Rediscovering Dorothy Arzner
Dorothy Arzner is someone I had never heard of before, and maybe you haven’t either. Arzner was the only director of films in Hollywood under the studio system of the 1930s and 1940s and she made some pretty remarkable films in those years. Her work is currently being celebrated at the BFI in London and this week I got to see her last film, First comes courage . Here is how BFI described her: “Her films were multifaceted revisions of Hollywood norms, paying sharp attention to the intersection of women’s working and romantic lives. Her protagonists were snappy and headstrong, subverting...