Somewhere in Akron, Ohio is a small dance hall, in which a small group of chorus girls entertain the locals, who in turn help support them and allow them to make a meagre living. Amongst them are Bubbles (Lucille Ball), a feisty young dancer who is the de facto star of the show, perhaps not being the most talented of them, but certainly the most confident. This means that Judy (Maureen O’Hara) is constantly shafted into the shadows, despite having her own set of gifts that make her very popular, just not on the same level as her co-worker. Their club is soon shut down by the authorities, who don’t show much pity to the people whose entirely livelihoods they just destroyed (other than contributing a few measly coins as compensation for causing the evening to end early), and the girls seek out the help of Madame Lydia Basilova (Maria Ouspenskaya ), their old mentor who has always believed in her dancers, but still harbours a very sobering, brutally honest sense of reality, making it clear that not everyone is destined to be a star, even if she knows that she will be willing to do anything to help any of her proteges achieve as much as she can. Naturally, charm trumps talent, and Bubbles soon rebrands as “Tiger Lily White”, the provocative star of a major revue that finds her making a name for herself on the New York City stage – while Judy is considered to be good for a background chorus girl, rather than the star of the show. The best she can do is become the comedic relief to her now very hostile, fame-hungry friend – but if there’s something she proves, what she may lack in confidence, she more than makes up for in audacity, and with the help of her new suitor (Louis Hayward), and her own inborn talents that she genuinely believes in, Judy makes it clear that she intends to see her name on a marquee, whatever the cost.

Her 1932 masterpiece Merrily We Go to Hell may be her best work, but Dorothy Arzer’s most underpraised film has to be Dance, Girl, Dance, a slightly bigger production produced a few years later, when the esteemed pioneer of feminist cinema was finally afforded a bigger budget and more elaborate resources to bring her vision to the screen. The story, set in the cutthroat world of New York’s high society burlesques and dance halls, is a fascinating experiment, which is something that should be almost entirely expected from the director, who perpetually goes in search of some elusive quality relating to the society she grew to know as a result of being one of the few openly-vocal female filmmakers at a time when such a concept was very little more than an abstract idea. It’s not easy to make a living in as male-dominated an industry as Hollywood during the studio era, but her mighty resolve as an artist, and her ability to weave together fragments of social critique, showbusiness satire and tender-hearted romance, made Arzer’s a formidable figure, and someone whose work continues to speak for itself. Dance, Girl, Dance has gradually ascended into the pantheon of the director’s great works, as part of a concerted effort by film scholars to make these films available for audiences – and while it may not hit the same impossible heights as Merrily We Go to Hell, the film is still an exceptional example of functional feminism at a time when it just seemed impossible to find anything quite like it, which only makes it even more of an enthralling and captivating piece of filmmaking.

The stars of the film are two bright-eyed young actresses that should be known to anyone with even a slight interest in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Maureen O’Hara is the impressionable Judy, a talented dancer who has the gifts to hone her craft, but not the “oomph” to make it matter, as made abundantly clear by her instructor, who sees her as more of a chorus girl than a major star. Instead, it’s Bubbles, played by the iconic Lucille Ball, who has the potential for stardom – and not only is she gifted, she has the drive to succeed, so much that she’ll even completely disregard her own friend just to get ahead in the business. O’Hara and Ball are stalwarts of a particular time and place in the history of the entertainment industry – they may have only started to achieve some degree of fame in the following decade (with this film being a very early appearance for both of them), but even at these relatively young ages, they’re establishing themselves as very talented performers that can balance both the comedy and drama of the material with equal ease, something that can’t often be said for relative newcomers. Dance, Girl, Dance is a character-driven piece of storytelling, so it only stands to reason that it’d have to make use of some actors who could handle the material. The two leads occupy most of the screen, but it doesn’t mean that the likes of Maria Ouspenskaya and Ralph Bellamy, both amongst the most perpetually reliable characters actors working at the time, don’t slip in through the cracks and make the best of their limited screentime, in a film centred almost entirely on the dynamic between two women trying to make their way through an industry designed to drive them apart.

Showbusiness satires are not difficult to find, and as Hollywood started to become more self-reflective in these years surrounding the Second World War (where the mystique of cinema started to erode as people began to look for other means to distract themselves from the state of the world), so did these stories that aimed to look beyond the glitz and glamour that many aspired to achieve. Arzner was never one to blindly subscribe to the idea of the film industry as one without flaws – if anything, her entire career was built on exposing the hypocrisy of various social situations. Only someone with as keen an observational eye for injustice, and a working knowledge of gender disparity (in terms of both social perceptions and economic structures) could’ve made something as profound as Dance, Girl, Dance, which derives a lot of its merit from how it casually eviscerates the entire concept of the male gaze, and how women are placed on pedestals in public, but treated as second-class citizens behind closed doors, mere pawns that exist solely for the purpose of entertainment. You don’t even need to wait to the climactic moments, when O’Hara delivers a spirited monologue calling out audiences for their perverse tendencies, to realize the umbrage and anger Arzner feels for society – throughout the film, she peppers in moments of fury that showcase her real feelings towards sacrosanct institutions, but rather than doing it through an endless array of overwrought, emotional sequences, she inserts the commentary into the film in a much more subtle, measured manner – and it ultimately makes an enormous difference, since the film is a ferocious but powerful drama with a bold satirical edge.

To say that Arzner is an obscure filmmaker is making a fatal error, especially since she has always been discussed in relation to early female pioneers in the craft of film directing, a distinction that has given her an indelible place in the history of Hollywood. However, it’s the fact that this is all many people know her as that is the problem – she’s the tokenized female director in a time when such an individual was so rare, the fact that she was merely producing good-quality films at a decent pace was seen as something revolutionary. If we look beyond her status as a rarity in the industry, and focus instead on what she did with it, we see someone whose knowledge of society and compassion for her characters elevated her films far beyond the sub-genre so nefariously referred to as “women’s pictures”. Arzner made films for everyone, but often did so through the lens of female characters, who were afforded a much broader opportunity to exist as protagonists, rather than just objects of desire, or feisty femmes fatale, only there to complement male characters. The director offers a unique and worthwhile perspective that would simply not have been present had this film not been made by someone who had an implicit understanding of the trials and tribulations of being a woman in an industry not only run by men, but defined by their enjoyment more than anything else. Dance, Girl, Dance is certainly an early feminist masterpiece that makes some bold assertions about gender roles and the part ingrained social conventions play in defining one’s life, and it gradually manages to dismantle a stark and unforgiving system, while managing to still be darkly comical, and refreshing in a way we’d not see from more traditional Golden Age fare. Complex, layered and filled with a unique understanding of common issues, Dance, Girl, Dance is a tremendously interesting film that deserves its place in contemporary discussions on the history of feminist storytelling.