Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom (review)

The reason I recommend Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom is that it displays the value of a true multi-disciplinary analysis. Adrienne L. McLean is not only a scholar of film studies but also is well educated in dance. This dual perspective allows her to point out and describe aspects to Rita Hayworth's labour and performance that would otherwise remain unresearched and not discussed by the historian. In fact, one of McLean's major points is to illustrate how differently film and dance critics respond to Hayworth.

Being Rita Hayworth is within general star studies in asking about Hayworth's agency in creating and maintaining her star image – as public labourer, private woman, and filmic fantasy. McLean's answer is historically detailed, describing the capable struggles Hayworth pursued in her career. Importantly, McLean broadens the usual image of Hayworth: "although Hayworth was both a pin-up girl and a film noir femme fatale, she was also a musical comedy star and dancer who not only worked with Astaire and Kelly but collaborated on two of the three films … made by one of the very few women choreographers to work in classical Hollywood, Valerie Bettis". Additionally and as a marker of her intelligence, Hayworth was one of the first stars to create her own production company in the late 1940s. These characteristics produce a much more ambiguous image of Hayworth than the more traditional impression of Hayworth in Gilda and as the short-term wife of Orson Welles, Prince Aly Khan, and three other men.

Filled with theoretical discussions surveying contemporary feminist positions about female stars as objects of spectacle and of the gaze, Being Rita Hayworth is split into two major sections. The first is a biography that focuses on Hayworth's career and image moving from Margarita Cansino to Rita Cansino to Rita Hayworth. This transformation "and its discourses of ethnicity, authenticity, and labor" are very public to American fans as Hayworth finds both success in her career and unhappiness in love. The second section examines several major films, with excellent analyses of what one might see from a performance and dance specialist's perspective.

If a reader were to focus on only one chapter, I would recommend McLean's investigation of Affair in Trinidad (1952, Vincent Sherman). The musical numbers were choreographed and directed by Bettis, a major innovator in modern dance. In particular, McLean considers the two major dance numbers in the film, which she reports received more critical attention than the rather formulaic plot. While the film critics "complain about and scorn" these numbers, dance critics praise them, especially the first one, for Hayworth's ability to use her body in an expressive manner. Barefooted, she performed, in McLean's terms, an expressed autoeroticism. As directed, the dance also broke the fourth wall via the dancer's initial direct facial gaze toward the camera, although Hayworth then moved into a self-absorption appropriate to the narrative. For film critics, the dance appeared "ungraceful" in its angularity and wrenching motions. For dance critics, however, the bodily expression goes beyond the physical surface to reveal "new aspects of a very vibrant personality". The barefoot dancing implies, to dance critic Walter Terry, a "primitive earth-contact", and he compares her as moving toward "Martha Graham's danced revelation of the inner being". McLean's portrayal moved me – to watch the dance. As someone without good training in dance, I was able to see what had excited Terry and to understand why traditional film critics like Bosley Crowther might see the dance as "vulgar and grotesque".

It is this sort of eye-opening about the past (and the present) that I seek from a good book. McLean offers other insights in her study of Hayworth, but even if this were the only one, I would count the book a success. It has asked me to reexamine several assumptions about historical accounts of postwar American cinema: Hayworth as a laborer and performer, cinematic...