Lucille Ball worked hard to make her reputation as one of the great screen comedians of history, trudging through years of experimentation and failures to become responsible for one of the most important pop culture works of the 20th century, I Love Lucy. While it might be hard to imagine her failing at anything, given her sharp business acumen and legendary intelligence for playing on the screen, it’s intriguing to note how long she tried to make it in movies before finding her stride on television. She tried to find different films that suited her style, and while drama didn’t work in her favor, she found the best cinematic showcase of her career thanks to the direction of one of the first great female directors in Dance, Girl, Dance.
What Is ‘Dance, Girl, Dance’ About?
Dance, Girl, Dance is about the frenemy rivalry between two passionate up-and-coming dancers, Judy (Maureen O’Hara) and Bubbles (Lucille Ball). If you’ve seen Black Swan, then you have an idea how this will play out. Judy is more technically proficient and heartfelt, but she lacks stage presence and is overly anxious. Bubbles might not be quite as skilled, but she’s got that “it factor,” that innate ability to play to the audience, and has a far more fiery personality to match. Judy pursues a life in ballet, while Bubbles dives head first into the world of burlesque performance. Judy finds her spotlight constantly stolen by Bubbles, both regarding her dancing opportunities and her love life. Bubbles’ instinct for sabotaging Judy gets so bad that Judy hits a point where she must take a job as Bubbles’ “stooge” sidekick in her burlesque show.
On paper, this is all the stuff of traditional backstage dramedies in the vein of 42nd Street or Stage Door, with a little romantic comedy spice thrown into the mix with a love triangle involving Jimmy (Louis Hayward), a sad sap who’s still in love with his soon-to-be-ex-wife Elinor (Virginia Field). Instead, the film strikes a delicate tone that prioritizes the sincerity of these women’s shared ambitions and shows solidarity in how women can both hurt each other and support each other in pursuit of their dreams. Key to this undertone is how Lucille Ball is directed, as she’s more or less the antagonist of the film, single-handedly creating a majority of the problems for Judy, who the film favors as the protagonist. While Bubbles is no doubt opportunistic and a bit of a shark when it comes to sniffing out what she needs to move forward, Ball plays her as far less catty than would be normal and comes off as more cynical and pragmatic in her approach. It’s not bad blood, it’s just business.
Lucille Ball Plays To Her Strengths in ‘Dance, Girl, Dance’
An important side character in this story is the mentor and manager of Judy and Bubbles, Madame Basilova (Maria Ouspenskaya), who underlines the fundamental difference between the two: that Bubbles simply has that “oomph” that can’t be taught, and Judy doesn’t have it. If Lucille Ball had anything in life, it was that “oomph”, and no film utilized that better than Dance, Girl, Dance due to how it allows her to embody a full character without falling back on clownery. Despite her silly name, Bubbles doesn’t treat her burlesque ventures with frivolity or shame, she’s wise about what others see in her and how to use that to her advantage. She espouses the perfect philosophy when she says “I don’t fall in gutters, I pick my spots.” When viewed in the context of Lucille Ball’s future ventures, specifically her genius for making herself both the butt of jokes and the source of laughter, Bubbles feels almost prophetic, like the closest we’ve come to seeing an accurate representation of how Ball saw herself as an entertainer. This isn’t to claim that she’s “playing herself,” but to say that the director saw things in Ball that other filmmakers didn’t and knew what a perfect fit this character was.
Take how the film exhibits her dance skills. For her side of the narrative to work, we must buy that she is not only a good dancer, but that she has an instant charisma that Judy simply couldn’t compete with. From the first time, she crashes an audition to do a hula dance routine right after Judy’s adequate audition, the emphatic hip swings and the sly winks of “I’m enjoying this too” to her audience make it abundantly clear how equipped she is for show biz, especially given the extreme close-ups of the male talent agent leering at her. Ball’s physical command is so precise that she communicates that she’s still a relatively basic dancer in terms of skills, but is making up for that with her sex appeal, which translates well into her burlesque phase. Seeing her antagonistically tease the audience, throwing barbs with her sharp delivery, and fighting back against a giant fan blowing her dress around is to be witness to how thrillingly confident Lucille Ball was when making a fool of herself. It speaks to one of the ways that the film humanizes Bubbles: she will not be made to feel cheap for doing things her way, and will not apologize for chasing her ambition.
