Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

DIRECTOR: Dorothy Arzner
WRITERS: Vicki Baum (story), Frank Davis, Tess Slesinger
PHOTOGRAPHY: Russell Metty
CAST: Maureen O'Hara, Lucille Ball, Louis Hayward, Ralph Bellamy
COUNTRY: USA
GENRE: Drama
MISCELLANY: 90m; bw

Although not exactly revolutionary in its portrayal of women, Dorothy Arzner's "Dance, Girl, Dance" has some righteous moments for 1940, notably when ballerina Maureen O'Hara dresses down the audience of a burlesque act. Arzner turns the tables on the "male gaze" in another scene, too, with an uncomfortably tight, unrelenting shot of a cigar-chomping nightclub manager who is sizing up the sex appeal of auditioning dancers. At a point in the story ripe for exploitation — half-naked women are writhing, let's watch! — the camera rebels, focusing its impolite stare on the smug and lascivious face of the man whose privilege it is to leer and deliver judgment.

The plot mirrors a feminist dilemma, pitting a dancer of dubious talent who cashes in on her ability to pander to male chauvinists against one down to her last dime because she can't play herself cheap. Neither woman is villified. They dance for the same troupe, led by a washed-up Russian ballerina who has traded her tutu for a necktie. Madame Basilova has sold out her ideals to survive, sexing up her dancers and marketing them to various nightclubs. The troupe is hard to sell, though, without their vampy leader, Bubbles, played by Lucille Ball. Even the gorgeous Judy, played by a young but ever-feisty Maureen O'Hara, can't cut it. The girl can dance, but it does her little good because she lacks what Madame Basilova terms "oomph," a trait she describes as a birthright and which Bubbles has in spades.

Watching Ball before she was Lucy, well after she became Lucy and an icon of women's liberation, makes it difficult to imagine how she struck audiences in 1940. The TV Lucy we love is a married housewife, not an exotic dancer, but she is a lot like Bubbles, full of Ball's trademark sarcasm, and delightfully unafraid of appearing unladylike. This must have been a revelation at the time, but I take it for granted in 2010.

O'Hara's Judy is an aspiring ballerina with raw talent, fated by financial necessity to play Bubbles' stooge in a burlesque act that contrasts the proverbial good girl against the bad girl. Guess who the audience favors? Still, everyone except Bubbles admits the act is nothing without Judy to absorb the audience's abuse. The act parallels the competition between the dancers for the attention of Jimmy, a millionaire with an alcohol problem who likes Judy because she reminds him of his ex-wife Elinor but doesn't offer much resistance when Bubbles tries to turn his head.

The film avoids cliches, and aside from Judy, no character is wholly good or bad, and relationships, like Jimmy and Elinor's, are not clearly defined.

Ramrod (1947)

DIRECTOR: Andre de Toth
WRITERS: Luke Short, Jack Moffitt, C. Graham Baker
PHOTOGRAPHY: Russell Harlan
CAST: Veronica Lake, Joel McCrea, Don DeFore, Preston Foster
COUNTRY: USA
GENRE: Western
MISCELLANY: 95m; bw

Upon hearing a rival gang galloping to the doorstep, some characters in western movies head for their guns, and others head for the hills. Connie Dickason heads for the mirror.

The rivals riding up to Connie's door are associates of entrenched cattle baron Frank Ivey. He drove Connie's fiance Walt Shipley out of town, partly because he wanted to marry Connie himself, but mostly because Walt had set out to herd sheep in the territory — bad for business. Connie surprises Frank, though. Instead of giving her hand in marriage, she bitch slaps him ... one, two, three, four? times. The diminutive blonde fixes to run the ranch Walt abandoned, partly because she's got the entrepreneurial spirit, but mostly because she wants to bring Ivey to his knees. She'll destroy Frank, she warns her father (just another man in town who is in Ivey's pocket), but she'll do it without violence, because she's a woman.

At first, her disarming femininity manages to keep guns out of the conflict: When faced with Connie, Ivey's men are handcuffed by chivalry. So they target her male ranch hands, particularly "ramrod" Dave Nash, the only truly honest and decent man in town besides the sheriff. An alcoholic past is alluded to, but Dave is squeaky clean in his stiff dad dungarees cinched too high, his carefully tousled mane and his frozen half-smile. As difficult as it is to swallow sweet little Veronica Lake with her cute peek-a-boo hairdo as a scheming spitfire with a case of penis envy, it's tough to buy boy-next-door Joel McCrea as the loner tough guy with a dark past, driven back to the brink in his quest for redemption.

In contrast to Dave, his partner Bill Schell is a risk-taker and, like all the men in Ivey's gang, putty in Connie's hands. It's interesting that Connie's rival for Dave's affections, the golden-hearted, long-suffering Rose Leland, also devises a scheme to thwart Ivey that relies on his chivalry for success: the old half-dressed lady trick to halt a house search.

