Gender isn’t a preordained limit in movies. Some of the best movies about men (“Mikey and Nicky,” “Le Bonheur”) have been directed by women; some of the best about women (“The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum,” “Gertrud”) have been made by men. But ideas and emotions are inseparable from experience, and with the best women directors, their experiences of gender relations fuse with the depiction of women characters—and also, as with the director Dorothy Arzner, in the film “Dance, Girl, Dance” (which I discuss in this clip), give rise to a distinctive aesthetic style that embodies that experience. The question isn’t whether a man could have come up with these cinematic devices and deployed them to the same end; only Arzner did so. In the process, she got fiercely committed performances from her leads—Lucille Ball, who flung herself exuberantly into the flashy role, and Maureen O’Hara, whose temperamental fury seemed to burn here with an intimate spark before rising to historical dimensions in John Ford’s films. It’s worth noting that the script was written by the short-lived novelist Tess Slesinger and her husband, Frank Davis, a producer but a relatively inexperienced writer. The movie’s fine and urgent turns of phrase bear the mark of a literary art that Arzner lent cinematic life through her own distinctive vision.