Alfred E. Green | Parachute Jumper / 1933

a gay male farce

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Francis Larkin (screenplay, based on a story by Rian James), Alfred E. Green (director) Parachute Jumper / 1933

 

Alfred E. Green’s 1933 film is ostensibly a heterosexual comedy in which Bill Keller (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is romantically involved with two women, one a wealthy mistress of the film’s villain, Mrs. Newberry (Claire Dodd) who hires him as a chauffeur whom she hopes  to engage in sexual pleasures after hours, and Alabama (Patrica) Brent (Bette Davis), a woman without a job or a place to stay, whom he invites to share his and his friend Toddles Cooper’s (Frank McHugh) apartment—even though, as Bill later puts it, their rent is so overdue that their bankrupt landlady wants to move in with them.

     Bette Davis does not remember this film fondly, describing it as “dead last” in the films she made. And many critics have savagely attacked the movie. Its dialogue, however, is often quite witty, and the plot is for cleverer than one might imagine. It is however unkind to Davis in several respects, mostly given the fact that she had not discovered her persona and does a rather poor Alabama accent that comes and goes and the story continues. I’d argue it her acting that is weak, not necessarily the film.          For the most part, the movie attempts to portray Fairbanks as a version of Clark Gable, which generally works, except that his interchanges with both the women of the film, Dodd and Davis, are lacking in intensity and even believability. What John Francis Larkin’s script concentrates upon, even if the plot seems to go in another direction, is Fairbanks’ remarkable relationships in this film with men.

      In the story, Bill and Toodles begin as Marine flyers, who as in all such movies, have established a deep friendship that borders on a bromance. As Toodles, McHugh is especially personable, singing throughout the film at the oddest moments while still making a wisecrack that demonstrates his love and admiration of his roommate.

 

      Their relationship, if not precisely gay, certainly flirts with the possibility, in one scene the two engaging in a rather fey series of comments as Bill virtually strips Toodles, who has just returned exhausted from searching for jobs, Bill needing to put on his pants simply because it is the only pair the two own, and change into his friend’s shirt and tie since is own are drying over the bathtub. Bill, slapping his friend with the imitation loose wrist of a queer, comments: “If you sewed your panties once in a while, we could hunt jobs together,” hinting that a shared experience together might be great fun, like two gay men out shopping.

     Toodles answers “Sewing is woman’s job.” Then turning his fanny towards Bill, he adds, “But I can run you up a hooked rug,” suggesting by the word “hooked” the street word for engaging in sex, and in the word rug, hinting at the hirsute condition of his behind. This scene, in which the two clearly are playing with notions of gay sex, doesn’t represent exactly new territory for Fairbanks, Jr.

  Unlike his macho father, the younger Fairbanks has long been rumored to have explored homosexuality as a young man, perhaps with gay tennis star Bill Tilden, who was evidently quite fond of younger boys, being arrested twice for having sex with boys, one aged 14, another 17. Tilden, who was a close friend of Charlie Chaplin, often played on Chaplin’s home tennis court and was well known to Fairbanks’ parents, Douglas, Sr. and Mary Pickford. Douglas, Jr. was a teenager in just those years when Tilden was winning his first championships. Below are photos with Douglas Fairbanks Sr, Bill Tilden, Charlie Chaplin, and Spanish tennis player Manuelo Alonso from 1923, and another of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. with Lester Stoefen, Bill Tilden, Paulette Godard, and a young Judy Garland. Fairbanks, we should remember, was also a child actor.

 

     

 

    Fairbanks Jr. went on to marry three times, Joan Crawford in 1929, Mary Lee Epling in 1939, and Vera Shelton in 1991, bearing three children. But throughout his life, Fairbanks’ closet friends were gay and bisexual, among them Laurence Olivier, Noël Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, Beatrice Lillie, Prince George, Duke of Kent, and Rex Harrison. And during his marriage to Crawford he had an affair, he admits, with Katherine Hepburn.

