Working Girls

The hayseed sisters Thorpe, June (Judy Wood) and Mae (Doroty Hall) blow into the big city with hopes and aspirations for a decent paying job and perhaps, future husband. Staying at a boarding house for women the girls find employment (during the Depression) at lightning speed along with some intense male interest from Buddy Rogers, Paul Lukas and Stu Erwin.

Directed by Hollywood's only female director at the time, Dorothy Arzner, Working Girls is a light comedy chick flick that offers moderate return. The leading ladies simply lack the comedy chops and sass in which the contemporary comedy team Zazu Pitts and Thelma Todd would shine. There's plenty of sapphic inference while the male lovers border on heels and lechers, Arzner and scriptwriter Zoe Atkins keep matters light and comic but not interesting enough to hold one's attention for long. Working Girls deserves a pink slip.

I've been hearing and reading a rather elevated evaluation of Dorothy Arzner's talents as Hollywood's first reasonably important female director, but based on what I had seen to date, I felt this to be another of those 'social' reevaluations endemic to feminist/lesbian work of the period (well, whatever we assume there was of it). Maybe not, after all.

Although this film has a screenplay so full of holes that almost nothing the characters do makes sense in relation to what they have previously done or will do, it is still a basically likable movie, because most of the characters in it are likable, if, as in the case of those played by Judith Wood and Dorothy Hall, fairly dizzy if not downright dopey. Wood is really quite good most of the time (given the 1931 requirements for voice projection and naturalness of delivery), and if Hall's voice is the kind that, in a different context, would make sandpaper feel like velvet, she, too, gets her character across. Neither of these actresses went anywhere (indeed, this was Hall's last film), but it seems to me that Wood might have stood a chance if handled properly. Everybody else in the film - Lukas (always a charming actor, even when playing villains), Erwin (maybe the most underrated comic leading man of this early period), and to a lesser extent Rogers (not terrible, but somewhat vacuous), and all the girls at the rooming house they inhabit, are good.

But what makes the film jell even as much as it does is Arzner's direction of somewhat inferior material. She uses the camera beautifully, even in scenes that wouldn't seem to require anything in the way of special concern, and there are a couple of montages that would do credit to directors of considerable superior reputations. In other words (and real movie lovers will know exactly what I mean), the film evidences a certain amount of real directorial care in its execution. The purported "lesbian" element in the early part of the film is, I think, seen to exist where it may not, probably because Arzner was known to be gay. But the early scenes which show the girls dancing with each other at home are not really very lesbian in nature, since 1) there are only girls in the rooming house, and if they want to dance, who else would they dance with?, and 2) it may be forgotten that lots of very straight women used to dance with each other at parties and the like right up into the 1960s, usually because their boy friends or husbands were lousy dancers or just didn't want to engage in Terpsichorean endeavors (my mother, aunt, some early girl friends at high school and birthday parties, etc. used to do so all the time, and nobody even thought of such an ulterior motive!). If you don't believe me, just watch some of the old Dick Clark afternoon teenage dance shows of the 1950s.

Anyway, an enjoyable little movie, one that will not put Arzner up there with John Ford or William Wyler, but one which she could have pointed to with a modicum of pride.

Dorothy Arzner makes the film interesting by the way she depicts the clichéd story and by the touches she adds.

An aura of lesbianism pervades the beginning of the film, set in a woman's hostel, as women are seen dancing closely arm in arm, and one (Dorothy Stickney) winks and smiles suggestively at another (Judith Wood), with the latter winking back!

Lesbianism lays dormant the rest of the film as focus shifts to sisters Judith Wood and Dorothy Hall and their attempt to become "working girls." Double entendres fill the screen as Hall is hired by lecherous professor Paul Lukas, mostly because he feels she can give him "satisfaction." Lukas suggests she get boots to protect her feet during rainy weather; caught in a shoe store by a friend, Hall explains, "My boss told me to get some rubbers!"

At the shoe store, Hall meets rich Harvard man Charles 'Buddy' Rogers and falls in love. After months of courtship, they accidentally spend an evening alone together and the inevitable happens. Equally inevitable, Rogers, having conquered, silently abandons Hall and becomes engaged to Frances Dee, a woman from his own social class. Roger's conquest has lingering effects, though, as Hall is with child. When Judith Wood finds out, she gets a gun and demands Rogers marry her sister! Rogers has no qualms about complying. As he tells a friend, he prefers Hall over Dee: Dee is of his station, his social equal and no fun, while Hall, being of the working class, looks up to him and treats him like a God, and this he likes! This is an incredibly cynical film, especially where men are concerned!

Dorothy Hall steals the picture as Jane Thorpe, her last screen role. Judith Wood, who, billed as Helen Johnson played Dot in "The Divorcée" (1930), is equally good. Less so is Paul Lukas. He gives a confused performance; not completely sleazy, but not completely honorable, and not at all funny. Lukas gives a similar confused performance in another Arzner film, "Anybody's Woman" (1930).

This film didn't get much of a release in 1931, being effectively buried by Paramount. Little wonder given its content! It's well worth tracking down. The UCLA Television and Motion Picture Archive has beautifully restored it, along with five other Arzner Paramount films. It's an 8/10.

...Not even the movie literally named "The Women" could boast that.

In this film directed by Dorothy Arzner from Paramount, two young women come to New York seeking work and romance. The two girls initially dress rather loudly and alike as though they were twins, although an opening scene indicates that they are a year apart in age. June (Judith Wood) is the more world weary while Mae (Dorothy Hall) is naive. Wood reminds me of a precode version of Virginia Mayo with those flashing eyes and her brassy demeanor. The really odd thing about it is that Charles Buddy Rogers, Stu Erwin, and Frances Dee are all playing in support to the now obscure Wood and Hall.

It treads familiar precode ground as there is a society swell who uses and then loses a working class girl and gets engaged to another society swell, leaving said working class girl abandoned and pregnant. But it treads unfamiliar ground too as its cast of characters includes an anthropologist who is writing a technical book and ends up being part of a love triangle. Also Stu Erwin plays a rather hip saxophone musician in a band who is rather smooth with the ladies when, normally, Erwin plays a corn-fed everyman.

Arzner wrote female camaraderie and relationships quite well, and it shows here. When the sisters move to New York they move into a female boarding house with a variety of residents, the film takes an early scene to introduce them all socializing one Saturday night in the boarding house parlor.

The picture's true strength is in the camera work, inventive all the way through, with moving camera shots, clever framing devices, and noirish use of shadow. Harry Fischbeck was the cinematographer.

It's worth seeing if the early 30s intrigue you.

A preCode quickie that's nothing like as saucy as the title suggests since the work it refers to is absolutely respectable; and although a personal favourite of Dorothy Arzner it certainly doesn't pass the Bechdel Test since men are practically all the girls ever talk about (and as usual with Arzner compare extremely badly with the ladies).

As a director Arzner does little to conceal the subject's theatrical origins but the large cast is well organised and differentiated (including a youthful appearance by Dorothy Stickney - a stage actress who made very few films and is probably best known in films as Gene Hackman's mother in 'I Never Sang for My Father'.)

It also befits from the mobile camerawork and vivid imagery that characterised so many early talkies.