Otis Turner | A Cave Man Wooing / 1912

how not to pick up woman

by Douglas Messerli

 

B. M. Connors (screenplay), Otis Turner (director) A Cave Man Wooing / 1912 || difficult to obtain

 

Although a copy of this film survives in the EYE Film Institute Netherlands in Amsterdam, Otis Turner’s A Cave Man Wooing is virtually unavailable for US viewing.

     But we do have descriptions of its plot, and from the Moving Picture World synopsis we can easily perceive that it follows the story introduced by Alice Guy Blaché in Algie, the Miner of the same year. A “sissy” boy, George (King Baggot) is in love with a woman Clarice (Violet Horner) dedicated to athletics. Clarice is also loved by the 'normal' strapping, muscle-bound stud Sam (William E. Shay) with whom George cannot even imagine competing.

 

     George, however, reads an article in the newspaper by a famous female writer who argues that women respond to the cave-man methods of male species, just as they did hundreds of years earlier.

      George joins of class in physical culture and after a series of humorous and embarrassing situations finally begins to develop muscles and perform feats of great strength which begin to impress his friends, family, and finally even Clarice. At the end of an evening of surprises, George simply picks up Clarice, who hasn’t even time to resist, and hurries off to the minister’s house to be married.

       When Clarice finally realizes the situation into which he taken her, she begins to strongly react in a manner that George, the strong man, pretends not even notice. And the marriage is performed. Clarice fortunately comes to realize that she really does like George, and when her entire family descend upon them to protest, she sends them away, leaving behind only the newlywed couple.

       In his Queer Sexualities in Early Film Shane Brown concludes that the “sissy” character probably was created by Guy Blaché. But given the fact that Algie appeared only 4 months before this film it may have not been her influence that provided the many similarities but the fact that such a figure had long existed in burlesque and vaudeville theater, as well as fiction.

        And as I discuss above, while Russo, Barrio, and I argue that such a figure is simply another manifestation of the male queer figure, a homosexual, Shane suggests that the issue is not sexuality but one of gender. Indeed, he cites the later David Wayne character Kip Laurie in George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib as another example, a man who acts more like a woman but by film’s end has fallen in love with Amanda (Katherine Hepburn). I think what Shane is arguing is not so much about gender itself but about the way gender is defined and perceived. The weak and effeminate men who love the arts instead of sports are simply defined as “sissies” by the society at large.

         Although that may, in fact, be true, the type is still today played out in thousands of LGBTQ films as gay boys who are beaten up in the high school hallways by the sportsmen bullies. And the character, it seems to me, is still thought to be and even defined by society as being gay, even if he is actually aroused by the female sex.

     Although I make this point above as well, it doesn’t hurt to emphasize that what Shane and other well-meaning deniers who maintain characters who seek out women in film cannot be described as homosexual don’t seem to take into account is that not only directors of the day but even as late as 1949, the date of Cukor’s film, could not present a hero that did not end up with a girl, despite and indeed because of his gay behavior. No audiences would take kindly for the character ending the film by still liking boys, or in Kip’s case, preferring to be a woman—although I believe that description of his is quite exaggerated. The only way to explore such characters was to transform them by film’s end into mock heterosexuals, which of course is what nearly every film after 1934 did with their coded gay figures. The fact that in numerous films Cary Grant pretends attraction to and ends up with women does not mean that his characters are not gay.

        The “romance between” or “attraction to” such figures and women was simply an inevitable gesture, not the reality of the character the writer or director was attempting to satirize. And in the case of both Guy Blaché and Turner’s film, and later in Roy Clement’s movie, the true target of the satire was not the sissy himself but what how the society defined a heterosexual and what such a non-heterosexual figure would have to undergo to become one. In the case of A Cave Man Wooing, for George to get a girl like Clarice, so the movie argues, he would have to change into a beast who would simply be willing to rape her. I remind the reader, that to carry someone or something off is the primary definition of “rape.”

     Only in the comic fantasies of movies and vaudeville stereotype is a “sissy” desirous of becoming or able to become “a man” in the way the society has imagined such a being. And the subject is not the object of such a desire but the definition of what being “a man” to attain his goal might mean. This movie, like Algie, the Miner, does not at all care whether the sissy boy and his wife end up in bed, set up a house, or even have a family. The joke is about the definition of what a man who might “attain” such a woman might look like and what it means, mostly a gross distortion of the sensitive and lovely being with whom the story began.  

 

Los Angeles, September 30, 2022