The Bigamist, Dance, Girl, Dance

A double-bill of films by pioneering Hollywood directors! Actress-turned-director/producer Ida Lupino was the only woman working behind the camera in the Hollywood studio system of the 1950s. In The Bigamist, she directs herself along with Joan Fontaine and Edmund Gwenn in a noirish tale of a man who suddenly finds domestic responsibility tugging at him from two directions. (80 mins., 35mm)

The great Dorothy Arzner enjoyed a Hollywood career as a director that spanned the silent era through the early 1940s. Perhaps Arzner’s best-known film, Dance, Girl, Dance stars Lucille Ball as a sexy burlesque dancer and Maureen O’Hara as a classically trained ballerina who take very different paths to success and romance while maintaining their own ideals about feminist integrity. Named to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2007. (90 mins., 35mm)

The Bigamist print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.