Get Your Man (1927)
(Dorothy Arzner, US 1927, 63 min., 35mm)
Dorothy Arzner was one of the first women to direct film in Hollywood and, for a decade, was the only female director working in Hollywood. She directed 20 features between 1927 and 1943, helping launch the careers of Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Lucille Ball. She was the first woman to join the Directors Guild of America, the first to direct a sound film, and was the inspiration for the character of Ruth Adler in 2022’s Babylon. Get Your Man is the earliest extant film from Arzner, lovingly restored by David Stenn and the Library of Congress, replacing the first two reels of missing footage with carefully-placed still photos and intertitles. In the film, Clara Bow (the inspiration for Babylon’s Nellie LaRoy), plays a rich American vacationing in Paris. When she is accidentally locked in a museum overnight with a French nobleman (Charles “Buddy” Rogers), they fall in love. He has been betrothed since he was a tot, but that won’t stop Bow from getting her man.