edna foster, boy performer
Edna Foster played both young women and the male character Billy in
several of the Biograph movies directed by D. W. Griffith. She evidently
maintained the “Billy” nickname and some senses of the character off the screen
as well, film historian Susan Stryker suggesting she was identified in fan
magazines for her muscular development and her short-trimmed hair, and was
known for wearing male attire in public. Whether or not the actor perceived
herself as transsexual or transgender is not known.
It was clear that Griffith
was attracted to her for her ability to visually convey the emotions of a young
boy, which she does particularly well in The Adventures of Billy and
several of her other films.
*
finding a family
James Carroll (screenplay), D. W. Griffith (director) The
Adventures of Billy / 1911
We first spot “Billy” awakening from a
difficult night on a bed of straw near a back yard of a lumber mill and
industrial garbage. Billy picks up his shoeshine kit and hits the streets, but is
thoroughly disappointed when three men in a row reject her offer to give them
shine.
Determining that he is no longer able to find work in town, Billy takes
to the road, walking long and hard. Finally exhausted, he curls up by a brick
wall to fall asleep, two older tramps (the later renowned actor Donald Crisp
and Joseph Graybill) coming across the kid, amused by his situation. They wake
him and he evidently tells them that he too is “on the road” (the film contains
no intertitles, so we have to merely speculate about their conversation). And,
in what is surely one of the first examples of cinema outside of J. Stuart
Blackton’s filmic version of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (1908) we
witness a child being abused by adults.
The
two males befriend the boy—it is important to note that Foster plays Billy as a
boy, not as a girl dressed up like boy, and that he remains a boy through to
the film’s end, as in all of her other “Billy” pictures—and for a moment we can
see Billy’s need for adult company, as he smiles and leans into the first
tramp’s body as if finally, he has discovered the father he has obviously never
known. But the tramps soon turn that “friendship” into demands and threats as
they force him to beg for them.
He
first succeeds with an elderly woman who delivers up a wrapped paper with meat
bones and cakes, the older tramps handing him a small cake while they devour
the ribs.
At
a second location of what appears to be the home of a rich family and their
summer guests (Dell Henderson and Claire McDowell), he waits for the maid (Kate
Bruce) to bring him sweets; the family dogs comes running in to sit on the
daughter’s lap, Billy enjoying his chance to pet it.
By
the time he returns to other tramps with the treat, however, they have spotted
another local farmer paying a friend a rather large sum of money over a nearby
fence, and they determine to seek out the bigger reward. The two tramps grab
the father, slug him, and push his head to the ground, in the process
unintentionally killing him. The first tramp, nonetheless, grabs the money. But
both become immediately afraid that Billy, who has watched their actions in
horror, might report their deed to others.
The
first tramp (Crisp) locks him away, after threatening him in a nearby shed.
Although the boy has promised that he won’t tell anyone what he’s witnessed,
the pair are still fearful of what he might do, determining to kill him with a
knife.
In
the meantime, most of the rich family and their friends have piled into a car
for a short country ride, their pet dog following after. As they briefly stop
near the body and the shed for car problems, the dog comes running over.
Hearing the dog and spotting a small knotty hole in the structure near the
ground, Billy calls over the pet, writes a note reporting what has happened,
and places it into the dog’s mouth.
When the car full of revelers returns home, one of them spots the piece
of paper in their pet’s mouth, and they all jump into the car once again to
find the shed and save the boy who has written the call for help.
The tramps toss a coin to decide which one of them will accomplish the
evil deed, the mustachioed second tramp (Graybill) losing to his friend. They
return to the cabin, with the first grabbing the terrorized child while the
second tramp raises the knife high in preparation for the stabbing—but he
suddenly breaks down, unable to complete the act.
At that very moment the others arrive, break into the cabin and witness
the act, Billy pointing at his remaining notebook to confirm his deed. The men
take the two villains away, and a young remaining couple ask of Billy if he
would wish to join the daughter in becoming a member of their family. At first
hardly believing what he’s hearing, he looks up in tough bemusement, but after
a moment of realization of what he has just been asked, he breaks down into
sobs as he hugs the woman, nestling up to her with a feeling of safety and
pleasure for perhaps the first time in his young life.
It
is a touching moment, and one in which the young thespian triumphs in her
acting.
