Working Girls

There's a lot to commend Dorothy Arzner's simple film about two out of towners trying to survive in the big bad city. Virtually everyone involved in making this were women so you'll not be seeing the usual misogynistic moralistic preaching about how to be a decent girl or the horrors that will befall you if you're a naughty one!

Whilst you can appreciate that it is superbly directed, scripted, photographed, edited and reasonably well acted, it doesn't emotionally grab you as much as you'd expect. Arzner favoured depicting realism rather than melodrama and whilst realism gives a wonderful insight into life at the start of The Depression, it can also feel a little drab.

Another "problem" is the two leads: Judith Wood and Dorothy Hall. Whether it's because we don't know them or they're just not charismatic enough, it takes a while to engage with them. It's not until the end that you finally start to care about them. Wood is the one who looks a bit like an annoyed Ginger Rogers, Hall is the one with the very annoying voice. Adopting that affected 'baby talk' really was a thing back then! They're both meant for be normal, reflecting the struggles thousands of normal young ladies would have encountered but I'm not sure whether they don't come across as maybe a bit too ordinary.... not that interesting.... apart from that voice!

The theme this picture explores is how women had to conform to the male-written rules of society. It questions a world where a woman can never be independent and only has one option, one life choice only: to get married - almost to become a complete person. But this is a light, good humoured little picture so unlike some of those campaigning Warner films made about this time, it isn't trying to change the system. It's just saying: this isn't fair but if it's played like this, life won't be too bad and you might even have a bit of fun on the way.

It's a reasonably entertaining film but definitely not one of Miss Arzner's or indeed one of Miss Akin's best. Similar storylines have been done much more explosively - I prefer my pre-codes where everything's set to eleven!

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.

This is the story of the Thorpe sisters, June and Mae. They just moved to the big city and are a bit lost. June is the level-headed one...Mae her older but dopier sister. Why so dopey? Well, when it comes to men and love she's incredibly naive and foolish....and finds a man who clearly is using her. Despite all the evidence this is so, she hopes that somehow this cad (Buddy Rogers) will come to his senses and marry her. As for June, she's been dating a saxophone player (Stu Erwin)...but a professor also has noticed her (Paul Lukas). What's to become of them?

It's interesting that both Mae and June are played by mostly unknown actresses with very few screen credits. This actually helped the film a bit, as it was easier to believe they were country girls in the big city because they weren't famous or polished. The film is directed by Dorothy Arzner and is competently made and mildly interesting...but not a whole lot more. In other words, it's a time-passer and not much more. I think part of this is because Mae is a very unlikable lady....and connecting with her and her plight isn't easy.

...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.

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.