Anonymous | A Range Romance / 1911

a double outing

by Douglas Messerli

 

unknown filmmaker (screenwriter and director) A Range Romance / 1911

 

One of the most fascinating of early cinema “gender exploratory” works, A Range Romance shares the Western setting of two other such films of the same year, William Haddock’s Billy and His Pal and Frederick A. Thomson’s Kitty and the Cowboys. The latter of these is simply a comic drag piece, but Billy and His Pal is far more complex, featuring in Edith Storey’s characterization of Billy an almost transgender figure hopelessly in love with the cowboy Jim.

 

    A Range Romance, however, takes it quite a bit further. Bob Adams, fed up with his wife’s anger, going beyond the limits of most of the hen-pecked husbands presented in comic films of the period, leaves with his daughter for the Western range. He dresses his little girl Bessie as a boy, in part to protect her in a world, as we later observe in William A. Wellman’s Beggars of Life (1928), where women alone in the wild were always sexually threatened; but perhaps also simply to allow her more opportunities other than the kind of slavery of hard work and baby-bearing that marriage demanded from frontier women. It also seems clear, through his reaction when Ethel finally “becomes” a boy, that Bob simply would have preferred a son, perhaps since he’s so easily left his wife, even prefers the company of men.

      All of these possibilities play an important role when the film fast-forwards to ten years later where we see now cowboy Bob and his experienced partner arrive at a ranch seeking jobs. They’re hired on, and almost immediately the handsome foreman takes a liking to the young, slightly less rugged new hire. In a very short space of time, we observe him taking on the new boy as a kind of mentor and soon after, hardly being able to keep his hands off the kid.

      Kino, the film distributor that has released a restored version of this film, describes the work as “A Brokeback Mountain for the silent era.” But it isn’t quite that. First of all, these two “males” have a true opportunity to get to know one another before leaping into sex, and, of course, one of these guys is actually a girl. I’d say it’s closer to Barbara Streisand’s 1983 film Yentl or, in closer historical perspective, Paul Czinner’s The Fiddler of Florence (1926) in that the attraction the older male feels for the younger seems overwhelming but still strangely queer and disturbing—the tension between the contradictory feelings being perhaps even more frightening than simply realizing that one is attracted to the same sex. What the foreman likes about this young cowhand is that he has many of the features, in his youthful mien, that appear to be feminine, just what society in general teaches us are negative qualities.

     And this 1911 film doesn’t quickly resolve that confusion. Although an intertitle declares “Her Sex Discovered,” we’re left free to discern when that “discovery” takes place, whether it occurs immediately after the title card when the foreman soon begins to compare the size of his hand with that of his cowboy’s and to actually express his deep affection, or more gradually. Certainly, the young cowboy resists his friend’s first expressions of admiration and love, and even after seemingly being swayed by his cajoling, both determine to keep it secret, checking around them to see if anyone else might be observing what almost becomes their “first kiss.”

 

    The question remains why, if he’s actually discovered his sex, can’t they kiss first and explain it immediately to others who might catch them in the act. Why, if he immediately admits his gender to him, does he still resist expressing his own love or even accepting the foreman’s attentions. Surely at his age, it can no longer be because of his father or even the deception that he’s so thoroughly woven among the others. And surely, given what we soon learn after they marry and bear a child, that “she” now willingly takes on the traditional roles demanded of a wife, his earlier indecision can’t be for fear of losing his male stature.

      It appears to me that only at the dinner table where Bessie suddenly encounters her long-lost mother, Mary, just hired on as the new cook, and after Bob has identified himself to his wife, that the cowboy is willing to publicly reveal his/her sexuality, seemingly astounding the foreman, whose wide-eyed wonderment suggests he is hearing that she is truly female for the first time, Bessie flexing her muscles just to show that she was the same person as the cowboy they all thought her to be.

 

      If so, it is quite apparent that the ranch foreman has been completely willing to make love to another man, younger and more effeminate that he perhaps, but a male nonetheless. And I’d argue that the film quite purposely encourages that confusion throughout the long scene where it is apparent that the two have fallen in love and are willing, no matter the details, to engage in a relationship.

       As critic Laura Horak notes about the work, summarized by the blogger BL Panther: “we see how queerness and empire building are not mutually exclusive. She [Bessie] can dress like a man because of the drive to expand. The need for labor in The West facilitates [Bessie’s] queer play. In this unregulated and wild space, new identities could be taken on and played within. Just as imperialism will always resolve at the feet of the patriarchy, so does the film. A Range Romance may be a bittersweet tale about how cinema forestalls queerness….” before necessarily appeasing the censors.

     Finally, this film is fascinating because it represents what one might describe as a double—albeit heteronormative—outing, as a child of her parents and as a person of another gender other than what she had so long pretended to be. It might be safe to say that this is the very first “coming out” film.

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).