pursue a personal if undoctrinaire interest in the issue of women’s identity.
One has to confess that she generally played according to the Hollywood concept of “a woman’s picture. ” She did not stretch or threaten the system, as Barbara Loden did with Wanda; but that is also a sign of how far the 1930s romance was susceptible to a feminist sensibility. And Dorothy Arzner made more films than ever came from Barbara Loden.
Arzner got into pictures through hard work and paying her dues, and she stayed near the top long enough for her retirement to be an act of choice. All of which says very little about why she was unique.