Have It Your Own Way
“I know you want me to tear my clothes off so you can look your fifty cents’ worth. Fifty cents for the privilege of staring at a girl the way your wives won’t let you. What do you suppose we think of you up here…We’d laugh right back at the lot of you, only we’re paid to let you sit there and roll your eyes and make your screamingly clever remarks…”
Aspiring ballerina and reluctant burlesque performer Judy O’Brien’s (Maureen O’Hara) biting and caustic address to the hooting audience in Dorothy Arzner’s (1940) became a five-alarm fire for the feminist film critics who rediscovered the film in the ’70s, adopting it as a key text and enshrining Arzner—the most prolific female director in the Hollywood studio system from the ’20s to the early ’40s, as well as the first American woman to direct a sound film and the only one to successfully transition from silent to sound cinema—as a retroactive figurehead for the movement. Yet while the film’s enduring importance has long been recognized—including a belated (and perhaps token) induction into the United States’ National Film Registry in 2007, making it one of only a dozen or so films of the nearly 500 received a proper restoration, in a new 4K transfer from an original nitrate negative (inherited by Warner Bros. after their takeover of RKO’s library) that has been made available on Blu-ray and streaming by the Criterion Collection.
