Monthly Archives: February 2018

  • Dance, Girl, Dance

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Dorothy Arzner (1940)

    Dorothy Arzner was one of the very few female directors in Hollywood in the inter-war years and (just) beyond:  her first feature was Fashions for Women (1927) and her last First Comes Courage (1943).  Dance, Girl, Dance, Arzner’s penultimate feature, is also her best known.  Its two main characters are diametrically opposed performers:  conscientious Judy O’Brien (Maureen O’Hara), who wants to be a ballerina and an artist, and brassy Bubbles White (Lucille Ball), who wants to be a success.  At the start, both are members of a dance troupe whose teacher-manager, Madame Basilova (Maria Ouspenskaya), seems to accept the financial imperative of artistic compromise:  we first see her troupe as a chorus line performing ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ in a club in Akron, Ohio.  It’s after police raid the club, which houses a backstage gambling den, that Judy and Bubbles meet the rich and rakish Jimmy Harris (Louis Hayward), currently in the process of getting divorced.  The action switches to New York, where Bubbles gets a job as a burlesque dancer and Madame Basilova arranges an audition for Judy with ballet impresario Steve Adams (Ralph Bellamy).   As they make their way there, Basilova is knocked down by a car and dies of her injuries.  Judy still turns up for the audition but loses her nerve and exits before meeting Adams.  She doesn’t realise he’s the man who, as they both leave the building in pouring rain, offers her an umbrella, then a taxi ride, and whom she crossly rebuffs.  A while later, Bubbles – now a burlesque headliner, known as Tiger Lily White – offers Judy a role in her show.  As hard up as she’s naïve, Judy accepts.   She becomes Bubbles/Tiger Lily’s stooge, performing a piece of straight ballet in between Lily’s numbers.  Judy’s chaste routine soon has the male audience impatiently roaring for Judy to get off stage and Lily to get back on it.  Bubbles can’t understand why Judy is upset by this arrangement:  it’s good money.

    It’s not surprising that Dance, Girl, Dance has enjoyed an afterlife in feminist film studies. Dorothy Arzner was a highly unusual Hollywood figure, in what she did and in how she looked:  Madame Basilova’s mannish clothes and hairstyle in the film appear to be modelled on Arzner’s own appearance.  In their polar opposite ways, Judy and Bubbles are both determinedly ambitious; each does work that puts her body on public display.   A climactic sequence in the burlesque club features two important elements, catalysed by Jimmy.   After drowning his sorrows when his ex-wife Elinor (Virginia Field), as soon as they’re divorced, promptly remarries, Jimmy, blind drunk, weds Bubbles.  He arrives at the club midway through Judy’s act and, not understanding the stooge set-up, gets on stage to remonstrate with the jeering audience.  The hitherto demure Judy, at the end of her tether, suddenly finds a voice.  She excoriates the club’s punters for their leering voyeurism, derides them as sexually inadequate.  The tirade gets a powerful audience reaction that infuriates Bubbles and leads to an onstage catfight with Judy.  In the dock at a night court, the latter is keen to take responsibility for her actions.  Jimmy offers to pay the fine that the judge offers her as an alternative to a few days in prison but independent-minded Judy refuses.  Before she goes down, she and Bubbles exchange conciliatory words.  It’s crucial to the scheme of the film that, in spite of their differences, the two are friends – and sisters.

