Wallace McCutcheon | The Boy Detective, or the Abductors Foiled / 1908

a transgender first

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wallace McCutcheon (screenwriter and director) The Boy Detective, or the Abductors Foiled / 1908

 

This film begins with a newsboy, Swipesy, playing a sidewalk game of craps with his messenger-boyfriend, Swifty (Robert Harron). He not only wins all of Swifty’s cash, but is awarded a mean-looking revolver.

     But all the time he’s playing, we also observe that Swipesy seems on the alert as he watches a woman enter a store, followed by two men lurking nearby who later follow her home, Swipesy trailing behind the trio. The woman enters her house and the two men move on up the street, entering a saloon. Swipesy tries to enter, but soon is thrown out, as he peers through the window. 

     By coincidence the messenger boy is soon called, enters the saloon, and comes out with a message, which Swipesy convinces his friend to share with him. Not seen in the film, but provided fully in the “The Moving Picture World” synopsis, the message reads: “Dear Mary, Badly injured in auto accident. Come to hospital at once. Am sending a carriage for you. Ruth.”

     The clever Swipesy immediately comprehends what the message signifies, and rushes to the young lady to reveal the nefarious plot against her. Swipesy insists that the woman call the police and asks if he might borrow one of her dresses and a hat, intending to take the carriage in her place. The sight of the boy dressed in drag provides a great deal of humor to Mary and her maid, as it probably did, as well, to its 1908 audiences.

      But even in drag, Swipesy proves he’s the hero. As the published synopsis ends: 

   “The carriage is stopped on a lonely road by the would-be abductors, when the masquerading Swipesy leaps out and holds the infamous wretches at bay until the arrival of the police, with his newly acquired revolver, which proves to be a cigarette case in the shape of a gun. Snapping it open, he hands around cigarettes to the amusement of the police and the chagrin of the ruffians.”

      But director Wallace McCutcheon evidently has another surprise in store, focusing after the story on a close-up of Swipsey in his newsboy outfit, showing off the cigarette case-revolver. Swipsey, it turns out, is himself a woman in newsboy clothes, making him perhaps one of the first truly transgender figures of early LGBTQ cinema.

      Originally intended as a series—how nice it would have been to follow the adventures of this transgender figure years before Judith in D. W. Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia (1914), Lillian Travers of A Florida Enchantment of the same year, and Filibus in Mario Roncoroni’s 1915 epic—but only this 1908 episode was released.

 

Los Angeles, June 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).