Donna R. Casella - What Women Want - The Films of Dorothy Arzner

What Women Want: The Complex World of Dorothy Arzner and Her Cinematic Women
Author(s): Donna R. Casella

Source: Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Vol. 50, No. 1/2 (SPRING & FALL
2009), pp. 235-270
Published by: Wayne State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41552560
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What Women Want:
The Complex World of
Dorothy Arzner and
Her Cinematic Women
Donna R. Casella
In 1919, a then-unknown Dorothy Arzner was strolling through the various

departments at Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount) looking for that one
aspect of the film industry that would pique her interest. She happened upon
the set of Cecil B. DeMille. She studied his directing for a while, later noting
what she learned: "I remember making the observation, 'if one was going to
be in the movie business, one should be a director because he was the one
who told everyone else what to do. In fact, he was the Whole Works.'"1 Arzner
did get a job at Famous Players that year, but not as a director. She spent seven
years typing scripts, holding scripts, and editing films at Famous Players and
other studios before her first directorial job.2 Arzner got her break in 1927
when B. P. Schulberg heard she planned to leave to direct at Columbia. He
offered her a "future" job directing. She turned him down, adding "Not unless
I can be on a set in two weeks with an 'A' picture. I'd rather do a picture for a
small company and have my own way than do a 'B' picture for Paramount."3
He handed her a copy of the play The Best Dressed Woman in Paris and told her
to write the script and be on the set in two weeks.4 The result was Fashions for
Women (1927), a social comedy about a cigarette girl, Lulu, who falls in love
with a count while finding success as a fashion model; Lulu eventually gets
her man.5
Fashions for Women was the first in a long line of Arzner films that sat-
isfied the studio demand for the ever-popular women's picture: comedies,
dramas, and melodramas focusing on love, courtship, and marriage. Hol-
lywood's only woman director to make the transition from silent to sound,6
Arzner directed sixteen such feature films between 1927 and 1943.7 This
female-centered genre, like its literary ancestor-popular women's fiction
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-was a complex one that both
Framework50y Nos. 1 & 2, Spring & Fall 2009, pp. 235-270.

Copyright © 2009 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.
Donna R. Casella
affirmed societal roles for women while exploring women's struggles to meet
those roles. Jeanine Basinger, in her study of women's pictures from 1930 to
1960, articulates the paradox at the heart of the women's picture: "Everything
it endorses, it undermines. . . . These are films that tell the truth, but only
because they are about the unhappiness of women. They'll tell all the lies in
the world to make that one point clear."8 Basinger and others have argued that
Arzner's films, and the genre as a whole, present the problems women face in
meeting these assumed roles; some assert that Arzner challenges the patri-
archy that maintains these presumptions, even suggesting that Arzner finds
an alternative in the bonds formed between women. This study argues that
Arzner goes further: she pushes the limits of the women's picture by sharply
criticizing the social pressures at the heart of the genre that damage both
heterosexual liaisons and those between women. Furthermore, it is my con-
tention that Arzner's criticisms went unchallenged because her films flour-
ished inside a very complex ideological climate. For one, she made women's
pictures at a time when gender norms, the narrative center of such films, were
under scrutiny. Despite the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granting
women political rights, the three decades that followed-the period covering
Arzner's filmmaking-witnessed a strain in, not a loosening of, those gender
roles.9 Arzner's films reflected that strain. In addition, Arzner and her films
participated in the genre's larger event-the marketing and reception of film-
maker and film. Publicity material before distribution and media coverage
after hailed Arzner as an expert on the affairs of women. According to studio
and media, Arzner made women's pictures that affirmed love, marriage, and
motherhood as the primary goals in a woman's life. Her public image and
that of her cinematic women, then, diverted attention away from her films'
inherent criticisms.
Arzner challenged the standards of the women's picture by depicting
the instability of male/female bonds and the impermanence of any viable
alternative such as female friendships. In fact, her films undermine socially
prescribed roles by refusing to acknowledge that the promise of heterosexual
love and marriage can ever be fulfilled in a society limited by its own gender
assumptions. The surviving comedies Get Your Man (1927), The Wild Party
(1929), and the comedy-drama The Bride Wore Red (1937) offer the promise
of heterosexual love, but only if women are willing to overcome a host of
obstacles, such as arranged marriages, resistant prospects, class conflicts,
and mistaken identities. While these narratives end with couples finding each
other, there is only an assumption of a permanent union, never an actual
marriage within the film's fictional space. Her dramas and melodramas,
Sarah and Son (1930), Anybody's Woman (1930), Honor Among Lovers (1931), Work-
ing Girls (1931), Merrily We Go to Hell (1932), Christopher Strong (1933), Nana
(1934), Craig's Wife (1936), Dance, Girl , Dance (1940), and First Comes Courage
(1943), present both the promise and betrayal of the classic romantic ideal, as
women's blind obsession with a love that should lead to marriage has tragic
236
The Complex World of Dorothy Arzner
consequences. The films depict thwarted relationships, missed opportunities,

marriage breakups, and even death, consequences also evident in the literary
heritage of these films.10 Even her men seem lost in the rituals surrounding
courtship and marriage. The underlying message in an Arzner film is that
male-female couples are problematic and the only alternative- relationships
between women-are temporary at best. In her handling of the women's pic-
ture, then, Arzner managed to play both sides-satisfying her studio bosses
with the popular, conventional love and marriage stories that studios and
press could easily spin for their own ends, while challenging the thematic
center of those narratives: women's expected social roles. She did this at a
time when the American culture was profoundly uncertain about the nature
of those roles.
Arzner's attention to gender has been the focus of a number of stud-
ies since the 1970s when she first came to the serious attention of film his-
torians, preservationists, and scholars, but few have looked closely at how
Arzner's films operated inside the women's genre, particularly at a time when
gender roles were tense. In a 1973 Velvet Light Trap article, Karyn Kay and
Gerald Peary were the first to call attention to Arzner's feminist approach,
arguing that her films "document the lives of women at all phases of con-
sciousness, wrestling for love, career, independence, and integrity."11 Peary
and Kay's subsequent 1974 interview with Arzner was later published in
Claire Johnston's The Work of Dorothy Arzner: Towards a Feminist Cinema (1975)
alongside Johnston's and Pam Cook's articles exploring Arzner's feminism
as a way of understanding her contribution to film history. While Johnston
discusses Arzner's privileging of women's discourse inside the patriarchal
ideology of the Hollywood film, Cook shows how Arzner's narratives-with
their interruptions, reversals, and play on gender stereotypes-create mean-
ings that challenge that ideology.12 As Laura Mulvey's theories on the gaze
became a subject of debate, Arzner scholars began to explore spectatorship
and sexual difference in her films. Beverie Houston's 1984 essay, "Missing in
Action: Notes on Dorothy Arzner," concludes that the male gaze, in some of
Arzner's films, is destabilized by both director and characters through the
inference that "there is, in fact, nothing to be looked at."13 These early studies
promote Arzner's subtle defiance of gender convention without looking spe-
cifically at the implications of a Hollywood machine that supported that con-
vention. In short, early scholarship did not go beyond Arzner's film text in an
attempt to understand the subversiveness emerging in the interplay between
the promise of love and marriage and its betrayal.
By the 1990s Arzner scholarship began to look beyond the text and
to explore the connections between Arzner's life and work. In paying par-
ticular attention to how a woman director and a lesbian operated in Holly-
wood at the height of a male-run studio system, such scholarship opened up
new ways of looking at Arzner's films. Judith Mayne was the first to explore
deeply the connections between Arzner's life (especially her relationship
237
Donna R. Casella
Figure 1. Dorothy Arzner, center, on the set of Working Girls (1931) with Judith
Wood (right) and Dorothy Hall, who play two sisters who come to New York in
search of work and husbands. Mae (Dorothy Hall) finds herself pregnant and alone
until June (Judith Wood) forces the unwilling Boyd at gunpoint to agree to marry
her. Courtesy of Paramount Pictures/Photofest
238
with dancer and choreographer Marion Morgan), her career, her public rep-
resentation, and the lesbian subtexts of her films. In several articles and
two books, Mayne goes in search of an Arzner signature. She acknowledges
Arzner's attention to traditional forms, like the women's picture, noting her
authorial presence in how she handles the female communities so common
in such pictures. Mayne begins her search for an Arzner mark by looking at
Arzner's complex public image. In The Woman at the Keyhole (1990) Mayne
studies photographs- publicity shots and media illustrations of Arzner and
her actresses in particular-uncovering sites of erotic exchange between
women. This eroticism also informs the female trace in Arzner's films: "The
photographs of Arzner are interesting not only in the biographical terms
suggested by Sarah Halprin, but also in textual terms. For one of the most
distinctive ways in which Arzner's authorial presence is felt in her films is
in the emphasis placed on communities of women, to be sure, but also in
the erotic charge identified within these communities." In Arzner's films,
her choice of female bonding, of a female gaze between and among women,
and of costume and character are her markers. And, according to Mayne,
this signature is replete with "lesbian irony," as multiple discourses clash in
an Arzner text. Directed by Dorothy Arzner, Mayne's 1994 biography, is a more
detailed study of Arzner and her thematic preoccupation with female com-
munities and troubled heterosexual unions within the formulaic women's
picture. Mayne continues her exploration of the queer subtext of Arzner's
filmmaking and what this means for lesbian spectatorship. Here, as in all
her writings, Mayne reminds scholars of the importance of going beyond
Arzner's film texts to understand what was unique about Arzner's filmmak-
ing. Of her own work, Mayne tells us, "I have tried to include both the chair
[the director] and the images in my field of vision."14
This study enlarges that "field of vision" by looking at the Hollywood
machine that sold a glossy image of Arzner and her films, the media that
bought that image, and the films that spoke to women about the contradic-
tions inherent in that image. While an Arzner public persona was carefully
constructed to seem overwhelmingly supportive of traditional roles, the crit-
ical subtexts of Arzner's films profoundly challenge them. This contradic-
tion is not surprising. Throughout the silent era, when Arzner worked as an
editor and scenarist before her first directing job in 1927, women filmmak-
ers were Hollywood's darlings, regardless of the underlying messages of
their films. Arzner's predecessor, director Lois Weber, for example, wrote
and directed films between 1912 and 1934 about religious hypocrisy ( The
Hypocrites, US, 1914), birth control (Where Are My Children? US, 1916), capital
punishment ( The People vs. John Doe, US, 1916), and women's social and eco-
nomic difficulties (Shoes, US, 1916; The Blot, US, 1921). 15 These were hard,
challenging subjects; yet the media tagged Weber as a writer of women's
pictures-romances, domestic dramas, etc.-downplaying her complex
women characters. Her public image was repeatedly coded as feminine.
239
Donna R. Casella
For example, Aline Carter dismisses Weber's social feminist themes in her
interview "The Muse of the Reel": "Just what Miss Weber may think of
the feminist movement, I do not know, for that is one of the few subjects
on which we did not touch during our interview. However, I am quite cer-
tain that she has never marched in a parade, carried a banner nor made
speeches in its support
she has retained all her womanly charm."16 A few of Weber's films fall under
the category of women's pictures-ГА^ Dumb Girl of Portici (US, 1916) and A
Chapter in Her Life (US, 1923), for example-but many of her films are dra-
mas and melodramas of social realism. This is exactly how scholars such as
Jennifer Parchesky, Shelley Stamp, and Thomas Slater have approached her
work.17 There is nothing subtle about the political commentary in Weber's
films, which is one of the reasons why her directing career stalled when
the studio system took hold of the industry.18 Arzner had a similar public
image, but because she operated inside a larger, fully formed studio system
and because she accepted the studio-backed women's picture formula, she
could deliver on "safe" topics like love, marriage, and motherhood. In the
process, she could also tap into critical undercurrents.
But as far as the "public" was concerned, there was nothing critical
about her films. Studio publicity, contemporary film reviews, and media
coverage had homogenized the Arzner public image, and in working with
the women's picture, a genre that Hollywood deemed popular among
women,19 Arzner created a window for others to construct a relatively tame
image of her. Publicity at the time typically included cinema programs,
reviews and articles for local newspapers, advertisement catalogues, lobby
cards and poster catch phrases, and exploitation ideas; this material was
sent to exhibitors for advertising.20 As Mary Ann Doane notes in The Desire
to Desire , early Hollywood publicity provided a "reading" of the film in order
"to produce the conditions of its own marketability."21 Such material consis-
tently presented Arzner as a spokesperson, an expert on women's desire
for love and marriage, and praised her films as cinematic fare with a dis-
tinctly female artistic world: female director, female writer, and/or female
lead. The films themselves were labeled women's pictures, though the term,
then, referred to a wide range of films focusing on women's search for love
and marriage. Mayne argues that this identification codified Arzner: "That
Arzner's position as a female director was unusual and worthy of mention
had been given in reviews of her films. The suggestion was made that as a
woman, she was better able to work with female actors, and more capable
of understanding the nuances of women-centered dramas."22 Paramount's
press sheet for Honor Among Lovers reads: "A woman who knows women-
Dorothy Arzner-made the new Claudette Colbert-Fredric March drama,
'Honor Among Lovers'!" A publicity feature ("Woman Director Calls
Boles A Perfect Spouse") in the Columbia press book for Craig's Wife identi-
fies Arzner as an expert on ideal husbands and wives: "Dorothy Arzner,
240
Hollywood's sole woman director, is probably voicing the opinion of a good

