A Woman Like Ann

Today I'm doing a guest post for that fabulous Bettie Page lookalike Christina Rice and her blog Ann Dvorak: Hollywood's Forgotten Rebel.  Ms. Rice's forthcoming book by the same title is under enthusiastic review at The University of Kentucky Press, and I'm inspired by her updates on the process of getting published.  I can't wait to get a copy hot off the press!

I must admit that my interest in Ann Dvorak is a personal one.  It's her saucer eyes---her nose for individualism---the sometimes slightest suggestion of seething under her professionalism.  When a script gives her the chance, she bursts forth with a nuanced performance, but often she's placed a little off center---a prop I can't keep my eyes off of.

 

But that's where life is at---off center.  We step into it, and like a toe into water the waves reverberate outward.  That is why my eye wanders away from the actors in a movie to study the setting.  The Radiobar, the Kelvinator in the kitchen---the soft river rock curbing along Nancy Carroll's residential street in Hot Saturday.  Oh God, I could almost trip over that curbing...

With that in mind, my favorite Ann Dvorak film is Heat Lightning (1934).  Where else can we linger midst a phalanx of desert tourist tent cabins?  Once again Ann is the laid upon young lady, but the way out West exotica allows her to slip in something wonderful:  When she kisses her already bored desert Lothario goodnight, you feel what has happened off screen out there in the sagebrush. To hell with this script's history is repeating itself middle class pretense---Ann was no baby sister to Aline Macmahon.  One wishes Ann was in Aline's role and the baby sister had been left back on Broadway.

It feels like I knew Ann before I ever saw her on the screen.  Go ahead, start humming Where Or When.  Writers get inspired in the queerest ways, you know.  But once a woman like Ann---a spirit darker, but with the same facial structure---brushed by my consciousness and plopped down on a settee with a bold muttering of Goddammit I'm gonna have fun.  Like that sentence, it was moment crammed with information.  She meant what she said because she took everything seriously.  Soon I was privileged to know of her young, intense love that could never be replicated---a love transferred to her commitment to the boys in her life and the dance she performed around the peripheries of the radio world, never giving in to the hypocrisies of showbiz.

I've been told Ann was a lot like that.