Dorothy Arzner’s Direction Is ‘Dance, Girl, Dance’s MVP
Normally I’d have said the name of the director by now, but Dorothy Arzner is so important to this film, that she deserves her section. For context, Dorothy Arzner was arguably the first female director to achieve mainstream success and acceptance in Hollywood. Starting as an editor, she transitioned to directing with the Rudolph Valentino film Blood and Sand, shooting bullfighting sequences and editing the footage with an efficiency that saved Paramount Studios thousands of dollars. This initial promise led her to make many successful silent films and then became the first woman to direct Paramount’s first sound film, The Wild Party, starring Clara Bow. The making of this film led to Arzner having to improvise by putting a microphone on a fishing pole to capture the actors’ dialogue, which is considered the invention of the boom mic. With the success of The Wild Party, Arzner went on to collaborate with some of the biggest stars of the 1930s, including Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Fredric March, and Claudette Colbert. Efforts like these led to her becoming the first woman invited to what we now call the Director’s Guild of America, and eventually happily retired to be an educator at UCLA, where one of her most famous students was Francis Ford Coppola.
Arzner’s direction of this film is the reason it stands out amid numerous dance films of this era, rises above the conventional trappings of the melodramatic structure, and gives Ball the chance to present a woman working in the world of burlesque as respectable and with agency. It’s her sensibilities that allow the film to end on a note that’s ultimately radically empathetic. The climax of the film is Judy and Bubbles getting into a fight on stage Judy gets arrested for starting the fight, and she gets put on trial before a judge. Once Judy and Bubbles tell their sides of the story, essentially recapping the plot for the judge, he gives a most unexpected verdict. He blesses them both with human dignity and argues that they were just at the whim of their different human natures and that it wouldn’t be right to punish them, though he does insist that Judy should pay a fine or stay in jail for a few days. In the end, both women wind up getting what they’ve spent a lifetime chasing, and the film makes them feel equally rewarded for it. This ending doesn’t work unless the film has been actively giving the characters an equal playing field, and the only way that would have happened is for Lucille Ball to play Bubbles as more than a cheap amoral floozy.
What Makes Lucille Ball and Dorothy Arzner’s ‘Dance, Girl, Dance’ Collaboration Brilliant?
In Lucille Ball’s entire film career, she was only ever directed by a woman once, and that was by Dorothy Arzner in Dance, Girl, Dance. It’s difficult not to see something in the idea that a brilliant talent like Lucille Ball’s could only have been fully unlocked when a woman was directing her and giving her the freedom to use everything she had at her disposal. The issue with the films that Ball tried being a major star in wasn’t simply that they were directed by men or were too serious for her; it’s because those films pigeonholed her in how they conceptualized her, wanting to treat her as either a silly screwball or a sincere supporter, but rarely are the two extremes aligned. Arzner is the person who cracked the code and guided Ball toward combining the two sides of the coin into one whole, making Bubbles a woman who is at once the stuff of screwball legend and a fiercely cynical realist with an instinct for self-preservation. Whether Arzner had any clue as to Ball’s potential future is something we’ll never know, but her handling of the script made for a significant boost over what was on the page.
If there’s anything to be gleaned from this collaboration, it has less to do with Lucille Ball specifically and more about the broad concept of women getting to direct major films. It shouldn’t be a Nobel Prize-winning concept that Lucille Ball would have had a better film career had she worked with better scripts and/or more empathetic directors, as that is a baseline principle of making films. But it can’t be ignored that Ball reached a high point in her career the one time she worked with a great woman director, as it affords a greater deal of comfort and freedom for a woman when a man isn’t in charge. We’re inching closer to an age where women consistently directing major films is a typical reality. Two of the most recent Best Director winners have been women, two of the most recent Best Picture winners have been directed by women, and the film that helped define this year’s pop culture landscape was co-written and directed by a brilliant woman. This current landscape exists in part due to the trailblazing of Dorothy Arzner, and without her creative input, we wouldn’t have been given the eternal gift that is Lucille Ball.