      It’s fascinating, I would argue, that Olivier and Hepburn were bisexual, Hepburn according to Scotty Bowers’ Full Service, being primarily lesbian, as were Gertrude Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie, long rumored to have had an affair together. Coward, as is well known, was an open homosexual in a time when being so was truly dangerous, and the Duke of Kent had an affair with Coward for 19 years as well as covert gay relationships with several other men.* Although Harrison, who married four times, was known to be a homophobe, some friends argued that it was simply a front to hide his own bisexuality. Harrison is certainly not known for his sympathetic relationships with women, two of his wives having committed suicide. All of which perhaps made him perfect for the character of Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady, a misogynist who preferred the company of his friend Colonel Hugh Pickering.

      Moreover, at least two of Fairbanks Jr.’s early film roles were ones in which he played gay men: A Woman of Affairs (1928) and Little Ceasar (1931). In the first Fairbanks plays Jeffry Merrick, brother to Greta Garbo’s character Diana, a woman who is in love with Jeffry’s dear friend and imagined lover David Furness (Johnny Mack Brown). As I wrote of that film, based on Michael Arlen’s almost scandalous 1924 fiction, The Green Hat:

 

      “The moment that David wins the rowing competition for Cambridge the very next day, Jeffry leaps down a substantial distance—almost as Fairbanks’ athletic father might have—from the high banked viewing cabana where he has been watching the race with others in order to be at the river spot where David shores his boat, the first to greet and congratulate him.

       If this isn’t love, pure homosexual desire—not youthful idolatry as the script would have it—I might never trust my “gaydar” again. But I can fully trust director Clarence Brown’s coding and strangely Fairbanks’ compliant acting. Jeffry loves David so deeply that when the latter jumps to his death, Jeffry immediately retires to a room in order to drink himself to death. The film allows no other logical explanation. In short, Jeffry is a homosexual in love with David, whether or not they have ever engaged in sex.”

 

        In the later film, Fairbanks’ first major role, he plays Caesar Enrico Bandello’s long-time friend and gang partner, Joe Massara, who leaves his friend to become a nightclub dancer, with an only slightly coded message that he remains Caesar’s deepest love, who despite his new “assistant”/lover Otero, he cannot do without, and whose courting of and demand that Joe return ends in Little Caesar’s death.

      My point in all of this is that writers and directors seemed not at all afraid to use the young Fairbanks Jr. as a handsome figure representing, even if highly coded, a homosexual. In their minds Fairbanks fit the part. And his acting, in both these roles, are some of the best moments of his early career.

      Is it any wonder then that the very best moments of Parachute Jumper are when Bill finally hooks up with the film’s villain, Weber (Leo Carrillo), the actor a leading man at this point in his career who would later be forced to play Pancho to Duncan Renaldo’s The Cisco Kid, one of whose major films was titled The Gay Amigo (1949).

    Once Weber discovers the chauffeur kissing his girlfriend, moreover at her insistence, he immediately rids himself and the film of Mrs. Newberry, and from that moment on stays as close as he can get to Bill, using him as his truly “in house” body guard.

       It is, in fact, at this point when the dialogue suddenly ceases being merely clever small talk and begins to truly take on sexual connotations, although previously while Alabama and Cuddles wait outside of Mrs. Newberry’s mansion wherein their friend Bill is trapped, they too begin to move the film into some of its sexual dimensions.

      Having just been told that he’s been asked to light Mrs. Newberry’s fireplace, the two wait below.

     Tired of their wait, Alabama laments, “He’s been up there an hour Toddles. It wouldn’t take that long to light a fire with a pocket lighter.”

     Cuddles answers in a manner that might almost suggest a male/male encounter: “Maybe he’s rubbing two dry sticks together.”

      Alabama adds: “Look, one of the lights went out,” with Cuddles still attempting to cover for his friend, “He’s making a few electrical repairs.”