    Dance, Girl, Dance (the title echoes Madame Basilova’s dying words to Judy) is undoubtedly interesting as a piece of cinema history.  It’s also, unfortunately, a mostly mediocre film.   Arzner was brought in to direct after the original (male) director left the project.  She, Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis reworked the script, based on a story by Vicki Baum, to foreground the feminist aspect but the result is an awkward concoction.  The cynical elements are discomfiting partly because you’re not sure if they’re meant to be.  Steve Adams sees Judy again only when her face appears on the front page of newspapers, as Jimmy’s companion in a restaurant where he assaults ‘Puss in Boots’, his disparaging name for Elinor’s new husband (Sidney Blackmer – Roman Castevet in Rosemary’s Baby many years later).  The heedless change-partners of the very wealthy – after the restaurant altercation, Elinor instructs Puss in Boots to get a marriage annulment – is less amusing than acrid.  (Jimmy and Elinor end up back together; Bubbles is happy with that – at a price, that she sets.)  Judy’s antipathy to Steve Adams until the very end of the film is a feeble contrivance:  it’s impossible to understand how she could see him as a wolfish pest, which seems to be the idea, when she’s charmed by the creepy Jimmy.  In the final scene, Judy, out of prison, joins Adams’s company and puts her head gratefully on his shoulder.  His embrace is a paternal one but this moment too is remarkable in screen history.  Ralph Bellamy, whom romantic heroines regularly rejected in favour of a more exciting man, gets the girl – and perhaps twice (professionally and personally).

    Arzner’s direction of the main actors is sometimes shaky and not just in the sense that she allows Louis Hayward to play Jimmy in such a phony theatrical style.  Several scenes badly lack rhythm and pacing in the delivery of lines.  For the most part, Maureen O’Hara’s face is more expressive than her voice.   When she speaks in her early scenes, she sounds less Irish-American than straight out of an elocution class and straining for sensitive tone.  Even though O’Hara’s better when she gets angry (and more Irish), Judy is a rather dreary complement to Lucille Ball’s Bubbles.  Ball’s less-than-graceful verve makes Tiger Lily’s burlesque routines the most entertaining bits in Dance, Girl, Dance.   Her straightforwardness helps avoid the sentimentality implicit in the script’s conception of Bubbles as not only a gold-digger but a heart of gold too.   The cast also includes Mary Carlisle, as Judy’s roommate, and Katharine Alexander, quietly witty as Steve Adams’s observant secretary.

    26 February 2018

  • From the Life of the Marionettes

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Aus dem Leben der Marionetten

    Ingmar Bergman (1980)

    In the first part of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973) the protagonists Marianne and Johan have dinner with another married couple, Katarina and Peter, whose relationship is evidently dire.   These two are the inspiration for Katarina and Peter Egermann, the main characters in From the Life of the Marionettes, who don’t, however, share with the prototypes much more than forenames and an unhappy marriage.  As in Scenes from a Marriage, the time is the present yet the actors playing Peter and Katarina in Marionettes are a decade or more younger than Bibi Andersson and Jan Malmsjö, who played their namesakes in the earlier work.  The Egermanns have also changed nationality.  From the Life of the Marionettes, the last of the three films Bergman made during his self-imposed exile from Sweden during the late 1970s, is set in Munich (where Bergman was living at the time) and peopled by Germans.

    In the prologue, Peter (Robert Atzorn) murders a prostitute (Rita Russek) and sodomises her dead body.   The rest of the film comprises a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards to the days and hours shortly before and after what the intertitles introducing the various episodes repeatedly call ‘the catastrophe’.  In the final sequences, Professor Jensen (Martin Benrath), Peter’s psychiatrist, summarises his patient’s personality and how this led him to murder; Katarina (Christine Buchegger) then listens to a nurse (Ruth Olafs) describe Peter’s daily routine in the mental institution to which he’s been committed.   Jensen rattles off the usual suspects:  a dominant mother (Lola Müthel) and absent father; Peter’s upbringing, established social rituals (parties, drinking, drugs) and working environment all of which stifled the expression of his true feelings.  The ‘emotional blackout’ during which he committed murder was also a moment of self-realisation.  Peter’s sex act with the dead prostitute served as a demonstration that ‘You only possess or have control over the person you have killed’.  Peter made a half-hearted attempt to end his life before he took another’s and Jensen considers he is now a suicide risk since ‘Only he who kills himself has total control over himself’.  The nurse notes Peter’s games of chess against a computer, his cleanliness and obsessively tidy bed-making, his mixture of good manners and reserve, the teddy bear he sleeps with.