many eligible American girls when she calls John Boles (Mr. Craig) the
ideal husband type. . . . Mrs. Craig is just about everything a good wife
should not be." Columbia's press book for First Comes Courage includes a
story ("Woman Director is Clever Arbitrator") that describes Arzner as a
woman, who "used her intuition" when directing the two leads in a love
scene. The goal was to suggest how a town should market the film (and by
extension its director), precluding a link between Arzner and her audience
that codified them as sisters with similar concerns and desires.
Publicity had a field day whenever an Arzner film featured more than
one female artist. If her screenwriter was a woman (and most of her writ-
ers were female), the press underscored the all-female collaboration and its
female-centered subject. Arzner did work closely with her writers, preferring
to have them on the set with her at all times.23 Women wrote, in part, nearly
all of Arzner's films, either contributing the original story or participating in
the adaptation, dialogue, and/or full screenplay, and publicity material was
quick to point this out.24 One selling point in Paramount's press sheet for Work-
ing Girls identifies director Arzner and screenwriter Zoë Atkins as working
girls creating a film about working girls: "Who better than they, should know
'Working girls,' and how to tell about them." Screenwriter Mary C. McCall
and director Arzner add a feminine touch to the women's picture, according
to Columbia's press book for Craig's Wife. The title of a suggested newspaper
article reads, "Women Add the Woman's Touch to Women's Film," and the
article notes that filmmaking "should be left largely in the hands of feminine
technicians." Publicity also tapped into studio star power to draw parallels.
Because she juggles the love of two men in The Bride Wore Red, Joan Craw-
ford becomes an expert in love and marriage in the MGM campaign book.
A lobby card reads, "Joan Crawford says it is easy to get your man in 'The
Bride Wore Red.'" And an article in the Paramount's sheet for Get Your Man
is aptly titled "Clara Bow Gives Lesson on How to Get Your Man." That they
were made by women, for women, and about women was the main selling
point. As a Working Girls press sheet notes, "The fair sex is your barometer
of entertainment; when you appeal to women, you set the groundwork for
box office bigness."25 Arzner clearly understood that her material appealed
to women; the presence of women on her set and her frequent collaborations
with women alone attested to this. However, studio publicity only recognized
that community as conspiring to present women as valuing romance, court-
ship, and the final product-domesticity.
The general consensus was that focusing on these topics appealed to
women. Coverage of Arzner's work normalized female desire; there was
nothing difficult or problematic about women's commitment to the marriage
goal. The Paramount sheet for the now-lost comedy Ten Modern Command-
ments (US, 1927) suggests: "Come learn the story of a pretty girl who followed
the 'Ten Modern Commandments' to love and happiness." Get Your Man's
241
Donna R. Casella
sheet included beauty tricks that would help a woman get her man, with Clara
Bow (Nancy) helming the advice column. And Joan Crawford's Anni in The
Bride Wore Red was a "Modern Cinderella" throughout the MGM campaign
book. No thought was given to the obstacles the women encountered in these
comedies as they tried to fulfill their social roles. Columbia's press book for
the more serious Craig's Wife even sidestepped the film's focus on an unhappy
housewife by suggesting: "Who is the most ideal couple in your town? Who
is the most perfect housewife in your town?" The film's lead, John Boles, was
"the ideal husband type." Nicole and Allan in Columbia's First Comes Cour-
age were assigned the perfect romance-even though there was a war raging
around them. "No Woman Could Give More, No Man Could Ask More!" it
was noted. In studio publicity, the perfect marriage always seemed within
reach. "What would you do if your husband suddenly lost interest in you
after 20 years of happily wedded life?" is the headline in the RKO press book
for Christopher Strong The article reveals how Katharine Hepburn's Cynthia,
Christopher's mistress, sacrifices her own happiness-and life-to preserve
her lover's otherwise ideal marriage. The Paramount sheet for Merrily We Go
To Hell reads, "Given in . . . marriage-a girl's dearest dream!", ignoring the
problems Joan faces in trying to stabilize her rocky marriage.
The goals of film reviews and articles in popular magazines, newspapers,
and trades were not so much to condition marketability as to register how
that marketability tapped into Arzner's public image. As in the studio public-
ity, civic and industry media saw Arzner's films as an index of women's con-
cerns and her audience as primarily female. Though frequently identifying
her femininity and even applauding Arzner's expertise in women's affairs,
these pieces avoided references to her women's troubled lives. The Kansas
City Star review for Merrily We Go to Hell, a film about a difficult marriage,
notes Arzner's special attunement to women's issues: "Having seen this pic-
ture we do not wonder that Dorothy Arzner, the director, rushed right out
and gave highbrow interviews in psychology, the feminine mind, and the art
of the movies." R. Ewart Williams in the Film Pictorial applauds the female
director of Craig's Wife for giving cinema's primary audience exactly what it
wants; the film is "a story of a woman's insane love for her home . . . that is
a woman's story." Little thought is given to what Harriet Craig loses in her
obsession for her home-her husband and family. The Motion Picture Herald
says of the same film, "Essentially, it is a woman's picture pointed directly
at women audiences." A review of The Bride Wore Red in the New York Times
exclaims, "If it is anything at all, it is a woman's picture- smoldering with
its heroine's indecision and consumed with talk of love and fashions." The
National Box-Office Digest , speaking of the same film, notes that Arzner "has
handled the direction of the picture with a manner and feeling that could
only originate from a woman." Advertisements also assumed a predomi-
nantly female audience. Photoplay , a film magazine that reviewed films and
provided industry news, wrote a review of Working Girls surrounded by ads
242
codifying the film as one appealing to women. Though this was not a woman's
magazine, the ads addressed working women and focuses on women's beauty
and health. In keeping with the film's storyline, one advertisement reveals
how to get and keep your man.26 The concerns in these advertisements are
superficial compared to the protagonist's struggle in Working Girls with the
prospect of unwed motherhood.
A woman on a film set was not new in Hollywood in the 1920s; a number
of women produced, directed, wrote, and edited throughout the silent period,
and many writers and editors continued into sound. However, Arzner was the
only woman director to do so, in fact, the only woman director in Hollywood
until Ida Lupino in the 1950s. As such, the media couldn't get enough of her,
and their fascination extended to Arzner's perceived femininity. They gos-
siped about her on the job, often speculating on what was expected of her as a
director, as if her films could not speak to men or to complex social concerns.
Arzner frequently came to the set in a rather conservative skirt and jacket, but
nothing about her appearance could detract from her assumed expertise in
heterosexual love; the media responded by noting her clothing as practical,
fashionable, and female. In his 1934 Family Circle article, Dudley Early identi-
fied the masculine touches in Arzner's clothes but said "she is feminine, hav-
ing an almost pre-war (or ultra-modern) distaste for loud and vulgar women.
This can be attributed not to prudity but to an innate fineness and sensitivity,
feminine at its source." They blurred her semi-masculine/practical attire with
her talent. The Motion Picture Herald reviewer of First Comes Courage seemed
surprised by Arzner's ability to direct a battle scene: "Dorothy Arzner
directed, and for a woman showed an almost incongruous sense of realistic
brutality in a battle scene following the landing."27 In their eyes, Arzner was
no maverick. She was not jarring the system loose with her films; rather, her
films fit nicely into the tight social presumptions about a working woman.
In fact, Hollywood insiders saw Arzner's femininity as both a surprise and
a useful gimmick. The studios sold a womanly Arzner to a primarily female
audience and sometimes the men who accompanied them. Hollywood knew
of her forty-year relationship with Marion Morgan, who worked with Arzner
on some of her early films, but the media never addressed it. They depicted
Arzner as speaking to "women" to imply her heterosexuality.28 Trades and
popular magazines assured audiences that the director, like her work, fit into
the social mold.
By working with the women's picture, Arzner no doubt spoke to women,
but what she had to say bore little resemblance to what the studio marketed
or the media discussed. Scholars such as Pamela Cook, Jeanine Basinger,
Annette Kuhn, E. Ann Kaplan, and Maria LaPlace have identified the dis-
tinguishing characteristics of the genre, while arguing its inherent complexi-
ties. Cook, in "Melodrama and the Women's Picture," explains that unlike
the melodrama, women's pictures feature a female point of view directed
at a female audience: "The women's picture is differentiated from the rest
243
Donna R. Casella
of cinema by virtue of its construction of a 'female point-of-view' which

motivates and dominates the narrative, and its specific address to a female
audience."29 Basinger in her study confirms how the content of such films
places women at the center: "In movies about women, all important histori-
cal and natural events are translated into the terms of a woman's daily life."30
And what this genre has to say about those lives is surprisingly controversial,
as the genre manages to affirm traditional roles at the same time that it allows
opposition to them. The hundreds of women's films that Basinger studied
reveal "how cleverly they contradicted themselves, how easily they affirmed
the status quo for the women's life while providing little releases, small vic-
tories-or even big releases, big victories."31 LaPlace's study of the 1942 film
Now, Voyager reveals the same intersection of tradition and resistance. She
identifies a "symbolic system in which women can try to make sense of their
lives and even create imaginative spaces for resistance, a system which the
film, seeking to address women, drawing on a woman's popular novel and a
popular woman's star, enters despite itself."32
LaPlace and other scholars also have argued that the women's picture
can and should be opened up to social and historical considerations. A look
at the social climate during Arzner's filmmaking, the late 1920s to the early
1940s, reveals that gender norms in the United States were under scrutiny
as a result of women's newly hard-won political, educational, and economic
rights. And even though women could vote in the 1920s, this law resulted in
very little change in gender roles. The problem, according to many social his-
torians, was that by the end of the 1920s the feminist movement that sought
to free women from severely proscriptive gendered conventions stalled. In
Beyond Separate Spheres : Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism , Rosalind Rosen-
berg explains how post-1920 activists drifted away from their Progressive Era
counterparts (who earlier advocated for no more separate spheres and wider
educational and economic opportunities for women): "As the Depression,
labor conflicts, and the rise of European fascism came to dominate national
and international concerns in the 1930s, the issue of women's potential seemed
at best irrelevant and at worst subversive of social order."33 Feminists who
acknowledged the separation of gender roles had society's attention, not the
radicals who were pushing for equality on all levels. And what they wanted,
according to Christine Lunardini, in From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice
Paul and the National Woman's Party , 1910 to 1928 , was protective legislation
so that women, particularly working women, could fulfill their obligations
as wives and mothers: "Many social feminists had little desire fundamentally
to alter sex roles as society defined them. Where equality could be obtained
without endangering woman's place in society, the social feminists pursued it
with vigor."34 Such feminists, then, advocated more stabilized roles for men
and women-part icularly as women continued to attend universities and work
outside the home. Traditional women's roles during Arzner's filmmaking,
then, were both valued and under assault.
244
In this ideologically charged climate, Arzner appropriated all the key

