D. W. Griffith | Pranks / 1909

straight crossdressers interrupt gay lovers

by Douglas Messerli

D. W. Griffith (director) Pranks / 1909

 

D. W. Griffith’s short film ostensibly is simply what its title suggests, a series of pranks played out by two boys (performed Robert Harron and Jack Pickford) who while a fighting heterosexual couple are both out swimming in their own spots in a public park, enter their dressing cabins and switch the clothing, putting the male’s togs, belonging to Tom (Arthur V. Johnson) in Ethel’s (Marion Leonard’s) cabin and vice versa.

   

      Ethel has already chastised Tom for showing his affection publicly, which scandalized the two women who evidently keep the hotel in which they are staying. But now she is even more angered by discovering not only someone has taken her clothing, but has left behind Tom’s suit and hat. Of course, she can suspect no one else but Tom himself, just as he suddenly must perceive her as vindictively forcing him into her dress. Their frustration with one another is not established in the film, but we cannot help but sense it, nonetheless, in their angry looks and in their following behavior as they both rush, first Ethel and after her Tom, back to the hotel.

       It the movie were to stop here, with the two in their quick crossdressing runs, it would be yet another meaningless film in which drag behavior results in a few giggles by those who think such behavior is as audacious as the two matronly hotel ladies of Victorian USA feel about young people demonstrating their love in public.

      But Griffith goes beyond conventional drag humor, almost intentionally challenging his audiences to take everything a step further. Ethel first runs past a couple of women sitting together closely on a bench sharing a map or a brochure. There is no suggestion that these two properly dressed ladies are doing anything else but sharing information, perhaps planning a car trip or a hike, but they become aghast at the woman dressed as a man wearing a straw hat, and are even more startled by seeing a man in full woman’s attire including a sun hat, hats which neither of them needed have donned as part of their costumes.

       It is the next couple, however, that makes this 5-minute film so very fascinating. First Ethel almost trips on a pair of full-fledged pansies canoodling in the grass; they stand up, one waving his right hand in a stereotypical gay manner and responding to what he sees with words which although we can’t hear we can almost observe him mouthing, “Hey, come back!” delighted, quite obviously by what he recognizes as queer behavior.

       Both are even more stunned by the arrival of a man in drag, this time one of two “fairies” (Billy Quirk and Henry B. Walthall) crying out quite passionately, “don’t go!” They turn to one another in both pleased wonderment and startlement.

        Clearly, Griffith has gone far beyond the unspoken sexual barriers of cinema of his day, and now must right the situation by returning Tom to his proper heterosexual position as Ethel’s protector. A masher (the published synopsis describes him as a tramp), seeing obviously a miss who’s willing to take chances, tries to accost her, Tom coming across the struggling couple and knocking the masher/tramp out. The two, seeing each other in their own attire recognize what must have happened, quickly patch things up, and return to heteronormativity despite the fact that they remain momentarily in drag. 

        In her commentary on the film, Laura Horak argues that the importance of this film is in how it presents public parks as “a free space for expression,” arguing that while the men lying together in the grass are coded as pansies, “there’s no hiding or fear of them being queer in the park.” She contends that in this moment in queer history public spaces belonged equally to them before they were “kept inside and policed.”

     Frankly, I see that view as nonsense. At no time in the first part of the century would queer behavior have been openly allowed in a public park. And we have plenty of evidence in films such as almost all of Chaplin’s works, as well as those of Laurel and Hardy, and, in particular, in Hal Roach’s 1917 short, Clubs Are Trump, that the police in public parks were quite actively on the lookout for those who fell to sleep on benches or in the grass, men who seemingly bothered women, and, in particular, men who appeared to pay astute attention to others of the same sex. In Roach’s film, Luke and Snub are seriously pursued by the police for their friendly hugging, not even a gesture of gay love but simply a reaction to their mutual nightmares. And to my knowledge, gay behavior was as much against the law in 1909 as it was in 1950.

      That doesn’t mean, of course, that gay men never attempted to find an out-of-the-way corner just as the two homosexuals in this film have found; and at this river resort there appear to be no policemen. But certainly, the idea that there was no fear of hiding about being queer in public doesn’t to seem match the world I have read of and seen through movies. Indeed, had it been openly permitted, we might have seen many another movie about this very subject; yet to my knowledge, Griffith’s film may be the first and only open expression of gay love in public in the three decades of the 20th century I cover in this volume.

       The unusual absurdity of what happens in Pranks might almost be headlined as another kind of political prank: “Straight cross dressers interrupt gay lovers.”

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).