D. W. Griffith | The Reformers; or, The Lost Art of Minding One's Business / 1913

gay prudes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frank E. Woods (scenario), D. W. Griffith (director) The Reformers; or, The Lost Art of Minding One's Business / 1913

 

This harsh satirical look at the reform business involves two central figures, a man described as The Father (Charles Hill Mailes) and The Mother (Jennie Lee), strict disciplinarian parents of the old school who dress as if they were still on an Amish farm. Both check in on their children after returning from a visit in the town, hoping to find them still busily studying their school lessons. Shocked, they discover their son (Robert Harron) sharing a book of racy stories with his sister (Mae Marsh). The Father quickly tosses the book away and insists they return to their studies.

 

    Evidently he is about to be visited by the League of Civic Purity to be asked to serve as their leader and to run as well for Mayor of the city. The League consists of several stern-looking women, dressed similarly in black garb, including actors Gertrude Bambrick and Kathleen Butler among others. Two men dressed in suits are among their group, consisting mostly of the Griffith Players regulars, Joseph Jiquel Lanoe and Adolph Lestina, the latter of whom was said to have actually “discovered” Griffith, making sure that Griffith was chosen to play a major stage role early in the director’s career.

 

    The Father agrees to serve the League and run for mayor as the group takes to the street, eventually through the course of the 33-minute film closing down a dance hall, a bar, a movie house showing a film version of Macbeth, and a local theater which includes a minstrel show scene starring one man performing in drag (Gus Pixley), a scene from Shakespeare’s Othello, and young girls performing terpsichorean feats. Indeed, all the city’s innocent pleasures are shut down, the police working in tandem with the League which The Father now leads. Even innocent conversation between two teenage girls and a boy on the street is forbidden.

     Meanwhile, back in the untended house, the son brings in Jameson (Walter Miller), a “bad influence” who encourages the son to drink from the bottles of liquor he carries in his pockets and begins to attend to and seduce the daughter.

     The first time the parents return, Jameson sneaks out, the daughter intrigued by the new admirer and the son just a little tipsy. But by the end of the work, when The Father and The Mother return have successfully emptied the town of all its pleasures, they discover their son totally inebriated and their daughter hiding in the closet with Jameson, realizing that while minding everybody else’s business, they have ignored their own.

     The film returns to themes that Griffith broaches in several of his films, the destruction of pleasure by well-meaning but sometimes even evil-minded authority figures. 

    What brings this work to my pages is the fact that the two male do-gooders in this work are obviously a gay couple, whose priggish mannerisms, and perpetual hand gestures which clearly put them in the same league with the “sissie” caricatures in the movies of 1912-1916 I describe above. Shane Brown groups them as being part of the same phenomenon.

      However, these sissies are not at all made to feel ostracized from the society, but are part of the most conservative and moral elements of their world. What’s more, it is apparent that these two are not just acquaintances or even friends, but are a couple who behave in communion with one another and seek out one another’s approval the way couples generally do. Griffith features this fussy duo, in fact, focusing the camera on them in almost all the scenes in which the League of Civic Purity is involved. That these sexual outsiders could also be representatives of “civic purity” is, of course, ironic and intentional, making clear once again the hypocrisy of such reformers who also force drinkers to begin sharing their bootleg bottles on the street instead of the saloon. Everything in such a world now becomes, in some respect, closeted, just as are the daughter and her boyfriend are in the very last frame of the film.

    Incidentally, the other figure performing as the gay couple, Lanoe, was an openly gay French-born actor who played in over 100 American Biograph films. Griffith featured him as the Eunuch in his Judith of Bethulia made the year after this film.

      I believe this was the first gay couple to be represented in US cinema. Of course, such obvious deviants could not be portrayed to be on the side of the open sinners.

 

Los Angeles, October 10, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).