How many “Billy” movies were made and how many still survive is hard to
determine. But I have found four others which I will also discuss, not because
any of them contain what might be described as gay content, but because their
easy assimilation of a female straightforwardly performing as a male represents
yet another way in which early silent films embraced cross-dressing beyond the
comic drag performances of both males and females, the male-oriented behavior
of tomboys, and the female impersonations of the sissies, along with the female
adaptation of male dress in order to self-protect herself in dangerous rural or
all-male environments among other purposeful disguises used by several figures
in these films of the first two decades of the 20th century.
In
a strange way, the child’s innocence and the clever responses of Billy on his
voyage of self-discovery in this film reminds one a bit of the 1950 gay classic
by James Broughton, Adventures of Jimmy, wherein Jimmy, in this case a
gay boy who doesn’t yet know it, leaves the house of his dead parents imagining
all the wonderful new worlds he may soon encounter and trying to determine
whether or not he might fit in.
One wonders whether this Billy after learning to fend for himself so
well will fit into the confines of traditional family life. In nothing else,
the constantly tired child will find a way to catch up on his sleep.
Los Angeles, July 5, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July
2023).
*
playing dumb
D. W. Griffith (screenplay and director) A Country Cupid / 1911
In July of 1911, a few months before the
October release of The Adventures of Billy, Griffith presented A
Country Cupid. There’s not a great deal one can say about Griffith’s early
outing with the “Billy” character. Here the young boy is in love with his
beautiful school teacher, Edith (Blanche Sweet), who Edna Foster claimed she
also loved in real life.
Edith is loved by the local boy Jack (Edwin August), much to all the
school girls’ fascination as they shame him for even hanging around the school
for her lunch break. But Billy is utterly furious with man; after all, it’s he
who gets her full love instead of Billy.
Another local man, the “Half-Wit,” as he’s described, who’s fond of
flowers, is also in love with Edith; but with men like Jack nearby, even the
half-wit knows there’s no hope for him and quickly grows violent.
Meanwhile, over lunch Jack and Edith have a fight, evidently over her
demand that he allow her to read a private letter without his first seeing it.
(Again, Griffith has relied so strongly on the acting and gestures of his cast
that he provides no intertitles.) Angry with his behavior, she breaks off their
engagement, removing the ring from her finger.
Jack goes off, the entire row observed by Billy, who constantly hangs
around, hoping to get her attention while at the same time afraid if she
notices him she might send him off. Almost immediately Edith regrets her temper
and writes a note to Jack apologizing and asking him to come by for her that
afternoon. Still miffed, however, for his behavior, she ends up tossing the
note in the wastebasket.
Curious to what the note said, when Edith isn’t looking Billy fishes it
out, realizing the ridiculousness of the two adult lovers’ situation, and how
his feelings for her don’t really matter. Billy decides to mail the note off,
putting it in Jack’s mailbox and returning for the afternoon school session.
As the students, this time Billy with them, move off home, Edith stays
after to correct some papers. The “Half-Wit,” still furious over Edith’s
refusal to pay him attention, plays with his handgun, appearing to be mulling
over the possibility of killing himself. But suddenly, he turns more violent
and moves off the school room, entering without Edith noticing.
For a moment, his love for her so moves him that he seems quite
harmless, but when he makes his presence known, her horror of his being there
turns him a violent avenger once more. Seeing the gun in his hand, Edith
recoils in horror, much as the young maidens do in all turn-of-the-century
melodrama. Remembering, however, the bunch of flowers he brought her that
morning, she pulls them out from the podium shelf where she left them,
indicating that he does mean something to her.
Again, he is momentarily tamed, laying the gun down, which she quickly
picks up and points it at him.
Having received her note, Jack is on his way to the school, and peeking
in the school window before entering sees the altercation within, rushing in to
save Edith and send her poor witless lover off.
The schoolteacher is delighted in how things have turned out, but
doesn’t understand why Jack has returned, until he mentions her note. She
remembers having written it and throwing it away, and, for the moment, the two
are confused by the differences in their realities. Billy, who has followed
Jack to the school, however, explains his role in the affair, and finally Edith
invites him to kiss her. He hesitates, pointing to Jack, but she quickly leans
forward, pulling him up into her arms, suggesting that she can have both a man
and a boy in her life. Billy beams with the happiness of finally being able to
mean something to her.
