Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

Oddball movie that really doesn't work, combination of slapstick comedy,
drama that falls flat, burlesque, ballet, and modern dance in a showbiz
story.

An impossibly young Maureen O'Hara stars in just her third American
movie, after The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Jamaica Inn, both released
in 1939. Both movies starred Charles Laughton who brought her to Hollywood
under contract to him. Jaaica Inn was adapted from the Daphne Du Maurier
novel and was directed by Hitchcock.

In this movie, she's playing... an ingenue. She shy and has no sense of
self! Also she has blue eyes! It's a plot point.

Also starring Lucille Ball, in a performance I really liked.

The two women are part of a ballet troupe led by Maria Ouspenskaya, but
they can't get work. Lucy gets hired to perform a comic strip in
burlesque. She sings in the act and it's one of the few movies that
Lucy's singing isn't dubbed.

In a horrid dramatic sceme, Ouspenskaya sacrifices herself by stepping
in front of a car; the driver honks but doesn't even slow down. In her
dying breath, she's sent to see Ralph Bellamy who is putting on a show
with modern dance elememts, tap, and some ballet. A couple of dancers
are in blackface.

O'Hara sees the professional dancers rehearsing and loses confidence and
won't even speak to Bellamy.

Lucy gets her a job as a stooge in her burlesque act, doing a straight
ballet solo whilst the clothes stripped of Lucy rain down on her head.
The audience is intended to boo at her. There's also another man from
O'Hara's home town, drunk, horrid, who tries to date O'Hara, briefly
marries Lucy, who is really in love with Virginia Field (remember her
from The Earth Dies Screaming (1964)?) who herself married a second time
but got it annulled.

Actually, the show business scenes are entertaining even though much of
the rest of the movie isn't. For slapstick, the two women get into a cat
fight on stage of the burlesque! Maureen tries to murder Lucy!

This is important because Lucy is in makeup, having been beaten up in
the cat fight. Having lunch at the commisary with Maureen, they both
spot Desi Arnaz having lunch with the director of Lucy's next film.
Desi, seeing Lucy in makeup, ignores her, but Lucy is smitten. Lucy and
Desi wouldn't have the best marriage but they were better as business
partners. They bought the RKO lot for Desilu Studios, invent the three
film camera sitcom with audience for I Love Lucy, and would produce the
first season of Star Trek before selling the studio to Paramount.

Despite the catfight, the two actresses were good friends.

The movie was poorly received by critics and audiences and lost money.
Still, it had some merits.

Maureen was quite beautiful but she got even more beautiful as she got
older. She really needed to be in Technicolor.

Still in b&w, she'd appear in How Green Was My Valley (1941), the
incredibly popular tearjerker and winner of 5 Oscars, directed by John
Ford. Her career was on its way.