elements of the women's picture-a female point of view that addresses a
female audience, themes that focus on a female desire for love, courtship, and
marriage, and the genre's capacity to embrace the very thing it questioned.35
Arzner registered these roles by placing the idealized image of woman as wife
and mother at the narrative center. Her women are attracted to, even driven
by this ideal, and the films' female communities all reinforce these goals.
The Hard Boiled Maidens club in The Wild Party is formed for this purpose.
According to Stella, the leader of the pack, the Maidens' primary goal in col-
lege is to seek out men, not knowledge. The all-female university club holds
regular meetings where they scope out eligible men and strategize how to land
them. This college community, like the boarding house community found in
many of Arzner films, legitimizes these concerns. In the drama Working Girls ,
a group of women live together as they wait for marriage proposals. The main
topic of conversation is the right behavior and dress for getting your man.
As one young woman warns, "How are you going to get married if you don't
have a man?" Anyone who is not attentive to their looks, like Baby's aunt, is
portrayed as sexless, unattractive, and out of the female loop. Similarly, in the
drama Dance , Girl, Dance, chorus girls and headliners live and work together
while waiting for that one marriage proposal, that ticket out of showbiz and
a life fraught with financial insecurity. Even though Arzner's women may
encounter almost insurmountable obstacles, they remain firm in a belief that
the parameters of their daily lives are shaped by an anticipated future as wife
and mother.
Women in these films act out a socially constructed female desire. Their
sexuality is the means by which they find a mate. In both the comedies and
dramas, women emerge as hunters, almost primal, in their desires to secure
a mate, and their sexuality is firmly on display. In the comedy Get Your Man,
Clara Bow's Nancy refuses to let an arranged marriage interfere with her
efforts. From the moment she sees Robert, she decides she will have him
despite his betrothal to Simone. Nancy secures entrance into Robert's home
by faking an injury, flirts with Simone's father (to prove her attractiveness),
and then arranges to be caught alone with Robert in her scanty nightdress.
Arzner shoots Clara Bow in open, loose frames, allowing her character's sex-
uality a degree of spatial freedom. The image of Robert alone with Nancy in
a bedroom, both in their nightwear, is markedly domestic and, by this point,
he is convinced they were meant for each other. No one has the chance to
question Nancy's show of sexuality because his father catches them together
and demands that Robert protect the family name by marrying her. Stella, in
another comedy, The Wild Party, is equally aggressive. In an early scene, she
and her sister Hard Boiled Maidens sit in the front row of Gil's anthropology
class exposing their legs to attract his attention. Arzner's camera sutures us
into both Gil's point of view as he witnesses their erotic display and Stella's
as she returns the gaze in an attempt to lure him. While she is empowered
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Donna R. Casella
by her ability to return the look, Stella's sexuality, like Nancy's, is carefully
constructed to secure marriage.
Arzner's visualization of female sexuality is always present. In Work-
ing Girls y for example, we are informed early that the women in the board-
ing house have "gone to work" to find a man. When Mae goes for her job
interview, Arzner's camera focuses on her legs, signifying that her body is
her access to a job because her job is her path to marriage. When June has
difficulty finding work, she is told to "dress differently." Anybody's Woman
opens with two chorus girls, Pansy and Dot, lounging on beds in their night-
clothes in front of an open window; they are discussing their future prospects
for marriage. In parallel editing sequences Neil and Calcio are discussing
women's bodies, preferring a good-looking wife because the alternative-a
smart wife-is nothing but trouble. Female desire is articulated and defined
in Arzner's mise-en-scène and dialogue. A woman's sexuality is on exhibit,
as in a window display, as she contemplates her desire for marriage; also on
exhibit is the male desire for that female commodity. Doane's study of female
subjectivity in The Desire to Desire addresses the way in which the women's
picture presents "women as commodity in a patriarchal system of exchange"
and encourages women both in and outside the film to accept that image.36
These scenes from Anybody's Woman suggest that within the traditional con-
structs of the women's picture, a display of female sexuality is not a marker of
a woman's lax morals, but rather of her understanding that she is valued as a
potential partner because of that very sexuality. Female sexuality, therefore,
is acceptable within the ideological parameters of the genre. With this open
display, Arzner reminds us that female desire outside of social norms is effec-
tively erased.
Interestingly, none of these early films experienced difficulties with cen-
sors, despite the sexually aggressive behavior of the female protagonists and
their revealing clothes.37 Get Your Man (1927), The Wild Party (1929), Anybody's
Woman (1930), and Working Girls (1931) were made during pre-Code Holly-
wood. The Production Code was adopted in 1930 but was not enforced until
1934.38 Even reviews and publicity avoided calling attention to any moral
transgressions, sometimes even applauding the women for doing anything
to secure a mate. Variety attributes Nancy's success in luring Robert away
from his arranged marriage in Get Your Man to her sexual explicitness: "To
clinch it, Clara [Bow] frolics around in undies as she tries to compromise the
boy she's after in his home." According to another review in Motion Picture
Magazine , "Clara leaps about radiating vim and vigor, and displays shocking
length of limb and a small amount of lingerie"; yet the review is in no way
critical of her efforts.39 The Wild Party reviews again applaud Bow's character
for the lengths she goes through: "When Clara flashes a gam, all senses are
deadened. And when she flashes a pair of 'em." Ruth Chatterton's chorus girl,
Pansy, in Anybody's Woman , is forgiven for past promiscuity because her sights
are set on marriage: "The successful efforts of the bad, bad girl to become a
246
good wife to a lawyer far above her station ought to win some fan admira-
tion." Publicity for Working Girls understandably doesn't address Mae's preg-
nancy; instead, she and the other women are applauded for mixing "love
with Business."40 Nancy, Stella, Pansy, and Mae reinforce the arguments of
Lea Jacobs and Gaylyn Studiar, whose studies point to the importance of a
visible female sexuality in the media arts at this time. "In the 1920s, women's
sexual desire, dismissed a few short years before as 'mainly pretense,' was
quickly becoming the national preoccupation," writes Studiar in her study of
cinema and the fan magazine. Jacobs explains how films between 1928 and
1942 even rescued the fallen woman by giving her a second chance at respect-
ability through marriage. These Cinderella stories "give some indication of
how the fallen woman plot was updated in the context of Hollywood in the
twenties and thirties."41 In Hollywood's eyes any woman was deserving of
woman's "approved" roles as wife and mother.
In the 1920s, despite the onset of women's political rights, women's place
in higher education and in the workforce changed very little. Rosenberg in
Divided Lives explains that "work-force figures for women overall rose only
modestly in the early twentieth century, from 21 percent in 1900 to 25 per-
cent in 1930." She also notes that a masculinizing of many fields kept women
from effectively pursuing certain careers. Rosenberg sees a similar shift in
women's educational opportunities in Beyond Separate Spheres ; here she argues
that while the 1920s saw men going on to graduate work, it was unusual for
women to continue beyond an undergraduate education.42 Women were
expected instead to attend college and then marry. Carl Degler, in At Odds :
Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present , writes, "Over
80 percent of graduates from women's colleges were marrying in the 1920s as
compared with 50 percent thirty years before."43
It is no surprise, then, that Arzner's narratives portray women interested
in jobs, careers, or an education, but only as a prelude to marriage. The one
exception is Joan (played by Sylvia Sydney), a Chicago heiress in Merrily We
Go to Hell; she is simply in a holding pattern until she meets the man who will
take her from her father's home and into his. Otherwise, Arzner's women are
stage performers, office workers, call girls, aviators, college coeds, spies, and
businesswomen. Anni is a cabaret singer in The Bride Wore Red . Pansy and
Dot in Anybody's Woman and Bubbles and Judy in Dance , Girl, Dance are danc-
ers. Stella and Helen are college coeds in The Wild Party, June and Mae are
sisters and office workers in Working Girls . Cynthia is an aviatrix in Christo-
pher Strong. Julia, is a successful private secretary in Honor Among Lovers. Nicole
is a spy in First Comes Courage. If women work or go to school, it is only to find
a man- neither activity is questioned as long as the first leads to the second.
Even the female community in Arzner's films reinforces these assumptions
as they expect women to forego employment or study once any mate, per-
fect or otherwise, is found. Stella in The Wild Party eventually abandons her
education and runs away with Gil, the professor who earlier scolded her for
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Donna R. Casella
not taking her studies seriously-obviously he didn't know why she was in
college. Stella not only anticipates giving up her studies when she finds a
man, but she engages in tutoring, trying to turn otherwise diligent students
into man-seeking coeds. The more studious Helen envisions a future of con-
tinuing studies, but that is not what society envisions for her. So Stella takes
Helen under her wing and advises her about attracting a man. Helen sheds
her bookworm attire and glasses at a dance and is suddenly "visible"; just as
suddenly, she falls in love. When Pansy in Anybody's Woman has doubts about
her marriage prospects and speaks about a career in the theater, Dot warns
her that if she pursues a career too seriously she will never "be" a marriage
prospect. Degler in At Odds explains that by the 1930s combining job and
marriage was not even an option for many women, as several states made
it difficult for women to work, barring them from jobs on that grounds that
men needed work more than women.44 Many forces combined to discourage
women from working once they married.
In centralizing women's social expectations, then, Arzner calls attention
to the way women embraced what was expected of them. Arzner's thematic
preoccupation with these ideals, however, is replete with narrative tensions.
In the comedies Get Your Man and The Wild Party , the ideal of love and mar-
riage is artificial. The women's interest in men is less emotional than prag-
matic. They have been conditioned to want a man, and they will not stop
until they get one. Also, the problems Nancy ( Get Your Man) and Stella ( The
Wild Party) experience in winning over their potential mates are all too eas-
ily resolved by the end. The resolution in an Arzner comedy includes only
the promise of marriage, not the actual marriage.45 Studies of the romantic
and screwball comedies have pointed to a constant questioning of the mar-
riage ideal, because of the endless complications in the search for a mate.
Kathrina Glitre, in "The Same, But Different: The Awful Truth about Mar-
riage, Remarriage and Screwball Comedy," even argues that the institution
is attractive only because it is "legal and 'respectable.'" She further points out
how the genre tends to confuse the couple's union at the end with an actual
marriage: "While marriage may well be implied, this is not the same thing
as conservative reaffirmation."46 Similarly, marriage in an Arzner comedy
is a valued but intangible commodity. In the resolution of all her romantic
comedies, we assume her women will marry, but we never see the ceremony
or the domestic scenes that should follow. At the end of The Wild Party we are
told that Stella will leave her studies and join Gil on an expedition. Nancy
will marry Robert-to remain respectable. The reviews of the now-lost com-
edies, Fashions for Women and Ten Modern Commandments , imply a permanent
future union. The films do not include an actual marriage. This is typical of
romantic comedies. As such, the genre speaks to the way the ideal remains an
expectation, a promise existing only in society's collective consciousness.
By asserting that women's roles are nothing more than fictions, the com-
edy drama The Bride Wore Red reveals Arzner's sharpest criticism. The film's
248
narrative structure resembles that of the romantic comedy with its focus on
a mismatched couple, a protagonist out of line with social values, mistaken
identities, and a resolution that "promises" a marriage. However, Arzner's
handling of this darker film exposes women's roles as merely performative,
existing in the internal "fictions" of her film. In Directed by Dorothy Arzner,
Mayne identifies the performative nature of female identity in Arzner's use
of fashion. Anni donning and removing clothes depending upon the men in
her life signals the performance: "The film suggests not only that gender and
class, for women, are equally a function of dress, or appearance; it also sug-
gests, obliquely, that there is virtually no such thing as a female identity that
does not rely on costume, staging, and performance."47 Mayne recognizes a
similar performance in the contrast between Anni's speech patterns: from the
more authentic Anni of her earlier cabaret days to the "performed" speech of
her assumed identity. Anni's identity, argues Mayne, is marked by illusion at
all points in the film, from her speech to her clothes.
Thus, the multiple fictions Arzner creates inside this film also serve to
point out the illusory nature of women's social identity. Her women, believ-
ing their choices in life are limited, ultimately depend on these artificial and
elusive social constructs. We first meet Anni performing in a cabaret in Tri-
este. She wants what every woman wants- love and marriage- but believes
both are temporary. The lyrics to her song reflect this: "Who wants love?
Love is a joy we borrow." Just when she thinks there is no hope for a man
to rescue her from her empty life, she is offered the opportunity to join the
leisure class for two weeks. This is the result of a bet between two wealthy
men about whether a lower-class woman can fool a high society man into
marriage. Believing she will never find a man, she borrows another life in
order to secure the love and marriage that she has been denied. In this fic-
tion, she meets aristocrat Rudi and simple postman Giulio, but pursues the
former because of his class. Anni's false identity eventually catches up with
her. Not long after Rudi proposes, her pretense is exposed and he rejects her.
Believing Giulio cannot possibly want her now-she certainly hasn't earned
his love-she returns to her room where she sees a future with no happiness
because there is no prospect for marriage. Just as easily as she dons the mask
of lover and potential wife, Anni removes it; both roles exist in an imagina-
tive world to which she has no access. Without that access, she is lost and
confused: "How do I know what I want? How does anyone know? I guess you
want what you haven't got." What follows is one of the few instances in an
Arzner film (Dance, Girl, Dance being the other) where a character questions
aloud the social constructs. Anni realizes how the expected social roles have
been burdens on her: "It is funny how light I feel as if I have been carrying a
heavy load for miles and miles and suddenly I could put it down and walk on
without it." Anni's epiphany is short-lived. Looking at herself in the mirror,
she sees someone that no one wants, someone who is loud and cheap. She is
back to no options. Anni leaves, heading for the train station when, as luck
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Donna R. Casella
would have it, she is picked up by Giulio who is passing in a wagon. He for-
gives her and takes her back. Anni gets in, laughs in relief, and the film ends
with an "assumed" union in a fictional future. Anni's earlier decision to aban-
don the marriage ideal is temporary ; she quickly changes her mind when a
prospect surfaces and she is reminded that a woman's journey in life always
leads down the path to marriage.
Society's promise of hearth and home for women takes an even darker
turn in Arzner's dramas and melodramas, most of which explore courtship
and marriage. Here, difficult courtships and problematic marriages cast a
dark shadow on any promise of marital bliss; women struggle with inattentive
and disloyal partners, the meddling of other women or men, financial diffi-
culties, and often their own blind faith in a system not of their own making.
The ideal that every woman strives for in Arzner's dramas and melodramas
is nothing more than a betrayal, not unlike the betrayal evident in eighteenth-
century sentimental and nineteenth-century domestic and working-girl fic-
tion. For three centuries Western women's fiction has addressed society's
expectations for women in both the domestic and public spheres, and that
fiction was often subversive in its perspective on gender role expectations for
women.48 In the earliest of these, sentimental literature, for example, women
are promised suitable mates and stable marriages, but what they experience
instead are seducing rakes, difficult childbirths, and high infant mortality.
Scholars often target the Cult of True Womanhood as the villain in early
women's fiction. Self-help manuals and popular essays, as well as novels, from
the late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries expounded on female
attributes. Women were expected to fall in love, marry, and contribute to
society by producing children.49 Mary Kelley, in "The Sentimentalists: Prom-
ise and Betrayal in the Home," was the first to argue that these writers pre-
sented women with marriage as the only possibility for happiness, but a host
of difficulties frequently threatened their security, as women found themselves
trapped with no choices beyond that of wife and mother: "And in spite of their
belief in the domestic as women's properly restricted sphere, they were appre-
hensive that women's position was dependent upon the stability of the family
and fearful that, because of the burden of household duties and the demands
of serving the needs of others, women's autonomy was diminished and her
individuality denied. . . . the protest in the novels and stories frequently pre-
empted the prescription. In the prescription and the protest lay the promise
and betrayal of the nineteenth-century woman."50 These tales reminded the
predominantly female readership of their own economic and social disem-
powerment as well as the era's high maternal and infant mortality rates. As
such, sentimental literature, along with domestic and working girl fiction that
followed, sharply criticized women's limited choices.
Many scholars have pointed to the connection between early cinema
and literary forms. For example, Arzner's films were based on popular senti-
mental stories or novels written for women and often by women. Even when
250
these films originated in works by men, the adaptation emerged as a woman's

