Friday, March 30, 2018


Watchingwell   








             Curated classic films















IN CHARGE


     
      Some notice has been taken of the admirable work in recent films of women directors – Ava DuVernay for A Wrinkle in Time, and Selma, Kathryn Bigelow for Hurt Locker and Detroit, and Patty Jenkins for Wonder Woman, for examples, and it’s high time. The recent nomination at the 2018 Academy Awards of Agnes Varda, a trailblazer director from Belgium and the recognition of her body of work in less enlightened times also points to the rarity of women in the position of ‘auteur’ in film.


     This is, as I have said, as it should be, but I would like to remind everyone of two women who worked regularly as directors in the less enlightened times.  The first, and probably, most difficult to explain, is the career with the largest body of work of a woman director, occurring during Hollywood’s so-called Golden Age, Dorothy Arzner.  For some reason that no one seems to explain convincingly, Arzner was
given regular work as a director in the studio system. Born in San Francisco in 1897 and raised in Los Angeles, she was introduced to William DeMille (brother of Cecil B.) and hired as a stenographer for what eventually became Paramount Pictures.  Her first assignment was to type up scripts.  She worked her way up from there to writer, script girl, editor (she was the first Hollywood editor to be credited on-screen).  In 1927, she was given a chance to direct a silent film, which was so successful that she was given another film to direct, Paramount’s first talkie in 1928, the first woman to direct a sound picture.  Strangely, women directors were not that uncommon in silent films, but Arzner seems to be the only one to have transitioned to the sound era.


     After making Merrily We Go to Hell from pre-code
1932, the story of a man who marries and drags his new wife down the destructive path of alcoholism, with fine performances from Fredric March and Sylvia Sidney, Arzner left Paramount to freelance.  She was hired by RKO to direct Katherine Hepburn in her second role as an aviatrix having an affair with a married man, in Christopher Strong (1933), a film
which stands out in my memory as the one with Hepburn in a moth costume. It is not clear in my mind whether she wears this to a costume party or just had strange ideas about party clothes.  Colin Clive, her co-star, does not strike one as someone that would inspire a brave aviatrix to engage in illicit love, particularly with the husband and father of friends, but it was a fun picture, if just for the costumes.
     








     Although Arzner is reputed to have had a difficult relationship with Hepburn, she formed a long friendship with Joan Crawford, during the filming of two pictures from 1937, which extended to the commercials she directed for Pepsi Cola while Crawford was married to the boss and after Arzner had left film directing. 
The Last of Mrs. Cheney, also starring Robert Montgomery and William Powell is a rare comedy for Crawford who plays a rich, American widow – or is she?  The other film from 1937 is The Bride Wore Red, co-starring Franchot Tone and Robert Young. In this story, Crawford is a poor girl who has two weeks to find a rich husband at a resort, although she is in love with a poor postman.


“What’s it for?” Judy demands. “So you can go home when the show’s over, strut before your wives and sweethearts and play at being the stronger sex for a minute? I’m sure they see through you. I’m sure they see through you just like we do!” 
     With these lines, Arzner’s 1940 semi-comedy, Dance Girl Dance, became forever celebrated as a feminist commentary as well as a veiled critique of Hollywood’s male hierarchy.  Spoken before a burlesque audience that had booed her ballet dance  while gearing up for the real attraction, Bubbles, played by Lucille Ball, Maureen O’Hara changes from the mere warm-up act for her successful friend to the strong woman who finally sees things as they really are.
It is assumed by some that this perception was possible because of the combination of the Vicki Baum story, the screenplay by the married team of Tess Slesinger and Frank Davis, and the  woman director, and that this angle would not have been as strong if the creative team had been comprised of all men. 


     In 1943, Arzner joined the war effort by making training films for the WACs.  After the war, health problems prevented her from returning to directing feature films, although she did direct documentaries and commercials for television.  During the 60s and 70s, she taught filmmaking at UCLA. Dorothy Arzner died in 1979 at the age of 82.
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      The English actress, Ida Lupino, having co-written the script of the 1949, Not Wanted, was given her first directing job when the director, Elmer Clifton, fell ill during the filming. The results were successful enough that Lupino was able to secure more work as a director, and, although these were generally considered ‘B‘ pictures,  she quickly showed a distinct point-of-view, creating well-regarded work in stylish, black and white noir-y pictures. 

     In the 1950 film, Outrage, the script, which
Lupino co-wrote, focuses on a rape, which had to be called “criminal assault” in 1950, which suggests how rare it was for Hollywood to deal with the subject, and its aftermath, with very little held back, emotionally.  It portrays the terror of the act and the distress that follows for the main character, played by Mala Powers, in a manner that would have seemed uncompromising at the time, and undoubtedly a manner resulting from a very personal female vantage point of the writer/director.
     In 1951, Lupino directed Claire Trevor and Sally Forrest in the unfortunately-titled, Hard, Fast, and Beautiful, the story of a talented tennis protégée, Forrest, whose mother, Trevor, sees a big future for them both and keeps a tight rein on her daughter’s life to protect that dream.  Naturally, romance rears its ugly head and Forrest realizes she has a conflict.
     Two of Lupino’s films were released in 1953, one of which, The Hitch-Hiker, starring Edmond O’Brien
and Frank Lovejoy as two men on a fishing trip who pick up psychotic, William Talman (Hamilton Burger on Perry Mason) on the road, is a real thriller and a genuine film noir, the only one directed by a  woman.
.       Lupino also co-wrote this with her writing partner, Collier Young, with whom she wrote the other film of 1953 that she directed, The Bigamist. Again starring Edmond O’Brien as the title character and co-starring Joan Fontaine and Ida, who was still acting, as the two women who are each unaware of the other.


     By 1956, she turned to television where she directed episodes in many popular shows such as The Untouchables, Thriller, and The Fugitive. Through the seventies, Lupino continued to act, in guest appearances on television and small parts in a few movies. During this period, she did direct one particular feature film that is one of my inexplicably, personal favorites, The Trouble With Angels (1966), starring Hayley Mills and Rosalind Russell.  When I first saw this, I laughed till I cried in the cigar scene, but not in subsequent viewings.     
It is a heartwarming film, I suppose, and Hayley Mills was great at pulling off the right tone for zany, comedy scenes (I still use the term, “scathingly brilliant idea”, which she did frequently in the film.).  But, if you ever saw Ida Lupino and her then-husband, Howard Duff, when they guest-starred on The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour in 1959, or the couple’s short-lived sit-com, Mr. Adams and Eve, you will remember what a hoot Ida Lupino was as a comedienne and wish she had been given the chance to try her hand at directing comedies.

     The second woman to be admitted into the Director’s Guild, after Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino died in Los Angles in 1995 at the age of 77.


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