The Film Actresses Directed By Dorothy Arzner

I wrote a review of Directed by Dorothy Arzner by Judith Mayne (Indiana University Press, 1994) that originally appeared in a monthly book review column that I wrote for the Manhattan Spirit, a weekly New York newspaper. The book, a biography of Dorothy Arzner, the pioneer lesbian film director (1900-1979), was published in the paper's January 12, 1996 issue. (I subsequently published it as a blog post in this blog on October 9, 2010).

Because of space limitations and the fact that the column consisted of three book reviews, I wasn't able to point out at the time that Arzner directed films that starred Clara Bow, Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford, and Katharine Hepburn.

I neglected to make the correction in the blog post. If the review ever gets republished in a print publication, like a book, I will make sure to include that important information.

In the meantime, I hope to persuade a cinema art house in New York like Film Forum to screen a retrospective of Dorothy Arzner's films. Among her films I would like to see are Christopher Strong (RKO, 1933), starring Katharine Hepburn and Craig's Wife (Columbia, 1936), starring Rosalind Russell.

Canadian Racism

Malcolm X once said that anything below the Canadian  border was the South, referring to the existence of white racism throughout the United States. That led other blacks to label the so-called "liberal" North as "Up South."

The "Up South" label could just as easily apply to Canada, a destination many fugitive slaves  headed for to gain freedom.

In Norman Jewison: A Director's Life by Ira Wells (Sutherland House Books, 2021), I learned that the Canadian-born film director (born in 1926),whose many films include In the Heat of the Night, A Soldier's Story, and The Hurricane, grew up in a Toronto neighborhood that was a five-minute walk from a Lake Ontario beach. At the beach, there was a sign Jewison would see that said, "NO JEWS, N******[NIGGERS], OR DOGS." The sign, writes Wells, a Canadian academic and journalist, was there to ensure that "the sight of a Black person or Jew" would not hinder the enjoyment of the beach by families seeking relief on a hot summer day. 

So despite being seen as a refuge for runaway slaves and a land that promotes racial tolerance and multiculturalism, Canada had its own struggles with racial, ethnic, and religious bigotry.

Note: Despite his surname, Norman Jewison is not Jewish. He is a white Protestant of British ancestry.

A Real-Life Hollywood Murder Mystery

 I received from HarperCollins a review copy of  William J. Mann's latest nonfiction book, Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood. It's about the unsolved 1922 murder of film director William Desmond Taylor. I already own a copy of  A Cast of Killers, Sidney D. Kirkpatrick's 1986 book about the same case. Unfortunately, I never got around to reading it. Mann's book will  be an incentive. After reading both books back to back to see how they compare and contrast, I will write a double review. Mann is an excellent writer whose previous books I have read.  So I am looking forward to reading Tinseltown.

Hooray For Hollywood and Its Screenwriters

In Hollywood, movies are considered a director's medium and so screenwriters are given second-class treatment. Newspapers and magazines, taking their cue from the suits at movie studios, have followed their example, ignoring the contributions of the writer and lionizing the director. It is refreshing to see that Entertainment Weekly in its Fall Movie Preview Special Double Issue (August 21-28, 2009) gives credit that's long overdue by including the names of those who have written the scripts for movies slated to be released in September, October, November, and December (including movies written and directed by the same person). Unfortunately, the movie reviews by Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwarzbaum in the same issue neglect to give the writing credits of the movies under discussion.
While going over the fall movies, one story came to mind: a screenwriter, tired of being treated like the low man on a totem pole and knowing that without a script there is no movie, throws a handful of blank pages at a director, telling him: "Now let's see you try to direct that."