narrative.51 Lea Jacobs, in Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film
7928-1942, also traces the fallen woman motif in nascent cinema back to
literature: "The story of the fallen woman derives from a set of nineteenth-
century narrative and iconographie conventions which were themselves in
flux in the twenties and early thirties." And E. Ann Kaplan, in "Mothering,
Feminism and Representation: The Maternal in Melodrama and the Wom-
an's Film, 1910-1940," finds the cinematic "Mother" similar to that in the
early European and American sentimental novel.52
The tension between the false paradisiacal "marriage" and the harsh
reality of life as girlfriend, wife, or mother is particularly evident in Arzner's
dramas and melodramas, which center on the mistakes women make in their
misguided belief about marriage, mistakes that impact their lives and the
lives of other women. For Arzner, unmarried women live under the stress of
finding a mate while married women endure unsatisfying marriages. Mae in
Working Girls is so determined to be identified in a relationship that she takes
the first man that comes along, never stopping to question his motives. Her
sister June warns her about slick talker Boyd, but she ignores the advice. After
spending the night with him, Mae discovers she is pregnant and alone; Boyd
has left her for a socialite. Like other Arzner women, Mae is so blinded by the
romantic promise that she fails to heed warning signs. Similarly, Judy ignores
Jimmy's own self-assessment in Dance, Girl, Dance:" Keep away from guys like
me, Judy. We're rotten. We make nice people like you unhappy." She eventu-
ally comes to blows with Bubbles, who needs men so much that she steals
them from other women. In Merrily We Go to Hell, Jerry's alcoholism is readily
apparent before their marriage, but Joan craves love, marriage, and mother-
hood; as she tells her father, "You don't wait when you are in love." Sarah in
Sarah and Son agrees to marry Jim even though she has already witnessed his
laziness and financial irresponsibility. And Pansy, who wants marriage so
that she can make something of her life in Anybody's Woman , fails to see that
by tricking Neil into matrimony, she is securing an unwilling (and alcoholic)
partner. Julia's decision to marry Phillip in Honor Among Lovers is particularly
interesting given that she is a financially stable career woman. She knows of
his affairs and money troubles but marries him anyway because the man she
loves, her boss Jerry, is afraid to commit. She fears that if she waits she will
end up alone. She wants social solidity. Julia, like other Arzner women, is in
love with the idea-with matrimony's alleged love, loyalty, and stability.
The subversive undercurrent in these films is found in the inescapable
fact that not one of her women finds that expected love, loyalty, or stability.
Problematic courtships lead to disastrous marriages as the women emo-
tionally and sometimes monetarily support men who don't want them. In
Honor Among Lovers, Phillip can't give Julia the family life she hungers after,
and during their marriage he swindles clients and squanders their money.
Guilty of his own adultery, he wrongfully accuses the loyaljulia of an affair.
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Donna R. Casella
Even after he clears out all her cash and goes on trial for shooting her boss,
she stands by him-even getting a job to support them through the ordeal.
In Merrily We Go to Hell, Arzner prepares us for Joan's commitment to her
"marriage mistake" on her wedding day through a long close-up of the ring.
Likejulia, Joan is the good wife, but Jerry's alcoholism and frustration over
his failures as an artist, as well as the flirtations of a former lover, distract
him. She persists in trying to make the marriage work, setting up house,
preparing meals, and darning socks, but she is unsuccessful. Jerry is rarely
home and cannot support her emotionally or financially. Even when they
face fiscal strength, domestic bliss is marred by his drinking and flirtation.
Ina poignant mockery of marriage, an embittered Joan leads a toast: "Gen-
tleman, I give you the holy state of marriage. Modern style . . . single lives,
single beds, and triple bromides in the morning." Jerry realizes too late his
part in their tragedy: at the end he reunites with a seriously ill Joan in her
hospital room after she has lost their baby.
Christopher Strong explores this expectation from the point of view of both
wife and mistress. Billie Burke is the long-suffering wife, Elaine, who tries to
keep her family together when she suspects her husband (Colin Clive) of an
affair. She believes that the strength of their marriage will bring him back.
She is pious, emotionally dependent on Christopher, and a staunch believer
in marital loyalty. That Christopher might not love her is irrelevant. Elaine
believes the marriage convention is stronger than any tie he might have to
another woman. While Elaine desperately hangs on to the lost marriage
ideal, his mistress, Cynthia, trusts in the ideal of love. She believes that if a
man really loves a woman, then the system will not hold them back. Early in
the film we wonder if she thinks that the affair can go on indefinitely. How-
ever, once she counsels Christopher's daughter, Monica, in her relationship
with a married man (who eventually divorces his wife to marry her), it is
clear that Cynthia considers the same possibility in her own liaison. When
she discovers she is pregnant, she can't tell him. Recognizing Christopher's
reluctance to leave his wife and unwilling to damage his family unity, Cyn-
thia commits suicide by piloting her plane above 30,000 feet and taking off
her oxygen mask-the scene recalls Monica's earlier threat of suicide when
Harry refused to marry her. Predictably, Hollywood and the media tapped
into Arzner's surface affirmation of traditional roles, ignoring the tension in
the film's ending. Reviews and publicity read Cynthia's suicide as the coura-
geous act of a self-sacrificing woman determined to preserve the sanctity of
marriage-the Strong marriage. The New York Times refers to her conduct as
"meretricious," and a story in the RKO press book explains that her actions
allow "Christopher to return to his wife, career, and home."53 In the public's
eyes Arzner's film was a celebration of marriage.54
Mayne, in Directed by Dorothy Arzner, dismisses the more traditional read-
ing, arguing instead that Cynthia's actions couple her with Elaine; both share
knowledge of the value placed on marriage: "This ending certainly can be
252
read as a restoration of the couple and the family at the expense of Cyn-
thia's life. But underneath that pat conclusion there is yet another odd cou-
pling, whereby Cynthia chooses Lady Strong's happiness over her own."55 1
see another odd coupling of wife (Elaine) and lover (Cynthia) that points to
Arzner's criticism of how women are forced to view their associations with
men. Elaine believes in marriage, but her husband's affair challenges their
security. Cynthia believes in love, but Christopher's marriage challenges
their romance. As a result of his claim on both his marriage and his affair,
neither female partner is satisfied. At the close of this film, Christopher has
neither given up his marriage nor his lover; it is Cynthia's suicide that finishes
the affair. The film's ending, then, is a reminder of the instability of both ide-
als in a woman's life. Arzner highlights the trouble with an institution held
together not by love, but by mere convention. The only thing affirmed at the
end of Christopher Strong is the sanctity of a failed tradition.
Motherhood, like love and marriage, is equally problematic in the few
films where Arzner explores this theme. Basinger's study of the women's
picture between 1930 and 1960 concludes that while Hollywood's attitude
toward motherhood was perceived as positive, the films themselves expose
that notion as problematic: "Young mothers, old mothers, fat mothers, thin
mothers, all mothers are good, and all women should be good mothers.
That's the accepted idea, but, like everything else one digs up in movies about
women, it is only partly true, and even when true, it is deceptive."56 Arzner,
however, doesn't even acknowledge motherhood as a viable women's role.
Like marriage, it is inextricably linked to a woman's sense of self; failing at
one, she fails at the other. In both cases, Arzner blames the men in the wom-
en's lives. In Merrily We Go to Hell, Joan has already leftjerry when he learns of
her pregnancy from a gossip column. He rushes to the hospital only to learn
that his child is dead-a casualty of an incompatible marriage. She tells him
what he denied her as result of his alcoholism and his affairs: "Oh Jerry, my
baby, my baby! Think about that." Sarah experiences an equally traumatic
marriage to Jim in Sarah and Son, but her story is of a working mother, a role
that carries another set of complications. Rosenberg in Divided Lives reports
that between 1900 and 1930, the percentage of married women in the work-
force doubled from 6 to 12 percent; she pays particular attention to those
women who had to work in the 1920s and 1930s and the problems they faced
juggling two roles: "Domestic responsibilities remained too burdensome for
all but the most ambitious, or the most desperate, to work outside the home."57
Sarah's husband Jim is an out-of-work variety performer who disappears for
days. Sarah works tirelessly but can only afford the rent of a single room, and
must depend on the landlady to mind her son since Jim is an absent father.
She is away from home and her child every day. Eventually, she loses her son
as Jim, desperate for money, puts the child up for adoption. Motherhood for
Sarah is a lost ideal, part of a fictionalized landscape to which she never really
had access. Sarah spends ten years (the span of the film's narrative) valiantly
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Donna R. Casella
searching for her son. She is eventually reunited with him but, in the same
manner that marriage exists in Arzner's romantic comedies, in a fictional
space beyond the film's end; motherhood exists past the ending only. Women
like Sarah spoke to the female audience. As Basinger notes, you don't really
see perfect mothers with uncomplicated lives in the women's picture. Such
women have nothing to say to other women: "If you want to see a perfect
mother, look in movies about boys."58
Part of the problem here is that while Arzner's women blindly respond to
social expectation, her men show little interest in or commitment to marriage
itself. Melissa Sue Kort, in "Spectacular Spinelessness: The Men in Dorothy
Arzner's Films," argues that men misdirect women toward marriage, keep-
ing them from other pursuits; she also concludes that women in Arzner's
films "triumph despite the solid control men maintain in society"59-a theory
inconsistent with Arzner's consistent examination of men and women. Both
are trapped inside of social expectations. This is evident even in her com-
edies, which focus on the courtship; here her men are unwitting participants.
Robert in Get Your Man is in an arranged marriage with a woman he knows
little about, and by the end of the film he is surprised to find himself perma-
nently committed instead to a different woman he has just met. Similarly,
Rudi in The Bride Wore Red is engaged to another woman when he first sees
Anni alone in a restaurant; he is mesmerized by her and completely ignores
his fiancée beside him. Clueless Gil in The Wild Party gives little thought to
marriage, let alone women, until his classroom is turned into a mating arena;
even then the prospect of romance seems absurdly alien to him. In her mar-
riage dramas, her men repeatedly fail in their role as husbands. Jim [Sarah and
Sori), Jerry (Merrily We Go to Hell I), Neil (Anybody's Woman), Christopher (Chris-
topher Strong, and Phillip (Honor Among Lovers) are so uncomfortable in mar-
riage that they avoid their own houses (by going to offices, bars, or parties, or
by having affairs). Marriage's physical space, the home, is just as unappealing
to men as the institution of marriage.
While Arzner's men can escape the home, her women are imprisoned
inside it and, more so, without men, Arzner's married women lack direction
and focus; they exist in empty, ideological (as they idealize it) space. In Sarah
and Son , Sarah and Jim live in a drab, sparse single room. Arzner's mise-en-
scène is replete with full shots and closed frames that emphasize how trapped
Sarah is in her failed marriage. We never see her working, only coming home
where she holds her child, cooks a meal, puts him to bed, and then sits and
waits for the ritual to start anew. Most nights she is alone. Jim is frequently not
home; when he is, he sits motionlessly or lies in bed. Arzner's cinematic space
in these scenes is lifeless, reflecting Sarah's stalled life. The physical and ideo-
logical space of Joan's marriage in Merrily We Go to Hell is equally confining.
She never leaves the apartment, and the tediousness of her life is evident in
Arzner's labored editing sequences focusing on hands darning socks or pre-
paring meals. In one scene she works all day cooking for a dinner party; an
254
intoxicated Jerry returns home and drops the chicken she has meticulously
prepared-twice. In Anybody's Woman , Pansy, as a wife, finds herself with noth-
ing to do and nowhere to go, since the mansion where she lives has a host
of servants. She tries to manage the household but the servants ignore her.
Pansy has married out of her class. She has no friends, no life in or outside. As
Christopher drifts from his home in Christopher Strong , wife Elaine becomes
tied to it. We see her in long takes alone in her bedroom or moving about her
empty house. She no longer attends social events with her husband; and when
she does, she returns early while, to emphasize her isolation, the film cuts to
Christopher and Cynthia together.
Much has been written about Craig's Wife, Arzner's essential film on
failed domestic bliss. Rosalind Russell plays Harriet Craig, a woman obses-
sively attached to her home and all it is supposed to represent-financial and
social security. She keeps her house impeccably clean with everything in its
place; her marriage, however, is emotionally bankrupt. Kathleen McHugh,
in "Housekeeping in Hollywood: The Case of Craig's Wife," argues that Har-
riet is guilty of "inappropriate domesticity" and is therefore to blame for her
own unhappiness.60 Perhaps Harriet isn't to blame. In Harriet Craig, Arzner
gives us a woman who has achieved it all: a home, a husband, financial secu-
rity, and social status; therefore, she shouldn't be criticized for trying to pre-
serve what every woman wants. Harriet understands that her marital status
is a measure of her social and financial worth. Before marriage, she explains,
she "had no private fortune, no special training. The only road to emancipa-
tion for me was through the man I married." Beneath a cold exterior is an
understandable fear of losing her only lifeline; so she protects the home and
the husband she views as a fixture in that home.
Publicity and film reviews, however, criticized Harriet's behavior as
a warning to housekeepers everywhere not to idolize the home. A synop-
sis in the Columbia press book notes, "This home she guarded jealously,
viciously. She has closed its doors, gradually to all of Walter's friends. She
watches every lamp, every table, every chair as an eagle watches its brood."
The same press book suggests an advertising catch line that reads, "Her
one consuming passion forced her into a life of shame." The Motion Picture
Herald was particularly critical, calling her a "selfish, suave, iron minded
wife whose only love is her house" with a "warped idea of respectability and
security."61 Harriet's preoccupation with the appearance of a perfect home
and her attempts at controlling her husband's professional and personal life
eventually drive him away. The film ends with Harriet alone in her pains-
takingly tidy living room eyeing her possessions. "I'm all alone in the house
now," she says to no one. She looks at the door, the staircase, and the empty
living room. Arzner ends with a close-up of Harriet crying. The one person
who made this all possible is now gone. Harriet is not the villain here, but
the victim of a failed promise. Julia Lesage identifies the illusion at the cen-
ter of narratives about the domestic sphere: "The hegemonic female fantasy
255
Donna R. Casella
is an historical creation-a visible projection in our fictions at any given date

