Alice Guy Blaché, Harry Schenck, and Edward Warren | Algie the Miner / 1912

conversion therapy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alice Guy Blaché, Harry Schenck, and Edward Warren (directors) Algie the Miner / 1912

 

     Since I wrote this review in 2020, I have certainly come to see the comic elements about this film as well, and don't necessarily associate the viewpoint of conversion as being that of the directors or writers, since this is primarily a satire. Yet, I couldn't at the help but express my dismay in forcing such a figure into what is a conversion therapy even as a comic maneuver. And I have now revised by older commentary below.

 

Finally in the 1912 film directed by Alice Guy, Harry Schenck, and Edward Warren (I’ve purposely inverted the usual male-first listings, since Guy was also the producer) we get a truly early gay film, staring the effeminate Billy Quirk, desperate to marry his wealthy girlfriend, Clarice Jackson—for god knows what reason—who is told by his future father-in-law that if he can tough it up as a man in a certain period of time that he can marry his daughter (Mary Foy).

 

    That means “going west,” to learn from rough-neck cowboys how to become a masculine man. The results are quite hilarious as he begins by attempting to kiss the cowboys before they try to take control of him, particularly under the control of a hirsute, heavy-drinking man to whom Algie takes a liking, attempting to help him overcome his alcoholism. Gradually—and so, unfortunately American—Algie is taught how to use a gun, and, more importantly, how to become a miner of gold—the major source of wealth in those gold rush days.

      Quirk gradually turns the gay Algie into a figure suitable to Clarice’s father, who is able to return home, now forcing open the door to his future family’s home in the “cowboy” way, pushing down the frame and entering the house as a kind of boisterous hero. He has now clearly become a straight man—in the very worst sense.

      It’s a tragedy, celebrated by the family and the film, as after the earliest version of “Conversion Therapy,” cured evidently from his homosexuality and rich from his discovery of the gold mine, now a quite brutal masculine, gun-toting, individual who no woman should truly desire.

      Algie has, before our very eyes, been transformed from a pansy into the kind of being that represents some of the major failures of American straight men. Why he desires the socially aspiring Clarice is never explained, except perhaps to rid himself of his natural sexual desires or his dismissal of the world in which he previously lived.

      And in that sense we might suggest that he has now lost the being with whom evidently Clarice had fallen in love. Algie, in short, has lost his soul, unable to remain the loving being he truly is. The engagingly gay figure has been emasculated by the writers’ script.

      This is one of the saddest stories I have ever heard, as writer Ford Maddox Ford began his novel The Good Soldier. I’d love to have seen him kiss the cowboys continuously, and we can suspect that despite his marriage to Clarice, he might one day want to return to that activity. 

      Algie the Miner transplants an interesting gay male into a world into which he should never have entered. The gold he was seeking was not in the glittering rocks, but in the hearts of the people with whom he lived.

      In the end, this is a film I cannot quite forgive.

 

Los Angeles, January 13, 2020