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Dorothy Arzner (January 3, 1897 – October 1, 1979) was a film director from the late 1920s until the early 1940s, a period in which there were few if any other women directors.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Partial Filmography 3 Further reading 4 See also 5 External links

Born on 3 January 1897 in San Francisco, California, Arzner grew up in Los Angeles, where her father owned a restaurant frequented by many Hollywood celebrities. After finishing high school, she enrolled at the university of Southern California with the hope of becoming a doctor. During World War I, she left school to work for an ambulance corps but was never sent into the field. When the war ended, she decided against returning to her studies and, after a visit to a film studio, decided to pursue a career as a film director. She began her Hollywood career as a script writer and editor, and eventually was promoted to directing.

Arzner did indeed start at the very bottom of her profession: she went to the noted, flamboyant film director Cecil B. De Mille and applied for a job as a script girl. De Mille hired her, and within six months she was reassigned to work as a film cutter at a Paramount subsidiary, a job she later maintained taught her more about filmmaking than any other she held. She was then promoted to film editor at Paramount, her first assignment being the renowned classic Blood and Sand, starring Rudolph Valentino. As before, she quickly mastered the job and was soon receiving accolades for the quality of her work. During this period, Arzner also began writing film scripts, sometimes in collaboration with others.

However, Arzner faced significant hurdles to fully capitalizing on her skills and talents. In addition to being a woman, she was lesbian who was unwilling or unable to disguise her sexuality (Joan Crawford once quipped, "I think all my directors fell in love with me; I know Dorothy Arzner did!"), which made it additionally difficult for Arzner to succeed, and may have contributed to her departure from Hollywood.

Nonetheless, she frequently worked with first-rate actors and often was one to help a talent become a star, such as with Sylvia Sidney whom Arzner directed in Merrily We Go to Hell (1932) , and whose talent and mettle she recognized under Sidney's frail appearance, although Sidney could be difficult to work with, a fact Sidney herself acknowledged late in life blaming it on her early movie fame which she was not ready to handle. Arzner also had some difficulties with the notoriously headstrong Katharine Hepburn until Hepburn "was told by the front office who was the film's director".

The films often depict women seeking independence through career--a burlesque queen and an aspiring ballerina (Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)), a world-champion aviatrix (Christopher Strong (1933)). Alternatively, the escape route can be through exit from accepted female positions in the hierarchy--a rich daughter "escaping" into marriage with a poverty-stricken drunk (Merrily We Go to Hell). Even excess can be a way of asserting independence, as with the obsessive housekeeper rejecting family relationships in favor of a passion for domesticity and the home (Craig's Wife(1936)).

The films frequently play with notions of female stereotyping (most notably in Dance, Girl, Dance, with its two central female types of Nice Girl and Vamp). Arzner's "nice girls" are likely to have desires that conflict with male desires, while narrative requirements will demand that they still please the male. While these tensions are not always resolved, Arzner's strategies in underlining these opposing desires are almost gleeful at times.

In addition, Arzner's films offer contradictions that disturb the spectator's accepted relationship with what is on screen--most notably in Dance, Girl, Dance, when dancer Judy O'Brien turns on her burlesque (male) audience and berates them for their voyeurism. This scene has been the focus for much debate about the role of the spectator in relation to the woman as spectacle (notably in the work of Laura Mulvey).

Although the conventions of plot and development are present in Arzner's films, Claire Johnston sees these elements as subverted by a "women's discourse": the films may offer us the kinds of narrative closure we expect from the classic Hollywood text--the "happy" or the "tragic" ending--but Arzner's insistence on this female discourse gives the films an exciting and unsettling quality. In Arzner's work, Johnston argues, it is the male universe which invites scrutiny and which is "rendered strange."

Dorothy Arzner's position inside the studio system has made her a unique subject for debate. As the women's movement set about reassessing the role of women in history, so feminist film theorists began not only to reexamine the role of women as a creative force in cinema, but also to consider the implications behind the notion of women as spectacle. The work of Dorothy Arzner has proved a rich area for investigation into both these questions.

Most feminists would recognize that the mere reinsertion of women into a dominant version of film history is a dubious activity, even while asserting that women's contributions to cinema have been excluded from most historical accounts. Recognition of the work of a "popular" director such as Arzner and an evaluation of her contribution to Hollywood cinema must be set against an awareness of her place in the dominant patriarchal ideology of classic Hollywood cinema. Arzner's work is particularly interesting in that it was produced within the Hollywood system with all its inherent constraints (time, budget, traditional content requirements of particular genres, etc.).

While Arzner directed "women's pictures"--classic Hollywood fare--she differed from other directors of the genre in that, in place of a narrative seen simply from a female point of view, she actually succeeded in challenging the orthodoxy of Hollywood from within, offering perspectives that questioned the dominant order.

Dorothy Arzner's career as a commercial Hollywood director covered little more than a decade, but she had prepared for it by extensive editing and script-writing work. Ill health forced her to abandon a career that might eventually have led to the recognition she deserved from her contemporaries. One of only a handful of women operating within the structure of Hollywood's post-silent boom, Arzner has been the subject of feminist critical attention, with film retrospectives of her work both in the United States and United Kingdom in the 1970s, when her work was "rediscovered."

"Sometimes," Arzner told interviewers a number of years later, "I think pride is the greatest obstacle to success. A silly false pride, that keeps people from being willing to learn, from starting at the bottom no matter how far down it may be, and learning every step of the way up. When I went to work in a studio, I took my pride and made a nice little ball of it and threw it right out the window."

Dorothy Arzner, who never married or had children, died at the age of 82 in La Quinta, California.

• First Comes Courage (1943) with Merle Oberon and Brian Aherne
• Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) with Lucille Ball and Maureen O'Hara
• The Bride Wore Red (1937) with Crawford and Franchot Tone
• The Last of Mrs. Cheyney (1937) with Joan Crawford and William Powell, uncredited
• Craig's Wife (1936) with Rosalind Russell
• Nana (1934)
• Christopher Strong (1933) with Katharine Hepburn
• Merrily We Go to Hell (1932) with Sylvia Sidney and March
• Working Girls (1931) with Frances Dee
• Honor Among Lovers (1931) with Claudette Colbert and March
• Anybody's Woman (1930) with Chatterton and Clive Brook
• Paramount on Parade (1930) co-director with several others
• Sarah and Son (1930) with Ruth Chatterton and March
• Behind the Make-Up (1930) (uncredited)
• The Wild Party (1929) with Bow and Fredric March
• Manhattan Cocktail (1928) with Nancy Carroll and Richard Arlen
• Get Your Man (1927) with Clara Bow
• Ten Modern Commandments (1927) with Ralston
• Fashions for Women (1927) with Esther Ralston
• Blood and Sand (1922) (additional footage) (uncredited)

• Claire Johnston (Editor), The Work of Dorothy Arzner: Towards a Feminist Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1975)
• Judith Mayne, Directed by Dorothy Arzner (Indiana University Press, 1994)

• Women's Cinema

• Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
• Dorothy Arzner on Find-A-Grave
• Dorothy Arzner at the Internet Movie Database