of how women are socially, by consensus, defined." Marriage in such films
is "a bargain struck between a man and a woman and reflects the woman's
maneuvering for power."62 Marriage gives Harriet power by giving her con-
trol of a home-both its physical and social spaces. It is not surprising, then,
that Harriet lives for her home. Arzner, Lesage argues, presents the darker
side of the hegemonic fantasy. An unforeseen consequence of adhering to
social expectations, she points out, is that a woman may come to care more
for the home than the people in it. Arzner does not leave us with any solu-
tions to Harriet's problem, but rather with the contradictions inherent in
the marriage bargain, contradictions that reverberate throughout women's
lives and their choices in all her films.
In Arzner's last film, First Comes Courage , marriage takes an ironic
twist.63 The 1943 film integrates wartime espionage, romance, and melo-
drama. Nicole, a Norwegian spying for the British during World War II,
becomes involved with Paul, a German major, in order to gain military
information. When her identity is in danger of being compromised, her
former lover Allan is sent to bring her to Britain. His appearance reignites
their love affair. Suspecting Nicole of spying, Paul pressures her into mar-
riage in order to watch her; she agrees, but only to secure a final piece of
crucial information. Both Arzner's set for the wedding ceremony and the
ceremony itself pervert the traditional marital icons and rituals. Swastikas
adorn the walls as they exchange their vows, and Mein Kampf replaces the
Bible. The new bride soon finds herself a prisoner in her own home. Instead
of celebrating the union on their wedding night, Paul becomes violent, con-
fronting her about her deception. She responds by telling him, "I can't think
of anyone I loathe more." While he plots her death, she and Allan plot his.
Once the major is dead, she decides to stay in Norway to continue her work
as a spy ; Allan leaves without her-another example of a woman sacrific-
ing her happiness for a larger good. The marriage ideal is simultaneously
corrupt and elusive in this film. The one relationship that leads to mar-
riage is founded on a lie and any promise of a permanent union between
Allan and Nicole is threatened by the war. Here, as in her earlier dramatic
films, Arzner appears to uphold Hollywood narrative conventions for the
romance while subtlety dismantling the domestic ideology.
Arzner's dramatic finales are even darker than the ambiguous ends of
her comedies, which at least suggest the "promise" of a stable union. In two of
these, the endings are tragic. Joan in Merrily We Go to //¿//becomes gravely ill
after losing her baby in childbirth, and Harriet, in Craig's Wife, is abandoned
by her husband. In the other films, Arzner's women do not so much over-
come obstacles as survive them. Sarah finds and meets her son after a long
separation at the end of Sarah and Son. Lawyer Vanning has made this possi-
ble, but there is only a vague suggestion in the last scene that Sarah's reunion
may involve being part of a family with Vanning. In Anybody's Woman, Pansy
256
and Neil have been separated when Pansy overhears his admission of past
mistakes and growing love for her. The film's ending features a bittersweet
reconciliation between two people who realize that they are dysfunctional
together but unhappy apart. Jerry and Julia in Honor Among Lovers finally
unite after Julia leaves Phillip for the last time. However, they grieve over
how much time they have wasted, and how much they have hurt each other.
At the end of Working Girls, the agreed upon gunshot wedding of Mae and
Boyd is an ominous start to a marriage. Rather than acknowledging the tri-
umph of romance here, Mae looks relieved that she doesn't have to live a life
of shame. The ending of First Comes Courage suggests that the relationship
between Allan and Nicole will resume after the war-but only if they survive.
While each of these films implies a joining together, the couples are cautious.
Will the women find the permanence they seek? Will they ever find happi-
ness in marriage?64
We are left in all of Arzner's work with an overwhelming feeling that life
shouldn't have to be like this. There must be a way to avoid the pains of getting
and keeping your man. Some scholars have argued that in problematizing
heterosexual pairings Arzner creates sites of lesbian detection. Jane Gaines
in "Dorothy Arzner's Trousers" finds queer expression in Arzner's image, in
her working relationship with gay male costume designers, in her "(queerly
positioned) point-of-view," and in her handling of heterosexual couples. For
example, Gaines interprets Cynthia's problems with the married Christo-
pher and her subsequent suicide in Christopher Strong" as demonstrating how
heterosexual monogamy cripples the imagination and curbs the appetite for
living and how Cynthia's heroic death stands at once for a bold termination of
pregnancy and an acknowledgment that heterosexuality kills."65 In contrast,
Mayne in Directed by Dorothy Arzner identifies a female signature in Arzner's
films that affirms the underlying importance of female attachments and com-
munity. She argues that even though Arzner's films have "lesbian subtexts,"
they do not overtly deal with lesbian plots or content, perhaps because Arzner
wanted to keep her private and public life separate. What she does do in
her films, says Mayne, is celebrate female bonds, deflecting assumptions that
there is anything pathological about relationships between women: "In the
present example, Arzner's film [The Wild Party] may not equate female friend-
ship with lesbianism, but it does refuse to validate the view, increasingly pop-
ular . . . during her lifetime, that there is anything unhealthy, immoral, or
otherwise lacking in intense female bonds."66
According to Mayne, Arzner celebrates women by focusing on nurturing
friendships, on communities of women living together, and even on unac-
knowledged sisterhoods-such as the Elaine/Cynthia coupling in Christopher
Strong I also see Arzner's celebration of women in her attention to women's
limited social choices and in her criticism of the gender constructs weighing
on them. But female friendships and communities in Arzner's films are too
impermanent to be part of that celebration. Competition for men and the
257
Donna R. Casella
sanctity of heterosexuality threaten the longevity of female ties in many of