    Part of what makes the police shrink’s appraisal of Norman Bates at the end of Psycho funny, apart from the wooden reading of the lines, is the chasm between the dull rationality of the summary and the vivid, discombobulating excitement of all that’s gone before.  The previous paragraph might seem to suggest that Bergman, like Hitchcock, is having fun with clichés of psychoanalysis but Jensen’s and the nurse’s delivery don’t bear that out – nor is there any tonal contrast between the epilogue and the preceding drama.  Both are bleakly straight-faced to the point of humourlessness (and, occasionally, inadvertent comedy).   The viewer hasn’t witnessed anything that enables us to see Jensen’s précis as inaccurate or inadequate.  Bergman, rather, illustrates Peter’s psyche so clearly that the professional analyses are superfluous.

    In other respects, From the Life of the Marionettes has an inattentive feel.  The opening sequence and the closing shots of Peter in his cell are in colour; all the intervening film is in black and white.  Even though Sven Nykvist’s lighting is ingenious and the monochrome fits with, and reinforces, the glum, exhausted mood, you get the sense that Bergman has chosen it for old times’ sake.  Arthur Brenner (Heinz Bennent), the investigator of the ‘catastrophe’, isn’t much more than a narrative device.  Having decided to make a drama out of Peter and Katarina’s marital dance of death, Bergman loses interest in them during the excessively long monologue he gives Tim (Walter Schmidinger), Katarina’s partner in a fashion business and (therefore!) homosexual.  Although the actor playing him was only in his mid-forties at the time, he looks older and Tim spends a lot of his monologue looking in the mirror and lamenting the ageing process.  Bergman clearly takes the view that a queer man is bound to be preoccupied with his appearance; it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the filmmaker, who’d just turned sixty, felt he could hide behind Tim.  An openly gay man is an unusual figure in Bergman’s cinema but Tim is a quasi-homophobic conception.

    This isn’t the only aspect of the film that makes Bergman look unreconstructed in twenty-first century eyes.   It’s possible that the camera’s close attention to the naked body of a woman performing at the peep show where Peter encounters his victim is designed to discomfort viewers by making us aware of our complicity in the ogling.  The near-nudity of the prostitute murderee in the prolonged sequence leading up to her death makes you less inclined to give Bergman the benefit of the doubt:  she doesn’t have to be wearing so little.  You can’t help but compare the physical exposure of these female characters with the discreet, miniaturising distance at which Bergman shoots his two leads when they are naked.  This last shot occurs during a visualisation of Peter’s recurring dream, which, as he explains to Jensen, ends with his killing his wife (the name of the prostitute he really does kill is also, of course, Katarina).  In terms of aesthetic imagination, this depiction of the couple’s strange sexual symbiosis is the visual highlight of Marionettes, though its marmoreal beauty and Peter’s calm voiceover make it the most emotionally detached dream sequence I’ve seen in a Bergman film.

    With the possible exception of Heinz Bennent, who had appeared in Bergman’s previous German film The Serpent’s Egg (as well as in Volker Schlöndorff’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum and The Tin Drum), the cast comprises actors better known at the time for their work in theatre rather than on film.  It sometimes shows.  Christine Buchegger is technically accomplished but, in the scenes illustrating the bilious nightmare of the Egermanns’ marriage, her hard-edged antagonism – a lot of bared teeth and harsh, mocking laughter – comes across as artificial (and annoying:  it’s rather unfortunate that you can understand Peter’s compulsion to kill Katarina).  Buchegger is better with quieter facial reactions than when she’s spitting out splenetic lines.  Much of the time, you feel those come too easily to Bergman; the writing is more interesting when Peter, usually in arguments with Katarina, consciously uses language to ensure that nothing potentially productive gets said, that the vicious circle of their lives remains intact.   I wouldn’t have guessed that this was Robert Atzorn’s film debut.  His supple face takes the camera naturally and Bergman makes the most of its planes and angles.  In the scene in which his character dictates a repetitious, highly technical memo to his secretary (Gaby Dohm), Atzorn’s voice and physical attitude combine brilliantly to convey Peter’s suffocation.

    24 February 2018

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