By Philip Berk June 2009
At the time when I was still a teacher, the year was 1975, the head counselor at my school, knowing my background in film, asked he if I knew of her aunt, Dorothy Arzner, who had directed films in the 1930s.
Even though I only had a vague knowledge of who she was, she gave me a book which once belonged to her aunt. The Academy Awards A Pictorial History by Paul Michael is still on my bookshelf
Dorothy Arzner, Hollywood director.
Over the years her name has become symptomatic of the misogyny and homophobia practiced in Hollywood during the 1940’s. Although Arzner kept her private life private, she maintained a thirty year relationship with Marion Morgan, a dancer who choreographed some her her films.
Towards the end of her life she was recognized and honored as a film pioneer, but it was only recently when I discovered a letter she had written to Preston Sturges begging for a job that I fully comprehended the full extent of her misfortune.
Ironically in that letter she makes a point of citing only male references who would vouch for her. She has doubts about the female stars she worked with, a list that includes Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford. Yet, when she was honored many years later by the Directors Guild, Hepburn sent a telegram which read, “Isn’t it wonderful that you’ve had such a great career, when you had no right to have a career at all?”
If Sturges failed respond to her letter, it is easily understandable. The letter type written is filled with spelling errors which she corrects, but the most glaring ones she allows to stand. Sturges’s name is mispelled not once but twice as Sturgis.
Keep in mind, it written in 1944 when Sturges was a household name, having made two masterpieces, The Lady Eve and Hail the Conquering Hero and was about to embark on a new career at RKO and 20th Century Fox.
Maybe by this time she had become embittered, which might explain her gross mispellings, but that should not take away from her remarkable career during which time she pioneered such themes as women seeing themselves not as rivals but as friendly competitors (Christopher Strong), the repressiveness of heterosexual monogamy which “cripples the imagination and curbs the appetite for living” (Craig’s Wife) and women reduced to objects of male fantasy (Dance Girl Dance.)
These three films starred Rosalind Russell, Katharine Hepburn, Maureen O’Hara and Lucille Ball, and were among the last films she made made at RKO.
When her RKO contract ran out, she made two execrable films at MGM both with Joan Crawford. Three years later RKO rehired her to salvage a programmer Dance Girl Dance which ironically has become her most famous film.
Then, unemployed for three years, Harry Cohn at Columbia hired her to direct First Comes Courage, starring Merle Oberon and Brian Aherne, and that spelled finis to her career.
She found a position as a teacher, and in the 50’s was hired by UCLA to teach film classes. One of her devoted students was Francis Coppola.
Although passively resigned to her fate in the forties, as a young woman she was surprisingly ambitious and enterprising.
She was still in her teens and eager to work in the industry, when she got a job interview with William DeMille, Cecil B.’s older brother. He encouraged her to learn the ropes, eventually she became a film editor. Her skillful cut of Rudolph Valentino’s Blood and Sand suggested it needed additional footage. Paramount hired her to direct scenes which she intercut with existing footage and the film became a hit.
James Cruze who had won acclaim for directing The Covered Wagon recognized her talent and hired her as his writer and film editor.
In time she felt she was ready to move on and threatened Paramount that if they didn’t give her a picture to direct she would relocate to Columbia. At first they were ready to let her go, but (later famed) producer Walter Wanger changed their mind, and her first film Fashions for Women became one of the biggest hits of the silent era.
She was assigned to direct three more pictures — all of them did well — so with the coming of sound Paramount entrusted her with their first talkie The Wild Party, which was a remake of a film she had previously edited. The film starring Clara Bow and Fredric March (all told she would work with him four times) was a huge box office hit. So for the next few years she directed such big names as Ruth Chatterton, Claudette Colbert, and of course Hepburn and Russell in their ground breaking roles.
Maybe it was Joan Crawford who maneuvered her to MGM where she made two of Joan’s worst movies, one for which she was credited, and the other not, but both are tactfully omitted from her filmography.
Her most celebrated film Dance, Girl, Dance was her unceremonious return, three years later, to RKO.
Later women directors have all recognized Arzner’s pioneering contribution.
You can catch her films on TCM. Seek them out.