        But it’s only when Weber has finally kicked out his girlfriend that things truly light up with sexual innuendo.

        

          carillo: “Now that we’ve turned this into a stag affair, would you like a little drink?

          bill: “Try me.”

          carillo: I must admit, you are some shot. So, in a manner of speaking, I could use a young man. I like your intestinal fortitude.”

 

      Bill considers the all-male world which Carillo is hinting at. But before he can even answer, Carillo continues: “Do you object to cracking**…I should say “bending” the law a little bit?”

      Even Bill is not certain to what law he is referring, the law of sexual desire or the civil laws of society: “What law?”

       “The one we all laugh at.”

       Understandably Bill is still a bit confused and more than a little troubled. But Carillo even makes it clearer in the coded language he is speaking: “You don’t know how uneasy I am without a stout friend behind by back.”

       On the surface, of course, he is simply inviting bill to be his bodyguard, but even Bill is not so naïve that he doesn’t recognize a sexual come on, answering “I’ll try anything once.”

       Carillo’s answer is still sexually loaded; “And it’s much better than being shot climbing under a bed,” suggesting, one imagines, that Bill “climb into bed with him” instead.

        Even now, as I retype the lines I hear in the film, I’m startled that many people will accuse me of “reading in,” and that several of my most sophisticated friends will not perceive the multiple sexual puns. To me, it shows that coding is still quite effective. We in the US are still such a puritan folk when it comes to sex that we simply cannot imagine that people speak in such a “winking” language, even though, in this case, Alabama realizes that “even the stars are winking.”

        But if we thought that might be the end of their sexual game-playing, the script only prolongs it, as we soon discover that as a body guard, Corillo requires Bill to actually remain in a sort of closet, a side room of his office covered by large curtin which, at the push of a button, opens so that Bill can finally come out momentarily to protect him. Never before was the idea of living a closeted life made more literal in film until works such as Wrik Mead’s Closet Case (1995)

        Understandably, Bill complains: “I feel like I’m practicing to be a hermit being in there all day alone….”

        Carillo responds: You’re getting paid to be lonesome. …Get behind that curtain and stay there. Let me give you some advice, put women out of your mind while you’re working for me.”

        Never has a starving, supposedly heterosexual hero had to pay so much to a gay sex-starved villain in order to finally get his girl, which, of course, is a conclusion necessary in all such films. Even Cuddles adjures him for not getting a vaccination for love, as Cuddles finally once again joins up with the Marines, with three meals a day and all the friendly men he might want.

 

       And even in the final moments of this male-on-male oriented film, in search of Alabama, as Bill begins to open door after door of a high rise in which he’s seen her enter, he pulls one door too many to find a scene out of almost any of the early 1930s films, a prissy male secretary (played by, who else, but Franklin Pangborn?) taking notes from a quite obviously lesbian boss, a perfect closing vignette for what is basically a gay male farce.

          And I haven’t even spoken about all the between-the-legs hard rod maneuvering it takes for both Bill and Toddles to bring their planes back to safety. As one Letterboxd commentator named Genry put it: “there’s no way Joseph Breen would have approved Douglas Fairbanks Jr. holding a thick, long pilot stick between his legs like that.”

         No wonder Bette Davis didn’t like this film! The female role was merely obligatory.

                

* According to the internet site The Rake, love letters from George to Coward were believed to have been stolen from Coward’s house in 1942, and another group of letters had to be bought back from a male prostitute in Paris who was blackmailing him. Additional gossip suggests that George dallied with his distant cousin Prince of Prussia Louis Ferdinand and with art historian and, later, Soviet spy Anthony Blunt.

 

**”Cracking” here clearly means entering the asshole, which his next term, “bending” further hints at. But since Weber’s major business, it turns out, is narcotics, it also hints at the use of “crack cocaine.”

 

Los Angeles, January 3, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).