Working Girls (1931)
Directed by Dorothy Arzner! I did a deep dive into this pioneering director’s work when I was working on the Dance Girl Dance essay for Criterion. I really like her films. I hadn’t seen this one! Two sisters move to New York City, get jobs, live in a boarding house for women. One sister is street-smart, the other not so much. They know how to hustle, and they both want to find men, but one has a more practical view of things, while the other one is more romantic. In 1930s pre-Codes, being romantic means being naive. It means you’re prey. No big stars in this, but I really like Arzner’s visual choices: there are a lot of cool mirror scenes, but also just the framing, and the way bodies move across the screen: there’s real alive-ness in her films. There’s one scene where all the bored curfew-bound women in the boarding house dance with each other to the music coming in through the window, and it’s quite beautiful.