her films. The women boarding together in Dance, Girl , Dance are mutually
supportive-Bubbles even pays their rent when jobs are slow, but the personal
and professional relationship between Bubbles and Judy is threatened by
their mutual interest in the same man. In Merrily We Go to Hell, Joan must con-
tend wit h Jerry 's former lover Claire, whose flirting contributes to her already
unstable marriage. In Christopher Strong, Monica quickly befriends the excit-
ing aviatrix Cynthia, who mediates between her and her family when she
romances a married man. However, Monica distances herself from Cynthia
once she learns of the affair with her father (highly critical for someone who is
also with a married man). The young women in Working Girls live in a board-
ing house, encouraging each other's search for a man-even to the point of
sneaking in latecomers who have been on dates. But once a woman finds her
mate, her place in that community disappears. Pansy loses Dot's advice when
she marries Neil in Anybody's Woman. In addition, as married women, nei-
ther Pansy nor Harriet ( Craig's Wife) has a female friend in whom to confide.
Throughout Arzner's films, female affinities are eventually eclipsed by the
socially accepted but problematic heterosexual ones. This is particularly evi-
dent in The Wild Party . Before they meet their respective partners, Stella and
Helen's friendship is nurturing and protective. Bookworm Helen helps Stella
with college matters, and Stella initiates Helen into a social life. Stella even
takes the blame when Helen's love letter to George is found, thus threatening
her chances at a scholarship. When Stella sees George in Helen's arms, she
tells George that she too loves Helen and breaks down in tears. She is both
happy for Helen's union and sad because she has lost her friend. Their con-
nection is broken as Helen pairs with George and Stella with Gil: the feminine
community steps aside for the male-female one. Female relationships may be
privileged for a time in Arzner's world, but eventually they are replaced by
heterosexual pairings. In the end, her comedies, dramas, and melodramas
remind us that Arzner's women communities are no more steady or fulfilling
than her male-female ones-a commentary not on the failure of female affili-
ations or their insignificance for Arzner, but on the dominance of and blind
adherence to the heterosexual.
Though she created a body of films that consistently questioned the try-
ing expectations placed on women and the difficulties women faced in meet-
ing those expectations, only one of Arzner's films features a character who
openly challenges the patriarchy's image of women. In 1940 Arzner directed
Dance , Girl, Dance from a script by Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis.67 The chal-
lenge comes from Judy, a struggling ballerina who falls for Jimmy, a reckless
young man who juggles three women at once. In need of work and visibility,
Judy agrees to open for Tiger Lily's (a.k.a. Bubbles) enticing burlesque show.
Judy's ballet routine is habitually laughed at as the audience begs for the more
alluring woman. During one performance, Judy suddenly realizes she is
nothing more than eye candy for men and stops to address her audience:
258
Figure 2. Stella (Clara Bow) has just noticed she has been out past curfew as Gil
(Fredric March) declares his love for her in The Wild Party (1929). She quickly
dismisses the concern because she is with a potential husband. Courtesy of Uni-
versal Studios.
Go on. Laugh! Get your money's worth. Nobody's going to hurt you. I know
you want me to tear my clothes off so's you can look your fifty cents worth.
Fifty cents for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives won't let you.
What do you suppose we think of you up here-with your silly smirks your
mothers would be ashamed of? And we know it's a thing of the moment for the
dress suits to come and laugh at us too. We'd laugh right back at the lot of you,
only we're paid to let you sit there and roll your eyes and make your scream-
ingly clever remarks. What's it for? So as you can go home when the show is
over and strut before your wives and sweethearts and play at being the stronger
sex for a minute? I'm sure they see through you just like we do.
The theater is alarmingly silent, until she stops speaking and one woman,
secretary to Steve Adams, director of a modern dance school, rises and staits
the applause. In her analysis of this scene, Mayne departs from previous femi-
nist readings, which have argued that Judy's challenge of women as spec-
tacle is undermined by that act of applauding. Instead, Mayne reads female
259
Donna R. Casella
empowerment in Judy's monologue (her performance) in part because of the

secretary's applause: "Men may consume women through the look, but women
also watch and take pleasure in the spectacle of other women's performance."68
But in another departure from these older feminist readings, one could
argue that the secretary regularly witnesses the spectacle of performance
in her job, and thus understands the public image of women as spectacle.
Rather than undermining Judy's message by applauding, she is confirming
and celebrating Judy's defiance of the patriarchal objectification of women
on display. Furthermore, by addressing an audience of both men and women
and by acknowledging woman's role playing on and off the stage, Judy aligns
herself with a larger womanly community-a community of mothers, wives,
and sweethearts-all subject to male authority and all in prescribed roles. The
women in the audience who squirm at her speech are not comfortable being
reminded of their own complicity in these social constructs. Judy's speech
reminds the spectator (male and female, in and outside the film text) how
women's lives are carefully choreographed. Judy, however, controls her
own "performance" here and thus recuperates the power earlier denied her.
Betrayed by her dreams of artistic success and by the men in her life, Judy is
now determined to stand on her own-until Steve Adams, who has seen her
performance, agrees to audition her. At the end of the film, he tells her, "From
now on you are going to listen to me." Addressing his assistant, he adds, "It
is our job to teach her what we know." She appears awestruck by his offer.
Realizing the ironic twist of events, she remarks: "When I think of every-
thing, how simple things could have been, I-I just got to laugh." He prompts
her to "Go ahead and laugh, Judy O'Brien." Arzner ends with a close-up of
Judy staring down and then at the camera. It really is all so simple-if you just
accept what you are told to do . . . and to be.
Perhaps that is the darker message beneath the work of a woman director
who on the surface gave Hollywood, with its clearly articulated patriarchal
ideology, exactly what it wanted: sexually desirable women, from the naïve
to the more experienced, who unfailingly believed in the promise of love
and marriage. In so doing, Arzner also spoke to women; but she shared with
them something more than understanding gender pressures. Basinger identi-
fies that shared knowledge as the struggle women go through to comply with
social dictates. She argues that the women's picture connected with women
by assuring them that they were not alone in these struggles; they could go
back to their own suffering comforted in knowing they were on the right
path: "The woman's film was successful because it worked out of a paradox.
It both held women in social bondage and released them into a dream of
potency and freedom. It drew women in with images of what was lacking in
their own lives and sent them home reassured that their own lives were the
right thing after all."69 In the hands of Arzner, however, the women's picture
also conveyed to women that there was something fundamentally wrong with
these prospects. As such, Arzner takes the women's picture away from its
260
affirmation of the status quo and into an all-out subversion of it. Basinger sees
neither the subversion nor the implied solution to the problems articulated in
Arzner's handling of the women's picture: "In her movies, she often seemed
to present a sense of how hard it was for a female character to sort out the
various pressures of her life as a woman. Although Arzner did not suggest
an unconventional solution to these problems, other than perhaps suicide or
flaunting of small social conventions, she did at least stress that there were
problems for women."70
Arzner, however, did so much more than simply present women's prob-
lems; she took the contradictions inherent in the shared social knowledge
(by text and audience) and used these contradictions to subvert that knowl-
edge. Her comedies present a courtship ritual that culminates in-at best-an
imagined union; her dramas and melodramas point to the dangers of hetero-
sexual love, how such love threatens female kinships, and the complications
of assigning women a single sphere in life. At a time when women had gained
the right to vote and could reach for both education and a career and at a time
when social scientists recognized the "arbitrariness of sexual classifications,"71
women still battled on. They were denied access to advanced graduate edu-
cations in the 1920s, and at the height of the Depression they lost jobs they
may have wanted for personal fulfillment or because of financial need. And
if they worked outside the home, many fought with the impossible standard
of balancing career and home obligations. Beneath the messages regarding
women's roles in all Arzner's films is a clear statement of an overbearing male
system and its dogma that continued to promise something it could never
deliver: the romantic ideal. Arzner's public image (as an expert in such mat-
ters and as a director of films that affirmed acceptable roles for women) may
have overshadowed the inherent criticism in her films, but that public image
did not silence her. She once told an interviewer, ttI always had something
unusual in my pictures if I could catch it because that was the way that I could
know that I could draw attention to my pictures."72 In the hands of Arzner,
these women's pictures became vehicles that challenged the belief that soci-
ety-not women-knew what women wanted.
Donna R. Casella is a professor of film and popular culture at Minnesota State Uni-
versity, Mankato. She has published articles on the silent period in Hollywood and on
images of women in popular literature. Her recent work on early women scenarists in
Hollywood appears in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. She is currently
researching women's contribution to indigenous Irish filmmaking of the silent era .
Notes
The author wishes to express her thanks to the UCLA Film and Television
Archives, UCLA Special Collections, the Margaret Herrick Library, the Library
of Congress, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the
261
Donna R. Casella
National Archives at the British Film Institute for their assistance at all stages in
this project
1. Gerald Peary and Karyn Kay, "Dorothy Arzner Interview," Cinema 34 (1974):
10.
2. Arzner began as a script typist and quickly moved into the job of script clerk,
holding scripts for Donald Crisp at Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount) and
for Alia Nazimova at Metro. Before detailed screenplays, a script clerk (often a
script girl) would be present on set throughout the entire shoot, copying dialogue
and other shooting directions; this was referred to as holding a script. Eager to try
her hand at something else, Arzner started editing at the encouragement of Nan
Heron; she worked first at Realart Studios, a subsidiary of Paramount, and later
at Paramount for James Cruze. Arzner's transition from script typist and clerk to
editing was a natural one. Kevin Brownlow in The Parade's Gone By (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1976) explains that during her typing days Arzner
would frequently discuss the scripts with the cutter; this led to her interest in edit-
ing (286). Brownlow's book and Arzner's own comments in interviews point to a
seamless transition from typing to holding scripts to editing full time. According
to the American Film Institute (AFI) Online Catalogue, Arzner edited Blood and Sand
(Fred Niblo, 1922), The Covered Wagon (James Cruze, 1923), Inez from Hollywood
(Alfred E. Green, 1924), and Old Ironsides (James Cruz, 1926); all of these were
Famous Players- 1 ,asky / Param ou n t productions with the exception of Inez from
Hollywood , a Sam E. Rork production. At the same time she was editing, Arzner
kept continuity and wrote scripts for Paramount and smaller companies such as
Columbia. The AFI Online Catalogue lists the following credits: When Husbands
Flirt, Columbia Pictures, story and continuity with Paul Gangelin (William A.
Wellman, 1925); The No- Gun Man, Harry Garson Productions, story and continu-
ity with Paul Gangelin (Harry Garson, 1924); and The Breed of the Border, Harry