"Ramrod" is a perverse western in the vein of "Forty Guns" and "Johnny Guitar," but here the woman riding herd does not pack her own pistol or wear pants, and seems all the harder in her softness.
— Becky

The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! (1972)

DIRECTOR: Andy Milligan
PRODUCER: William Mishkin
WRITER: Andy Milligan
PHOTOGRAPHY: Andy Milligan
CAST: Hope Stansbury, Douglas Phair, Jackie Skarvellis, Ian Innes
COUNTRY: USA
GENRE: Horror
MISCELLANY: 91m

After the wacky opening segment, part of me had seen enough. Low production values and tacky period costumes cried made-for-TV fairy tale, but that vibe was at odds with the freak show unfolding. And the way the opening credit music halted mid-note in a choppy segue to the feature suggested in the filmmaker a certain sloppiness. But the first few minutes were so brutal — albeit amateurishly so, arousing horror but also amusement — I was curious enough to watch, just a little bit longer.

Plus the description of the film had sounded good: A man marries into a family of werewolves. I was wondering where the rats fit in.

After the bloody first scene, I stared into the abyss of flying chicken feathers, frustrated in my search for meaning. Harsh lighting burned a glare into the upper frame, souring the color and obscuring the scenes in grainy shadows. As I strained to make sense of the film visually, the audio proved unhelpful as well. Probably due to poor miking and the actors rushing their lines, I missed large blocks of dialogue, and if curiosity kept me watching even that had its limits — I wasn't about to rewind. Making matters worse, the actors were assuming aristocratic accents, but their point of reference seems to have been W.C. Fields. And the soundtrack varied from scene to scene, the stock compositions continuing to halt abruptly wherever scenes stopped, creating a patchwork quilt of sound.

From what I could make out, the conversations mostly comprised petty in-fighting among the Mooneys — a bitchy, inbred, lycanthropic, moneyed clan — all competing for the favor of their aging patriarch, who is fighting to stay alive to conduct certain experiments with his least crazy daughter, Diana, the only one not completely sheltered (because, it's explained, her mother was "pure"). Pa Mooney even risked sending her to medical school in Scotland, but she bitterly disappointed him by bringing home a husband, who finds sponging off his wealthy in-laws not all it was cracked up to be.

For a stupid horror film, this is way too talky. The dysfunctional dramatics coupled with the bad period costumes and set lend the air of a low-rent soap opera, which is what it would be mistaken for if one stumbled upon it while channel-surfing — although that would never happen because I cannot imagine a scenario in which a station would air this film, even in the dead of night. And yet the sheer weirdness — of everything and everyone, from the Mooneys to the "normal" townsfolk — is almost visionary.

Or maybe I'm giving the film too much credit: a case of cinematic stockholm syndrome. (Admittedly, I feel like a bully when taking cheap shots at a low-budget movie, kind of like the out-of-shape dude on the couch yelling at the TV that he could have caught the ball that the professional athlete just missed.)

The rat scenes add nothing to the plot, and are rather disturbing from an animal rights perspective, but they give Monica a chance to shine as the looniest Mooney of them all.
— Becky

Pitfall (1948)

DIRECTOR: Andre de Toth
WRITER: Jay Dratler, Karl Kamb
PHOTOGRAPHY: Harry J. Wild
CAST: Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt, Raymond Burr
COUNTRY: USA
GENRE: Noir
MISCELLANY: 86m; bw

Insurance investigator John Forbes is a wise guy who surrounds himself with people who find his stream of cynical commentary endearing, so his complaints about suburban drudgery are laughed off as part of the routine. In the midst of this restlessness, he meets Mona Stevens and falls for her. Meanwhile, Mack McDonald, an ex-cop who considers Forbes competition, starts stalking the couple, and Mona's boyfriend Bill Smiley is about to be let out of jail.

When I rented "Pitfall," I was afraid I had seen it already. Even the most banal noirs entertain me when the mood is right, but they tend to overlap. "Pitfall" would be one of those enjoyable but predictable and ultimately forgettable noirs were it not for a few distinguishing features, the most startling being the subtlety of its female characters.

In this tale of infidelity the wife is not painted as a shrew driving her husband to cheat, nor is she a shining saint to be contrasted with the ignoble mistress. The other woman, played by an apologetically luminous Lizabeth Scott, does not thrive on stealing husbands; she does not scheme or cling. And if anyone can be accused of seduction it's Forbes, who fails to disclose his marital status. Forbes is an unpleasant hero, only marginally less odious than the villain Mack. A few awkward scenes even set me wondering whether de Toth was going for something deeper with Mack than the stock stalker psychopath, like maybe he existed only as Forbes' doppelganger. Eventually the plot took such a turn I dismissed that notion and stopped trying to find deeper meaning in the occasional bursts of overdone acting and overwrought music.

"Pitall," in 1948, also was on the cutting edge of capturing the dissatisfaction simmering under the surface of suburban life. Forbes has the cookie-cutter home, the respectable job, a son that idolizes him and a wife who dotes on him. When he proposes throwing it all away, his wife takes it as a joke. That was the day he met Stevens and set himself on a course leading to murder.
— Becky