People are voting emotionally.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

It's great to find this Dorothy Arzner movie (she was hired as the director when Roy Del Ruth had a dispute with producer Erich Pommer and resigned) available today on an excellent Warner DVD, although one has the feeling that the somewhat strained, repetitive and even rather dull and boring at times Maureen O'Hara/Louis Hayward story is merely a sop for the censor and that the movie's real appeal is actually directed at third-billed Lucille Ball who is handed all the torchy dialogue and all the sexy stagework. Ball rises to the occasion with bells on and – like the movie's own impatient audiences – we too tend to suffer through O'Hara's scenes (although she doesn't outstay her welcome half as long as Hayward does) and wait impatiently for Ball's return. Yes, thank heavens for Lucille Ball who spices up what would otherwise be a rather dreary screenplay about the ingénue who wants to be a great dancer and the totally irrelevant but even more dreary story of the tipsy millionaire playboy whose wife has understandably divorced him. Similarly, while the burlesque numbers with Lucy are super, super- attractive, I cannot say the same about the ho-hum attempts at "modern" dance. The choreography is uninspired.

Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) This competent if unremarkable film was directed by Dorothy Arzner, Hollywood's one female director of note between the silent years and Ida Lupino. It's a package of different kinds of dance numbers, from show girl to burlesque to high art ballet. The thread that keeps it going is the usual: girls trying to make it in one show or another.Lucille Ball, famous for her television shows of the 1950s and 60s, might seem to be making an early appearance in this 1940 song and dance drama. But she had made fifty (fifty!) films before this one. She's no a remarkable dancer by any means, nor singer, but she has personality to spare, and she's fun, period. She plays the worldly girl who will dance anywhere, anyhow. In contrast is the Maureen O'Hara character, sweet and restrained. She's rather humiliated in the movie, and you can feel her pain, but it's a forced contrast.Musical numbers intersperse the thin plot, and those might or might not be your taste. I found even the ballet, which looked like a serious ballet troupe in action, pedestrian. And it was poorly filmed: the camera sat at the edge of the stage and watched. In truth, the movie as a whole was functional, not reaching for the stars, and not getting any. The one surprise, for me, was the ease and presence of Louis Hayward as a kind of good guy leading man who appeared now and then to properly show his love for O'Hara's struggling character.

Amidst the boy's club of classical Hollywood cinema, Dorothy Arzner's Dance, Girl, Dance is notable as a rare female vision. While the film's behind-the-scenes-at-the-girly-show subject matter might have been sensationalized in other hands--"NOT SUITABLE FOR GENERAL EXHIBITION" brags the poster--Arzner unceremoniously mutes the male gaze throughout: rather than command her camera to linger leeringly on the female form, she chooses to communicate her dancers' eroticism through,for example, an unmoving shot of a man's eyeballs.The film's characters are faced with two modes of femininity to embrace, neither particularly appealing: Lucille Ball's Bubbles exploits her sexuality so that she might latch on to--and this is a direct quote, and I s*** you not--a "great big capitalist;" Maureen O'Hara's Judy maintains a healthy self-respect and work ethic to absolutely no avail.Dance, Girl, Dance will be entertaining to contemporary audiences for its antiquated weirdnesses-- Louis Hayward in particular is delightfully insane as Mr. Harris, completely derailing the movie every time he's on screen--but the movie's real power is in its harrowingly cynical finale: our protagonist is literally forced into a chair and told not to think by a patriarchal businessmen, and through the least convincing laughter I've ever seen on screen, Judy laments how easy her life could have been had she subjugated herself sooner. I don't know if Arzner was trying to make a statement on the impossibility of maintaining a strong female identity in male-dominated culture, but that is certainly what she did. -TK 9/2/10

Though I take issue with the feminist slant on this film (the fact that it continually glamorizes objectification and ogling the female form/body while no masculine counterpoint is truly offered) I still feel this is an alright film with a fun story and a few great scenes. Arguing over the performances of Maureen O'Hara and Lucille Ball seem ridiculous to me, given that they were explicitly coming from different places within the studio "star" system. What is perhaps of interest is the fact that the director is female, that there is a violent "cat-fight" between LB and MO and, that lesbianism is directly addressed. Worthy, at least, of a rent.