Before Pamela Anderson in ‘The Last Showgirl,’ Maureen O’Hara Stood Up to the Leering Male Gaze in ‘Dance, Girl, Dance’
Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl” follows a week in the life of a Las Vegas showgirl named Shelly (Pamela Anderson, in a career-defining performance) as she prepares to take her final curtain call. In its examination of the cost of living for your art and the toll of being undervalued by the world around you, it recalls another feminist showbiz classic, Dorothy Arzner’s “Dance, Girl, Dance,” which also centers on a pair of showgirls (played by Maureen O’Hara and Lucille Ball). In both films, women must navigate the male-dominated capitalist system in which they live, using their beauty as currency. Both films also confront the male gaze that supports and consumes them.
Coppola’s film begins with an empty black screen and the sound of high heels clacking on the floor. Soon, a close-up of Shelly fills the frame. She sports a baby pink cap bedazzled with rhinestones and full face of makeup. Coppola holds on Anderson’s expressive face for a full minute as she answers a bevy of questions from an unseen voice. When asked about her age, she says, “A gentleman never asks a lady her age,” giggles, then says, “36… sorry, I lied. I’m 42, but this house is huge…distance helps.” Her smile is wide, a cocktail of charm and nerves. When asked if she has an act prepared, she says she does and that she’s a dancer. As she walks to her spot on the stage, Coppola holds the camera steady on her back. When she turns, ready to perform, the camera holds on her face once more before cutting to the opening credits.
“The Last Showgirl” will return to this scene again after we’ve gotten to know Shelly better. After we learn she’s been a showgirl in a Las Vegas revue called Le Razzle Dazzle for three decades. After we learn that it’s the last of its kind on the strip and will be closing shortly. After we’ve learned that despite working consistently for this show for 30 years, Shelly doesn’t have benefits or a retirement plan. After we’ve learned that the only family she has, an estranged daughter named Hannah (Billie Lourd), doesn’t value her art or even really consider her an artist; just a selfish, failed mother.
In Arzner’s film “Dance, Girl, Dance,” we first meet showgirls Judy (Maureen O’Hara) and Bubbles (Lucille Ball) with their dance troupe in Akron, Ohio, at an also pretentiously named club, The Palais Royale. The girls dance in a chorus line, clad in black bedazzled thigh-cut dresses, their knee-high stockings and garters showing just the right amount of leg. Each has a black top hat with a mirror on top, which Bubbles uses to flirt with men in the audience. When the place is raided by the cops for illegal gambling, Bubbles and Judy must find their way back to New York City, where their manager and former Russian Imperial ballerina, Madame Lydia Basilova (Maria Ouspenskaya) awaits, lining up their next gig.
Like Shelly, Judy’s whole life is about dance. Both women practice their art during their alone time at home. “The only thing I really care about is dancing,” Judy shares with a roommate. Similarly, Shelly shares that she feels alive in the spotlight and that there is nothing else like it. These dreamers are contrasted with more practical counterparts. Bubbles has “oomph” as Madame Basilova puts it, and is able to use that oomph to nab a gig dancing the hula in New Jersey, then secure a “capitalist” who helps her rebrand herself as a burlesque queen known as Tiger Lily White in a show simply titled Girls Girls Girls. In Coppola’s film, there’s Mary-Anne (Brenda Song), who is younger but has been with Le Razzle Dazzle long enough to be jaded by the grind. When asked why she works in the revue, Mary-Anne bluntly states, “Because it’s a job, and it pays American dollars.” While Shelly and Judy work within the system to achieve their dreams, their counterparts work within the system solely to earn a living.
In “Dance, Girl, Dance,” the difference in goals between Judy and Bubbles/Tiger Lily comes to a head after Judy begins working as a “stooge” for Bubbles/Tiger Lily, with the former’s “toe dancing” classical ballet a foil to the latter’s comically salacious “Oh! Mother What Do I Do Now?” act in the burlesque show. In the sequence, as Bubbles/Tiger Lily sings the vaudevillian song, her dress is slowly blown away by gusts of wind. Eventually, she finds herself behind a tree in an apparent nude state, waving her arm seductively at the audience. Soon, it’s revealed that the arm actually belongs to Judy, who takes the stage to perform a dance she wrote. The crowd boos and jeers throughout her entire dance until Bubbles/Tiger Lily reclaims the stage for her next song. Judy is humiliated but refuses to give up the spotlight, even if this degrading act is the only way for her to live out her dream.
That is, until one night, when everything for Judy begins to go wrong. Just before she is to go on stage, she learns that not only is the man (Louis Hayward) she’s been seeing still in love with his ex-wife, but Bubbles/Tiger Lily has married him while he was in an inebriated state. Heartbroken, Judy takes the stage late, and everything goes wrong. A strap from her dress rips, revealing her shoulder, prompting lurid comments from the audience. Frustrated, Judy begins to leave the stage when someone shouts, “She’s going home to mama!”
Arzner holds close onto O’Hara’s incensed face before cutting to a full shot of her body as she marches to the footlights to address the crowd. The audience’s laughter is muffled to shocked silence, except for one person who shouts, “What are you going to do now, cry?” Arzner cuts to a few reaction shots, then holds on a full shot of O’Hara’s body as she faces the crowd. As O’Hara crosses her arms, Arzner switches to a medium shot of her body and face, twisted into one singular unit of judgment. “Go ahead and stare, I’m not ashamed,” she tells them. Arzner holds on this shot, unbroken, as she continues, “Go on, laugh, get your money’s worth. No one’s going to hurt you. I know you want me to tear my clothes off so you can look your 50 cents worth.” Arzner then cuts to the audience, still silent.