Garson Productions, continuity with Paul Gangelin (Harry Garson, 1924).
3. Peary and Kay, "Dorothy Arzner Interview," 10, 13.
4. A number of sources were consulted for biographical information and for
Arzner's views of her career. Seejudith Mayne, Directed by Dorothy Arzjier (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Francine Parker, "Approaching the Art
of Arzner," Action 8, no. 4 (1973): 9-14; Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By, 283-87;
Peary and Kay, "Dorothy Arzner Interview," 10-20; and transcripts of the
"Interview Rushes," Thames Television, June 5, 1977 (BFI Hollywood Collec-
tion Series, Box 8). The Thames lelevision interview was conducted in 1977 and
later used in The Hollywood Series, a thirteen-part series directed by David Gill
and Kevin Brownlow, airingjanuary through April 1980 on Thames Television.
Some but not the entire 1977 interview appears in this series, which is available
on video. See Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film-End of an Era,
directed by David Gill and Kevin Brownlow (New York: HBO Video, 1980).
5. "Fashions for Women," Variety, March 30, 1927, 15. Sources differ on the name
of the female lead for this now-extant film. Variety says she is Lolo Dulay when
in Paris and Lulu Dooley when in New York. The New York Times review of the
film refers to the character as Lola Dauvry (March 28, 1927, 26).
6. Many women directed in the United States during the silent period, among them
Alice Guy Blaché, Lois Weber, Frances Marion, Mabel Normand, Ruth Ann
Baldwin, Grace Cunard, Gene Gau n tier, Julia Crawford Ivers, Cleo Madison,
262
Ida May Park, Elizabeth Pickett, Dorothy Davenport Reid, Kathlyn Williams,
and Margery Wilson; however, their directing careers halted with the coming
of sound. Lois Weber directed one film after 1930, White Heat (1934). Wanda
Tuchock entered the director's chair with the coming of sound, but directed only
Finishing School (RKO, 1933, co-director George Nichols Jr.); she did, however,
have a prolific writing career. See Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Women Film Direc-
tors: An International Bio- Critical Dictionary (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1995);
Anthony Slide, The Silent Feminists: America's First Women Directors { Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow Press, 1996).
7. All available Arzner films were viewed for this study; however, only those films
in which Arzner was the primary director are included. The following films are
at UCLA's Film and Television Archives and the British Film Institute, London
(BFI): Working Girls (1931), Merrily We Go to Hell (1932), and Dance , Girl, Dance
(1940). UCLA also has viewing copies of Anybody's Woman (1930), Sarah and Son
(1930), and Honor Among Lovers (1931). The BFI has viewing copies of First Comes
Courage (1943) and The Wild Party (1929). Reels 1 and 4-6 of the silent Get Your
Man (1927) can be viewed at the Library of Congress. The Wild Party , Christopher
Strong (1933), Nana( 193 4), Craig's Wife('93&¡, The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1937), and
ТЪе Bride Wore Red (1937) are available on video. Dance , Girl, Dance is now avail-
able on DVD. Fashions for Women (silent), Ten Modern Commandments ( 1927, silent),
and Manhattan Cocktail (1928, silent/sound) have all been lost All three were
completed for Famous Players-Lasky, which later became Paramount; there are
enough surviving Paramount films to draw conclusions regarding her work for
this studio. In light of her lack of creative control during production of Nana , the
film is only marginally considered in this study. The Last of Mrs. Cheyney is not
included because Arzner was only a fill-in director, after Richard Boleslawski
died and the replacement director, George Fitzmaurice, fell ill with only a few
days left of shooting. See the following articles in the Motion Picture Herald: Janu-
ary 23, 1937, 60; January 30, 1937, 55; and February 27, 1937, 59-60. Arzner did
not experience the same kind of creative freedom on First Comes Courage as she
did on many of her other films, but it is included in this study because she was
the primary director through most of the production. Films she co-directed with
Robert Milton at Paramount, Charming Sinners (1930) and Behind the Make-Up
(1930), are not included because the degree of her artistic contribution on these
films is unknown. Most reviews make no mention of her contribution. However,
a review of Sarah and Son, another film she directed for Paramount in 1930, notes
that Arzner, the director "who recently has been producing films with Robert
Milton and alternating in the credit for them, is set forth as the director for this
production" (New York Times, March 13, 1930, 22). The St. James International
Dictionary lists her as the co-director of Behind the Make-Up and uncredited co-
director of Charming Sinners (Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast, eds., St. James
International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers 2-Directors, 4th ed. [Detroit: St
James Press, 2000], 43). In the Peary and Kay interview, Arzner points out that
she was the technical director while Milton directed the actors (14).
8. Jeanine Basinger, A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 7.
9. The following texts were used in gauging the social climate of the 1920s,
1930s, and 1940s: Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from
263
Donna R. Casella
the Revolution to the Present { New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Michael
McGerr, "Political Style and Women's Power, 1830-1930 ? Journal of American
History 77, no. 3 (1990): 864-85; Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres:
Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1982) and Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1992); and Christine A. Lunardini, From Equal Suffrage to Equal
Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman's Party , 1910-1928 (New York: New
York University Press, 1986). Each of these studies is a social history draw-
ing from the following: feminist theories at the time, biographies of feminists,
educational and workforce data, government documents, advice books, and
contemporary interviews.
10. Though the women's picture is traditionally dramatic or melodramatic, it has
been frequently linked to the romantic comedy. Overall contemporary reviews
agree that Arzner's films are women's pictures with a strong romantic element,
but they disagree on the specific generic labels-probably because distinct formu-
las were just beginning to emerge and a critical framework would not be in place
for several decades. Referencing mostly New York Times and Variety reviews, the
AFI Online Catalogue makes the following distinctions: romantic comedy- Get Your
Man; society drama-Fashions for Women; melodrama-Manhattan Cocktail Nana ,
and Christopher Strong; romance- The Wild Party and Honor Among Lovers; comedy
drama- Ten Modern Commandments , The Bride Wore Red, and Working Girls; domes-
tic drama- Merrily We Go to Hell; society melodrama- Anybody 's Woman and Sarah
and Son; drama.- Craig's Wife and Dance , Girl, Dance; espionage drama- First Comes
Courage. There is some disagreement on the definition of melodrama. During
the silent era, the very popular melodramas were emotionally charged dramas,
according to Thomas Schatz in Hollywood Genres (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 1981).
By the 1930s the genre had begun to include a strong romantic element: "Gen-
erally speaking, 'melodrama' was applied to popular romances that depicted
a virtuous (usually a woman) or couple (lovers) victimized by repressive and
inequitable social circumstances, particularly those involving marriage, occupa-
tion, and the nuclear family" (221-22). The labels noted in the text of this study
are based on viewings of available films and a complete study of contemporary
reviews. Working Girls is listed as a drama in this study, despite the indication in
some reviews that this is a comedy drama; the narrative pace of the film and the
tragic implications of Mae's affairs suggest otherwise.
1 1. Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary, "Dorothy Arzner's Dance, Girl, Dance," Velvet Light
Trap 10 (Fall 1973): 26-31.
12. Claire Johnston, ed., The Work of Dorothy Arzjier: Towards a Feminist Cinema (Lon-
don: BFI, 1975), includes Johnston's "Dorothy Arzner: Critical Stratégies" (1-8),
Pam Cook's "Approaching the Work of Dorothy Arzner" (9-18), and a reprint
of the Peary/Kay interview (19-29). Johnston and Cook utilize Juliet Mitchell's
definition of patriarchal ideology: a system of patriarchal laws governing society
and the contradictions those laws produce. See Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and
Feminism: A Radical Reassessment (1974; reprint, New York: Basic Books, 2000).
13. Beverie Houston, "Missing in Action: Notes on Dorothy Arzner, Wide Angle 6,
no. 3 (1984): 31. See also Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cin-
ema," Screen 16 (1975): 6-18; and Samuel L. Cheli, "Dorothy Arzner's Dance Girl,
Dance: Regendering the Male Gaze," CineAction 24/25 (1991): 75-79.
264
14. Judith Mayne, The Woman at the Keyhole: Feminism and Women's Cinema (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 110, and Directed by Dorothy Arzner, 181.
See also Mayne, "Lesbian Looks: Dorothy Arzner and Female Authorship,"
in How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object- Choices (Seattle: Bay
Press, 1991); Jane Gaines, "Dorothy Arzner's Trousers," Jump Cut 37 (July 1992):
88-98; Alexander Doty, "Whose Text Is It Anyway?: Queer Cultures, Queer
Auteurs, and Queer Authorship," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 15, no. 1
(1993): 41-54; and Boze Hadleigh, Hollywood Lesbians (New York: Barricade
Books, 1994), 99-119.
15. A number of Lois Weber's films are available on DVD or video and fragments
of some lost films are available for viewing at the Museum of Modern Art, the
Library of Congress, and the British Film Institute.
16. Aline Carter, "The Muse of the Reel," Motion Picture Magazine, March 1921, 62.
17. Jennifer Parchesky, "Lois Weber's The Blot: Rewriting Melodrama, Reproduc-
ing the Middle Class," Cinema Journals, no. 1 (1999): 23-53; Shelley Stamp,
"Lois Weber, Progressive Cinema, and the Fate of 'The Work-a-Day Girl' in
Shoes," Camera Obscura 19, no. 2 (2004): 140-69; and Thomas Slater, "Transcend-
ing Boundaries: Lois Weber and the Discourse over Women's Roles in the Teens
and Twenties," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 18, no. 3 (2001): 257-71.
18. I argue this point in an earlier study of women writers in the silent period. By
her own admission, Weber geared her films toward women, but she argued in
interviews and articles that her goal was to give women a slice of real life. Weber
produced, wrote, and directed a number of her early films and independendy
produced her own films from the late teens into the early 1920s. In between she
was Universal's lead director. See Donna Casella, "Feminism and the Female
Author: The Not So Silent Career of the Woman Scenarist in Hollywood, 1896-
1930," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 23, no. 3 (2006): 217-35.
19. According to Kathy Peiss, by the 1920s women composed 40 percent of the
working-class viewing audience. See Cheap Amusements: Working Women and
Leisure in Turn-of- the- Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1986), 148. Gaylyn Studiar also argues that 1920s Hollywood operated as if
women were the main audience. See "The Perils of Pleasure? Fan Magazine
Discourse as Women's Commodified Culture in the 1920s," in Silent Film, ed.
Richard Abel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 263-97.
Studio heads, believing this audience remained constant with the introduction
of sound, continued to offer the women's picture in the 1930s and 1940s.
20. The Margaret Herrick Library Special Collections at the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences has Paramount press books/press sheets and ad
sales material for Fashions for Women, Ten Modern Commandments, Get Your
Man, Manhattan Cocktail, The Wild Party, Anybody's Woman, Working Girls, Honor
Among Lovers, and Merrily We Go to Hell. Special Collections lists holdings for
Paramount's Sarah and Son, but the press material is missing. Their core col-
lection has press books and ad sales material for RKO's Christopher Strong and
Dance, Girl, Dance. The British Film Institute (BFI) in London has press books/
press sheets, campaign or exhibitor books, and ad sales material for the fol-
lowing: Paramount's Working Girls, Honor Among Lovers, and Merrily We Go to
Hell; RKO's Christopher Strong ; Samuel Goldwyn's Nana; Columbia's Craig's
Wife and First Comes Courage; and MGM's The Bride Wore Red. The BFI material
265
Donna R. Casella
includes publicity released to U.S. distributors, with some additional material

