who
and what you will
by Douglas Messerli
Eugene Mullin and
Charles Kent (screenplay, based on the play by William Shakespeare, and
directors) Twelfth Night / 1910
Moviegoers in the early
part of the 20th century obviously enjoyed works that dealt with gender
confusion and transvestism. Given the number of films that survived, one can
only imagine that dozens of others were lost among the thousands of films
allowed to decay or were destroyed by fires and nitrate damage.
It comes as no surprise, accordingly, that
in 1910 directors Eugene Mullin and Charles Kent released a silent version of
William Shakespeare’s great comedy Twelfth Night. Although one
immediately ponders over such many seemingly misguided efforts to treat the
bard’s stories as something to be plundered while ignoring the language in
which he elevated his plots into masterworks of drama, it is also clear that
the directors of the work cared enough about the original to basically embrace
the drama’s central elements in a 13-minute, one-reeler while incorporating
snippets of Shakespeare’s language within the film’s informative intertitles.
The sets and costumes, moreover, were quite lavish considering that the
motivation for their picture was to entertain their audiences with a somewhat
complex story of cross-dressing.
Seeing the handsome young man (Viola
pretending to be Cesario) Orsino immediately employs him as his page. Viola
finds herself falling in love with the man who, because of the youth’s beauty
and demeanor, chooses her male persona to deliver a message to Olivia and court
her in his name. On the surface, in short, the budding relationship between
Orsino and his page is a gay one, while the girl dressed as a boy is now asked
to engage in a lesbian encounter, which becomes even more problematic when,
upon seeing and hearing Orsino’s page, Olivia falls immediately in love with
the youth.
In Mullin and Kent’s abbreviated version
the shenanigans of Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and the maid Maria,
who convince Olivia’s steward Malvolio (played with proper pomp here by Charles
Kent) that Olivia is in love with him, almost gets lost given that woman’s
obviously overwhelming passion for Cesario/Viola.
The sudden appearance of Sebastian (Edith
Storey) saves the day, as the twin falls in love with Olivia, for her a perfect
replacement for Cesario when he reveals himself to be Viola, permitting Orsino
suddenly to realize he is truly in love with his former page.
Much later in the century Preston Sturges
would play the same twin exchange and double it in his The Palm Beach Story
(1942); but here Mullin and Kent outdo even Mozart’s switch-hit pairing of
lovers in Così fan tutte by using a female actress to play Sebastien,
thus suggestively marrying off Olivia into a lesbian relationship after all.
Storey, as I write below, played the
young boy, Billy/Bobby in Billy and His Pal, a year later. And among the
more than 150 films she acted in for Vitagraph Studios, she played men in
several films, partly on account of her athletic abilities—she was an expert
horseback rider—and typecasting: she was Oliver Twist in the first film version
of Dickens’ work in 1909 (see my review above), and Billy the Kid in the 1911
film of the same name (a film now declared lost)—although Storey’s Billy is a
female raised by the Sherriff to be a cowboy. In 1911 she also starred in the
strange transsexual work, changing through the ingestion of magical seeds, from
a woman into a man in A Florida Enchantment, which I also review below.
Storey later signed with Metro, making another 75-some films before retiring at
the age of 29 in 1921.
Los Angeles, December
15, 2020
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).
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