Unlike the second episode, this first movie in the series is simply a
superficial statement about country love, allowing actor Edna Fisher very
little to do but play the bashful youth in love with someone who leaves him
speechless. Even silent movies need a language behind their characters’
actions.
Los Angeles, July 5, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July
2023).
*
impersonation and
disguise
Edward Acker (screenplay), D. W. Griffith
(director) A Terrible Discovery / 1911
One of the very best of the Biograph shorts
starring Edna Foster as a male child was A Terrible Discovery, in which
her role is not as “Billy,” but simply described as “The District Attorney’s
Son.”
Dick
(Charles Hill Mailes) is bitter about the local District Attorney (Wilfred
Lucas) having just successfully convicted his gangster brother, and is angrily
plotting some way to get his revenge.
The
District Attorney lives alone with his son, no reason given for his wife’s
absence. He loves the boy dearly, and when his son comes in crying, having
heard from their housekeeper (Kate Bruce) that his father’s life may be in
danger, the elder tells his son to cheer up, he has nothing to worry about, and
proceeds to take a long walk through the neighborhood with the boy, many of his
neighbors and colleagues congratulating him for his recent conviction along the
way.
By
the end of the walk, the boy has even a higher estimation of her father than he
did previously.
Our
villain Dick, in the meantime, has cooked up what he believes is a perfect
plot. Dressing in drag disguised as an old lady, he proceeds to the Attorney’s
neighborhood, and seeing the man and boy leave the house is almost ready to use
his gun, hidden in an umbrella, to shoot down his enemy in the street, until a
friend of the Attorney suddenly appears and blocks Dick’s vantage point.
Nonetheless, dressed as the old lady, he stalks them even on their walk, and
when they return to the house, seats himself on their porch as if he has
suddenly suffered heart palpitations.
Noticed by the young son, who asks after him, he pretends that
everything will be all right as soon as he gets a little rest, and the boy,
being properly raised by his father, immediately gets the housekeeper, with who
he invites the strange lady into the house to rest.
The
Attorney himself intrudes, and seeing the ill lady, demands she be taken up to
a bedroom to lay down and rest. He returns to his study while his son retreats
to his own room. Almost immediately, Dick pulls off his drag clothes, finds the
Attorney’s gun in a drawer and empties its chamber and with his own gun in hand
stalking the hallways and moves downstairs to find his target. Finding the
study empty, he spots the telephone and cuts the wires.
The
Attorney, meanwhile, has gone upstairs to check on his guest and bring some
tea, and not finding her there is confused, checking out the other rooms before
returning downstairs to check out the dining room and kitchen. With no sign of
the old woman, he attempts to make a call to the local police when he discovers
that the line has been cut, as the intertitles broadcast, coming to a
“Realization.”
He
immediately returns upstairs and enters his own room, pulling out his gun only
to discover the chamber has been removed. Locking the door, he attempts to
block it with his body as the intruder pushes upon it and tries to break in, at
one point even filling the door with several bullets.
A
little too early in the story to make logical cinematic sense, his son, still in
his own room, has already procured a rope and, as the father retreats further
to his son’s bedroom, he suggests he help to lower him via the rope down the
side of the house. The maneuver, which requires the actor to coil the rope
around his own body in order to slowly lower the child hanging from it, seems
dangerous. Hopefully they used a stunt artist, but in the early days of Hollywood
the actors were often quite intrepid since financial resources and time were
often limited.
In
any event, the son makes it to the ground and hurries off to find a policeman.
The villain makes it finally through the second door and they wrestle for a
short while before the police with boy leading them break into the room and
drag off Dick, who presumably will now join his brother in prison.
Griffith’s intercuts between the various viewpoints of the villain and
would-be victims, of inside and outside, and his simple movement of the camera
about the house represents some of best of his early filmmaking. One of the
most interesting aspects of this film, moreover, is how it uses cross-dressing
in two different ways, neither of them having anything to do with the popular
drag comic performances. Here it serves both as simple female impersonation of
a boy and disguise, in both cases working to great dramatic effect.
Los Angeles, July 6, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July
2023).
*
sex education
George Hennessy (screenplay), D. W. Griffith (director) The Baby
and the Stork / 1912
By January 1912, the date of at least the 4th
episode in which Edna Foster plays a boy, Billy had become Bobby, and he was no
longer an adventurer or problem-solver but the rather pampered son of the
nameless characters played by actors Claire McDowell and Charles Hill Mailes,
the villain of the previous film. The genre has also changed to a comedy, if
only Griffith had been satisfied to tell it as such.
