In Sight & Sound’s recent Greatest Films of All Time poll, Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) placed joint 48th with Ordet (1955), just ahead of The 400 Blows (1959) and The Piano (1992). Loden’s existential indie drama about an uneducated working-class Pennsylvanian woman (played by the writer-director herself) haplessly fleeing the role society allotted her might lack the intellectual heft of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which topped the poll, but it’s the more accessible and compelling film.
The Criterion Collection has announced the four movies that will be joining the prestigious list in March of 2022, with two films getting 4K UHD combos.
Dorothy Arzner s Working Girls Shows Depression Hard-Knocks from the Female Perspective
Dorothy Arzner s 1931 film Working Girls shows MEN may do the bossing but the girls make their own plans for them!
Paramount Pictures
Beyond the Classics is a recurring column in which Emily Kubincanek highlights lesser-known old movies and examines what makes them memorable. In this installment, she uncovers Dorothy Arzner’s hard-to-find 1931 pre-Code film ‘Working Girls.’
For decades in the studio era of Hollywood, the most powerful men tried to convince women they weren’t fit to direct movies. Dorothy Arzner was the exception, as she directed some of the largest stars and delivered magnificent movies of all kinds. Arzner recently had a retrospective on
Region: A
MSRP: $39.95
A pre-code melodrama that provided equal opportunities for sinning for both sexes, Dorothy Arznerâs
Merrily We Go to Hell shows âmodernâ movie marriage in ways that wouldnât be allowed on the screen less than two years later and features charismatic performances from its two leading players that would be bellwethers of finer things to come from both of them. In its free-flowing drinking and multiple sexual escapades, the film may show its age, but itâs still an enjoyable entertainment with glimpses of some stars to be also in the mix.
Newspaper reporter and fledgling playwright Jerry Corbett (Fredric March) has definite problems with alcohol, drinking himself into a stupor almost nightly to forget the girl that got away, flighty Broadway actress Claire Hempstead (Adrianne Allen). One night at another drunken party he meets Chicago heiress Joan Prentice (Sylvia Sidney) who has not allowed her fatherâs (George Irving) millions t