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62 2 The Lot of a Ballerina Is Indeed Tough Gender, Genre, and the Ballet Film through 1947, Part I I always said I’d leave off when the time came—and no trouble about it. Grusinskaya, who dances no more. What would she do? Grow orchids, keep white peacocks? Die? That’s what it comes to at last. To die. —Grand Hotel, 1932 David, do you know what a ballerina is? A bundle of muscles with a smile. —The Men in Her Life, 1941 We artists suffer so. —Specter of the Rose, 1946 If a dancer can’t dance she just dies, you know that, don’t you? —The Unfinished Dance, 1947 What do the following actors have in common: Donald Cook, Greta Garbo, Eleanor Powell, Fred Astaire, Vera Zorina, Ann Miller, Vivien Leigh, Maureen O’Hara, Maria Ouspenskaya, Loretta Young, Cyd Charisse, Stan Laurel, Tamara Toumanova, Ivan Kirov, and Margaret O’Brien? The answer, for the purposes of this book, is naturally that they all played ballet dancers in Hollywood films. Some of the names on the list are those of actual or erstwhile ballet dancers—Vera Zorina, Tamara Toumanova, Cyd Charisse—who had backgrounds in theatrical concert dance. Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, and Ann Miller are also dancers, although they are not usually associated with ballet in the public’s mind. Most of the other actors on the list, however, have no association with ballet or even with dance. In this regard, the roles they played in what I am calling ballet films would perforce have had to depend less on the performance of dancing than on the acting out of the dancer’s life. T HE LOT OF A BA LLER INA IS INDEED TOUGH 63 There was, however, plenty of recognizable ballet dancing in films from the beginning of the sound era, from The Jazz Singer (1927) and The Broadway Melody (1929) on. Film versions of operettas virtually always included one or more ballet interludes, usually performed by droves of women in fluffy tutus and spangles. Even revues like The King of Jazz (1930) and musical comedies that starred dancers (Marilyn Miller, for example, in Sally or Sunny, both 1930) included ballet set pieces, with ballet being defined as such mainly through the visual presence of toe shoes. The history of this type of dancing , and of its ubiquity, was introduced in the previous chapter. Here and in the next chapter I concentrate on how commercial cinema, Hollywood specifically, represented the dancer’s existence in films from the late sound era through 197, before, that is, the British import The Red Shoes (the topic of its own chapter) was released to become arguably the most popular ballet film of the twentieth century. The wide variability of the sorts of actors, and actor-dancers, that populate even the partial list above should give an indication of how wild some of these films are—Donald Cook as a ballet dancer, or Stan Laurel? Who is Ivan Kirov? And Margaret O’Brien, a child star, could hardly portray a professional ballet dancer, could she? Even Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell seem miscast as ballet dancers; both are better known for their tap dancing and, equally important, for the lightness of tone of their musical-comedy films. They may both be artists, but they do not play artists who suffer. I have alluded already to some of the “genre trouble” plaguing the scholar of classical Hollywood cinema in regard to the study of melodrama, in that what film studies means by melodrama has little to do with how Hollywood conceived of the term from at least the 1920s through the 1950s. As Steve Neale outlines the elements of melodrama according to the film studies “standard account,” melodrama was a pejorative term; was opposed to the more estimable category of “realism”; and was most consistently associated with pathos, romance, domesticity, the familial, and the “feminine.” The woman’s film, in particular, led a “lowly” existence as a result.1 As Neale and others have found, however, melodrama was only very rarely employed to characterize films starring, about, and aimed at women, and the term would not have been applied necessarily to films about suffering ballet artists unless they included “action, adventure, and thrills.” Trade journals and reviews, however, frequently used the terms melodrama and meller (Neale finds them in reviews of more than a thousand different films in Variety alone between 1938...

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