The
film begins by establishing the boy’s close and loving relationship with both
parents as his mother reads to him and his father enters greeting his son with
a couple on kisses on his forehead and top of his head. Almost immediately
after they both leave the room, Bobby breaks down in tears; his mother having
been evidently talking or reading to him about their plans to have another baby
and Bobby is suddenly terrified that when the baby comes, they will cease
loving him.
Returning to the room and finding him in this condition, his mother
quickly reassures him that he will never lose her love, his father soon after,
upon hearing of his son’s fears, also hugging his boy close to him.
“Sometime later,” however, the day when Bobby’s mother is in labor,
nurses, the maid, and housekeeper all rush around, even pushing his father out
of the way as they declare that he may not enter his wife’s bedroom. Bobby,
appealing to his father for a little attention is sluffed off because of his
own worries, and when the boy attempts to go to his mother, the father has no
other choice but to call the maid to take him to the zoo.
There, as they observe various bird species, the busybody tells the boy
the wives’ tale of “The Baby and the Stock.” Bobby is quite impressed, and at
the stork cage writes a note to the storks, telling them to keep the baby at
the zoo instead of delivering the infant to his house.
By the time he returns home, his baby sibling has been born and
everything has changed in just the way he feared. Everyone in the house is now
holding, cooing, and attending to the newborn while Bobby is not only left to
himself but is literally pushed out of the way when he gets too close to the
baby.
Forlorn, he leaves the house, encountering a coal man gathering up coals
(Edward Dillon) into sacks, begging him to allow him to help, and even
attempting to lift up a heavy sack to place them in the shed. The workman
quickly grabs it away from him, puts it in the shed, and locks it up, now on
his way home to his own family. Bobby follows him along the way, finally being
told to go back him; but some of his parents’ friends have spotted the boy
trotting along with the Sicilian workman.
Meanwhile, we see the workman enter his own home with very young
daughter and new born, which he delightedly lifts up and kisses, his wife
suggesting he go for a walk with the baby.
Now completely desolate, Bobby returns hope and seeing the baby gets an
idea. When the others have left the room, he quickly bundles his brother or
sister into a small carrying basket and runs off straight to the zoo to return
it, of course, to the storks! A zoo keeper spots him, sees what he’s left at
the stork cage and runs after him, finally catching the boy by the ruff of his
neck. When he is told by Bobby why he brought a living baby to the zoo, he
picks up the basket and with the boy in the other hand heads off to the boy’s
abode.
As
I suggested, this could have been a sweet comedy, but the moralizing Griffith
takes out several frames to show the distress and terror of both mother and
father, forcing them to gesticulate in the manner of high operatic melodrama.
Unless their melodramatic behavior is itself meant as satire—which I highly
doubt, but might have been given the fact that the couple seem not in the least
troubled by the fact that their son has disappeared—Griffith has robbed his own
work of the comic delight. Moreover, when the parents call the police, they
also discover that two friends have seen the boy with the Italian workman, and
encountering the man out on his stroll his own baby, presume it to be the
missing newborn, arresting both him and his wife, and dragging them to Bobby’s
parents. Today, of course, the racism involved with the police and friend’s
instinctive suspicions of a recent migrant might sound all too familiar.
And even after Bobby’s mother, at first relieved, becomes even more
horrified to find someone else’s baby in the basket the police bring to her,
establishing the fact that the child must surely belong to the coal man and his
wife as they claim, the cops still appear to manhandle them as if trying to
discover some crime of which they might still be guilty.
The arrival, of course, by the zookeeper and the basket Bobby has
sacrificed to the storks, clears up most of the confusion; and both father and
mother, having learned their lesson, turn their attentions momentarily to
Bobby, finally introducing him more fully to his own brother or sister. All is
right again, it appears, in Bobby’s middleclass paradise.
One can only imagine how shaken up the Italian workman, his wife, and
young daughter will remain, however, for some long time. Evidently, it’s not
even safe for a man like him to carry his own infant to the park.
Now if only someone can begin to explain to parents and other
responsible individuals that children should be taught more about sex and less
about storks.
Los Angeles, July 6, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July
2023).
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