Judy continues, “50 cents for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives won’t let you.” She then cuts to a tighter shot of O’Hara’s crossed arms and angry face, as she continues, “What do you suppose we think of you up here? With your silly smirks your mothers would be ashamed of? And we know it’s the thing of the moment for the dress suits to come and laugh at us too.” Arzner’s camera pans over the now visibly uncomfortable audience as Judy lays into them, stating, “We’d laugh right back at the lot of you, only we’re paid to let you sit there and roll your eyes and let you make your screamingly clever remarks.” Arzner then cuts to a full-on close-up of O’Hara, as she continues, “What’s it for? So you can go home when the show is over and strut before your wives and sweethearts and play at being the stronger sex for a minute?” As she finishes her screed, Arzner pulls back to a full body shot of O’Hara, the audience looking on at her in wonder, before cutting back to one final close-up. Judy ends her speech, “I’m sure they see through you just like we do.”
This scene has been studied and written about by countless scholars and academics as a groundbreaking subversion of the male gaze and of the consumption of women as products. Arzner makes it clear that Judy and Bubbles/Tiger Lily are both aware of the system and use what capital they have — their bodies — to make the best of it. In this scene, O’Hara’s Judy not only confronts the audience at the burlesque show but also the audience watching the film as well, commenting on the way in which actresses themselves are products within the system, consumed by moviegoers, just as the burlesque audience does the dancers.
This was the penultimate film for Arzner as a director. She directed 16 films in all, a record that still stands for women who’ve made films within the Hollywood studio system. She spent her twilight years teaching directing at UCLA Film School, Francis Ford Coppola was once her student. It follows, then, that his granddaughter Gia Coppola would also take inspiration from Arzner.
Toward the end of “The Last Showgirl,” Shelly, like Judy, is also at the end of her emotional rope. She is tired of defending her choices to her daughter. Tired of being a surrogate mother to Jodie (Kiernan Shipka), a young dancer in the revue. Tired of seeing her 30 years of work valued less than that of her male coworker, Le Razzle Dazzle’s stage manager, Eddie (Dave Bautista). But the show must go on, her dream must live on, and so Shelly puts on her makeup and her bedazzled cap and auditions for a new gig. Coppola replays the minute we’ve already seen, now with added context and emotional stakes, the cracks showing beneath Shelly’s smile.
When Shelly tries to say her last name, the director cuts her off. He only wants her first name, her height, her age, and what kind of act she can offer. As Shelly poses before her music begins, Coppola pulls back from the close-up of her face to hold on her full body. She’s beautiful, trim, athletic. It’s a dancer’s body without a doubt. As Shelly does her act, a dance set to Pat Benatar’s “Shadows of the Night,” Coppola’s camera follows Shelly’s choreography in close-up. Like Judy said of her own ability in “Dance, Girl, Dance,” Shelly is good, not great, but she has passion. Shelly’s older style routine fits with the atmosphere of the audition as poorly as Judy’s “toe dancing” ballet did at the burlesque show. After a mere minute, the director cuts Shelly off. “OK, thank you,” he shouts, calling her “Sherry” and then “Kelly,” uninterested in who she really is beyond what she can do for him.
Shelly asks why he didn’t like it and, when told it’s not the vibe they’re looking for, she replies, “Just tell me what you want, and I’ll give it to you. You’re looking for dancers. I’m a dancer. I’m an experienced dancer.” Coppola cuts to the director (Jason Schwartzman), hiding in the shadows of the theater, who says they need someone who’s either acrobatic or sexy. Not one to give up a fight, Shelly says she can do sexy, asking if a “Salome Dance of the Seven Veils” type dance would work.
But the director wants sex, not art, telling her she was hired at Le Razzle Dazzle solely because she was “beautiful and young. . .a long time ago.” He turns the ageist knife even further, insisting that’s not what she’s selling anymore. Losing it completely, Shelly “acts” sexy for the director, grotesquely pushing her head between her legs as she licks them and asks, “Is this what sexy girls do?” Mary-Anne rushes to the stage trying to help her off, but Shelly has one more thing to say to the director. Coppola’s camera holds steady on her face as she definitely declares, “I’m beautiful. I’m 57, and I’m beautiful, you son of a bitch.”
In Arzner’s film, Judy’s dream of being a ballerina comes true thanks to a helpful secretary (Katharine Alexander) and a smitten ballet impresario (Ralph Bellamy) who can offer her a chance to dance with a real ballet company. Even Bubbles/Tiger Lily is able to use her wit and wiles to secure a $50,000 dollar annulment. In Coppola’s film, the women are not so lucky. Like many of us in modern society, Mary-Anne is stuck in a soulless gig economy that offers very few ladders toward upward mobility. And while Shelly is undoubtedly still beautiful and has more experience than any other dancer on the strip, she has aged out of worth in a system that values youth over beauty.
Although both films directly address this poisonous consumption and twisted way of assessing worth, what does it say about the society we live in that it must still be addressed at all?
“The Last Showgirl” is now in theaters.