for UK distributors. Typically press books were thicker, while press sheets
consisted of fewer than ten or twelve pages. Press books and campaign books
(sometimes called exhibitor books) were different studio names for the same
material. Sometimes suggested advertisements appeared in with the press
material; at other times, separate ad catalogues would be sent to the theaters.
Since page numbers are frequently missing or illegible in these archived mate-
rials, quotes are referenced by article or ad titles.
21. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987), 27.
22. Mayne, Directed by Dorothy Arzjier , 53.
23. Mary McCall, who wrote the screenplay for Craig's Wife, noted that Arzner
always consulted her writers, who were invited on the set during shoots: "At
the end of every rehearsal she turned and said, 'How was that for you?'-and I
couldn't believe it!" See Lee Margulies, "Tribute to Dorothy Arzner," Action 10,
no. 2 (1975): 17.
24. Zoë Atkins, Tess Slesinger, Doris Anderson, Hope Loring, and Mary C. McCall-
major screenwriters from the 1920s through the 1940s-all scripted for Arzner.
Only three of the following films do not have the mark of at least one female
writer: Fashions for Women (script by Percy Heath, adaptation by Jules Furthman
and Herman J. Mankiewicz from the Gladys Unger novel); Ten Modern Com-
mandments , script by Doris Anderson and Paul Gangelin from the Jack Lait story;
Get Your Man , script by Hope Loring from the Louis Verneuil play; Manhattan
Cocktail , script by Ethel Doherty from the Ernest Vajda story; The Wild Party ,
script by E. Lloyd Sheldon from a Warner Fabian story; Sarah and Son, script
by Zoë Atkins from the Timothy Shea story; Anybody's Woman, script by Zoë
Atkins and Doris Anderson from the Gouverneur Morris story; Working Girls,
script by Zoë Atkins from the Vera Caspary and Winifred Lenihan play; Honor
Among Lovers, script by Austin Parker and Gertrude Purcell from the Parker story;
Merrily We Go to Hell, script by Edwin Justus Mayer from the Cleo Lucas novel;
Christopher Strong, script by Zoë Atkins from the Gilbert Frankau novel; Nana,
script by Harry Wagstaff Gribble and Willard Mack, suggested by the Emile
Zola novel; Craig's Wife, script by Mary C. McCall from the George Kelly play;
The Bride Wore Red, script by Tess Slesinger and Bradbury Foote from the Fer-
enc Molnár play; Dance, Girl, Dance, script by Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis
from the Vicki Baum story; and First Comes Courage, script by Lewis Meitzer
and Mel vin Levy, adaptation by George Sklar from the Elliott Arnold novel.
Arzner seems to have worked closely with many of the above writers with the
exception of those involved in Nana and First Comes Courage. In the Peary and
Kay interview, Arzner admits she did not work closely with the writers on Nana
because Samuel Goldwyn took full control of the script (15). Production credits
were determined by cross-listing credits from the AFI Online Catalogue, the 1998
CD-Rom of Film Index International, and available film prints; trades and reviews
also were consulted.
25. See also Dudley Early, "Who Is the 'First lady of the screen'? The Career of Dor-
othy Arzner," Family Circle, July 6, 1934, 10-11, 16-18. The Early article can be
found in the Dorothy Arzner Collection, University of California, Los Angeles,
Arts Library-Special Collections, Box 5. Subsequent references to this collection
266
are abbreviated "UCLA Arzner Collection" followed by the box number. Some
clipping citations are incomplete; all available information is provided.
26. "Merrily We Go To H- ," Kansas City 5tor,June 5, 1932, 104 (UCLA Arzner Col-
lection, Box 4); R. Ewart Williams, "Film for Women Made by Women," Film
Pictorial, March 6, 1937, 157; "Showman's Reviews: Craig's Wife," Motion Picture
Herald, September 19, 1936, 50; "The Bride Wore Red," New York Times , October
15, 1937, 18; "Crawford Scores Heavily Again, in Big Box Office Hit," National
Box- Office Digest, 1937, 160 (UCLA Arzner Collection, Box 4); and "Working
Girls," Photoplay, January 1932, 94. In addition to clippings in the UCLA Arzner
Collection, individual publications consulted in this study include Variety, New
York Times, Motion Picture Herald, Photoplay, Cosmopolitan, Close Up, Family Circle,
Film Pictorial, Hollywood Reporter, Motion Picture Daily, Film Daily, Daily Variety,
Motion Picture Magazine, Hollywood Spectator (formerly Film Spectator ), and Silver
Screen Magazine.
27. Early, "Who Is the 'First lady of the screen'? The Career of Dorothy Arzner," 18;
and "First Comes Courage," Motion Picture Herald Product Digest, September 11,
1943, 1530. See also the Paramount publicity material for Get Your Man, Fashions
for Women, and Ten Modern Commandments.
28. For information on Arzner's life with Marion Morgan, see Mayne's Directed by
Dorothy Arzjier and the photographs and correspondences between Arzner and
Morgan in the UCLA Arzner Collection, Boxes 5, 6, and 7.
29. Pamela Cook, "Melodrama and the Women's Picture," in BFI Dossier 18: Gainsbor-
ough Melodrama, ed. Sue Aspinall and Robert Murphy (London: BFI, 1983), 14.
30. Basinger, A Woman's View, 14-15.
31. Ibid., 10.
32. Maria LaPlace, "Producing and Consuming the Woman's Film: Discursive
Struggle in Now, Voyager ," in Home Is Where the Heart Is, ed. Christine Gledhill
(London: BFI, 2002), 165. See also Annette Kuhn, Women's Pictures (London:
Verso, 1994), 198; Alison Butler, Women's Cinema: The Contested Screen (London:
Wallflower, 2002); Jacqueline S. Bratton,Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill, eds.,
Romantic Melodramas: Stage, Picture, Screen (London: BFI, 1994); E. Ann Kaplan,
ed., Feminism and Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Kathleen
Anne McHugh, American Domesticity: From How-to Manual to Hollywood Romantic
Melodramas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
33. Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, 241. William Henry Chafe's 1972 study, The
American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Roles, 1920-1970
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), though dated, contains some valu-
able information on manuscript collections, government documents, and con-
temporary articles detailing cultural perceptions of this earlier period.
34. Lunardini, From Equal Rights to Suffrage Rights, 150-51. See also Rosenberg,
Divided Lives, 91-101.
35. Only two of her films include a shared point of view: Honor Among Lovers shifts
point of view between Claudette Colbert's Julia and Fredric March's Jerry
Stafford, and Merrily We Go to Hell does the same with March's Jerry Corbett and
Sylvia Sidney's Joan.
36. Doane, The Desire to Desire, 24. Doane also discusses how that exchange is evi-
dent in the marketing of the women's picture. Woman as commodity is evident
throughout the publicity material.
267
Donna R. Casella
37. The only Arzner film to experience any problem with censors was Nana (1934),
the story of a prostitute/musical hall performer who becomes the mistress of one
man and falls in love with another. In the Peary and Kay interview, Arzner notes
that the script she was handed was probably about the "fiftieth attempt" (17). See
also Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, Dame in the Kimono : Hollywood ' Cen-
sorship, and the Production Code (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001);
and Russell Cousins, "Sanitizing Zola: Dorothy Arzner's Problematic Nana ," Lit-
erature and Film Quarterly 23, no. 3 (1995): 209-15.
38. Thomas Doherty, Pre- Code Hollywood: Sex , Immorality , and Insurrection in American
Cinema, 1930-1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 10, 351-59.
39. "Get Your Man," Variety, December 7, 1927, 20; and Motion Picture Magazine,
March 1928, 62.
40. "The Wild Party," Variety, April 3, 1929, 20; and "Anybody's Woman," Variety,
August 20, 1930, 14. Interestingly, the Variety review of Nana (1934) yielded a
similar response: "For purpose of sympathy and conviction it became likewise
necessary to soft-pedal the three sisters of the sidewalk cafés and accentuate the
newly-made star's [Anna Sten] virtuousness and singleness of purpose when
the big romance arrives" ("Nana," Variety, February 6, 1934, 4). Arzner did not
work closely with the writers of Nana, because the script went through multiple
rewrites to get through censors even before Arzner came on board. Since Arzner
was never really committed to the film, Nana is only marginally considered in
this study. See Leff and Simmons, Dame in the Komono, 40.
41. Studiar, "The Perils of Pleasure?," 275; Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship
and the Fallen Woman Film 1928-1942 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1991), 13.
42. Rosenberg, Divided Lives, 93, and Beyond Separate Spheres, 239.
43. Degler, At Odds, 413. For a study of films featuring working women, see Carolyn
L. Galerstein, Working Women on the Hollywood Screen: A Fibnography (New York:
Garland, 1989); and Mary Haralovich, "The Proletarian Woman's Film of the
1930s: Contending with Censorship and Entertainment," Screen 31, no. 2 (Sum-
mer 1990): 172-87.
44. Degler, At Odds, 13-14. Rosenberg makes a similar argument in Divided Lives and
Beyond Separate Spheres .
45. See also the comedies Fashions for Women and Ten Modern Commandments. Though
these films are lost, their narrative structure can be determined from contemporary
reviews. The AFI Online Catalogue lists Fashions for Women as a society drama; how-
ever, reviews in the New York Times (March 28, 1927, 26), Variety (March 30, 1927,
15), and the Motion Picture Magagne (July 1927, 61) all mention the film's comedic
elements. For reviews of Ten Modern Commandments, see Variety, July 13, 1927, 20;
New York Times, July 11, 1927, 23; and Motion Picture Magagne, October 1927, 39.
46. Kathrina Glitre, "The Same, But Different: The Awful Truth about Marriage,
Remarriage and Screwball Comedy," Cine Action 54 (January 2001): 4. Techni-
cally speaking, Arzner's comedies can only be viewed as screwball comedies in
the loosest sense of the term. Not all her comedies feature couples from different
socioeconomic classes. See Schatz, Hollywood Genres, 150-85; and Wes D. Geh-
ring, Romantic vs. Screwball Comedy: Charting the Difference (Lanham, MD: Scare-
crow Press, 2002).
47. Mayne, Directed by Dorothy Arzner, 108.
268
48. The prescriptive and critical functions of these earlier tales have been well docu-
mented. See Nina Baym, Women's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women
1820-1870 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993); and Nancy F. Cott,
The Bonds ofWomanhood: Woman 's Sphere in New England , 1780- 1835 (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
49. Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820 to I860," American Quar-
terly 18 (Summer 1966): 155-74. Welter uses nineteenth-century self-help texts
in identifying women's behavior in and outside the domestic sphere. See also
Godey's Lady's Book (mid-nineteenth-century U.S. magazine) and Lydia Maria
Child, The Frugal Housewife (Boston: Carter and Hendlee, 1829).
50. Mary Kelley, "The Sentimentalists: Promise and Betrayal in the Home," Signs
4, no. 3 (1979): 437. Kelley uses the term "sentimentalist" to refer to writers of
late-eighteenth-century sentimental literature as well those of nineteenth-century
domestic literature.
51. See note 24 for a list of female writers who penned Arzner's films.
52. Jacobs, The Wages of Sin, 5; and E. Ann Kaplan, "Mothering, Feminism and Rep-
resentation: The Maternal in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, 1910-1940," in
Gledhill, Home Is Where the Heart Is, 113-37.
53. "Christopher Strong," New York Times, March 10, 1933, 19.
54. This reading of the film's close has led some early feminist scholars to argue that
the film details the suppression of female desire. See Jacquelyn Suter, "Feminine
Discourse in Christopher Strong ," Camera Obscura 3-4 (Summer 1979): 135-50.
Suter has problems with what she perceives is a predictable ending that affirms
monogamy and family, thus effacing any possible feminine discourse outside of
social constructs: "A second example of feminine occlusion occurs when Cynthia
decides to commit suicide by crashing her plane under the guise of an accident
while attempting to break the current altitude record" (144). Suter maintains that
all women in the film exist inside a patriarchal system that precludes any expres-
sion of female desire.
56. Basinger, A Woman's View, 392.
57. Rosenberg, Divided Lives, 93, 98.
58. Basinger, A Woman's View, 408.
59. Melissa Sue Kort, "Spectacular Spinelessness: The Men in Dorothy Arzner's
Films," Women & Literature*! (1982): 203. Carolyn A. Durham's "Missing Mascu-
linity or Cherchez L'Homme: Re-reading Dorothy Arzner's Christopher Strong " is a
more interesting study of shifting modes of masculinity and morality in the film
( Quarterly Review of Film and Video 18, no. 1 [2001]: 63-70).
60. Kathleen McHugh, "Housekeeping in Hollywood: The Case of Craig's Wife,"
Screen 35, no. 2 (1994): 124.
61. "Craig's Wife," Motion Picture Herald, September 19, 1936, 50. The Hollywood
Spectator reports that at the end of the film when husband Walter "smashes one of
her of cherished vases, the large preview audience actually cheered" ("Columbia
Gem of the Notion September 26, 1936, 7).
62. Julia Lesage, "The Hegemonic Female Fantasy in An Unmarried Woman and
Craig's Wife," Film Reader 5 (1982): 84, 89.
63. Her difficulties on this film pointed to a Hollywood that no longer gave Arzner
the room to speak. Suddenly, she was not overseeing the writing or editing of
269
Donna R. Casella
her films; she was no longer part of the creative collaboration of filmmaking.
Arzner was pulled before the completion of First Comes Courage. The trade
papers gave Hollywood the story that survived in the public's mind: Arzner
became too ill to finish the picture. According to cinematographer Joseph
Walker's biography, however, Arzner was removed because she was taking
too long to complete the picture: "'Arzner's off the picture,' he [Charles Vidor]
told me curtly. 'Cohn thinks the thing is a dud. He's not about to spend any
more money on it. My orders are to finish it in fast order. And that means no
more babying Oberon'" (Joseph Walker, ASC, and Juanita Walker, The Light
on Her Face [Hollywood: ASPC, 1984], 246). For the trade paper discussion of
her work on this film, see Hollywood Reporter , February 15, 1943, 2; March 9,
1943, 6; and April 28, 1943, 1.
64. Since most of her comedies came early in her career, one could argue that Arzner
became more disenchanted with romantic conventions over time, and presented
more cautionary tales in her dramas and melodramas. The only comedy appear-
ing later in her career was The Bride Wore Red (1937), a film that mixes the two
genres of comedy and drama.
65. Gaines, "Dorothy Arzner's Trousers," 91.
67. Arzner had worked with Slesinger on The Bride Wore Red in 1937. When she was
brought in to replace director Roy del Ruth, she immediately called for a rewrite.
See Mayne, Directed by Dorothy Ar&ier , 143.
68. Ibid., 146. For other feminist readings of the film, see Johnston's collection, The
Work of Dorothy Arzjier.
69. Basinger, A Woman's View, 6. Recent scholarship on the reception of early Ameri-
can cinema, particularly the work of Janet Staiger and Catherine Jurca, bears out
Basinger's argument regarding the interaction of audience and text Such schol-
ars argue that the audience at the end of the silent era and the first two decades
of sound was an active, not passive consumer of film texts. See Catherine Jurca,
"What the Public Wanted: Hollywood, 1937-1942," Cinema Journal 47, no. 2
(2008): 3-25; Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn, eds., The Audience Studies Reader
(London: Routledge, 2003); Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators : The Practices of Film
Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000) and Interpreting Films :
Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1992); and Jackie Stacey, Star Gayng : Hollywood Cinema and
Female Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1994).
70. Basinger, A Woman's View , 248.
71. Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres , 246.
72. "Interview Rushes," 26.
270

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What Women Want: The Complex World of Dorothy Arzner and Her Cinematic Women

Author(s): Donna R. Casella

In 1919, a then-unknown Dorothy Arzner was strolling through the various

Framework50y Nos. 1 & 2, Spring & Fall 2009, pp. 235-270.

consequences. The films depict thwarted relationships, missed opportunities,

Hollywood's sole woman director, is probably voicing the opinion of a good

of cinema by virtue of its construction of a 'female point-of-view' which

In this ideologically charged climate, Arzner appropriated all the key

these films originated in works by men, the adaptation emerged as a woman's

is an historical creation-a visible projection in our fictions at any given date

sanctity of heterosexuality threaten the longevity of female ties in many of

empowerment in Judy's monologue (her performance) in part because of the

includes publicity released to U.S. distributors, with some additional material

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