Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 07/04/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, July 4, 2019

Dance, Girl, Dance (Dorothy Arzner, 1940)

Lucille Ball, Maureen O'Hara, and Virginia Field in Dance, Girl, Dance

Cast: Maureen O'Hara, Louis Hayward, Lucille Ball, Virginia Field, Ralph Bellamy, Maria Ouspenskaya, Mary Carlisle, Katharine Alexander, Edward Brophy, Walter Abel. Screenplay: Tess Slesinger, Frank Davis, based on a story by Vicki Baum. Cinematography: Russell Metty. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Alfred Herman. Film editing: Robert Wise. Music: Edward Ward.

Dorothy Arzner's film about chorus girls struggling to make lives for themselves in a milieu dominated by males and their gaze earned its place in the National Film Registry by being one of the few movies of the era to take the women's point of view seriously. It has its melodramatic excesses, but it steadily keeps its focus on the characters played by Lucille Ball and Maureen O'Hara instead of yielding time to its male leads, Louis Hayward and Ralph Bellamy.