James W. Horne | Yoo-Hoo / 1932

escapes from the perverted culture

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Stevens and J. A. Howe (screenplay), James W. Horne (director) Yoo-Hoo / 1932

 

With the obvious exceptions of animated cartoons, travelogues, and news reels, the 1930s did not particularly mine the form so popular in the first two decades of the 20th century, the short film. There were, however, a few short films such as the very likeable work, directed by James W. Horne, from 1932, Yoo-Hoo, just 20-minutes in length, starring the memorable character actor James Gleason.

     But even this short film, influenced by its time, begins with a wonderful pansy event. The film begins with Jimmy Gleason working on a telephone line, one of the cables blocking the desert highway.  A truck pulls up to the cable and honks its horn, forcing the grouchy Gleason to shout out his complaints, “All right, keep your shirt on, you’ll get by.”

      The driver does not seem pleased with the lineman’s pronouncements, honking again, and turning Gleason into an even grumpier worker. “Oh, you’re gonna be that way, are you?”

      The drive exits the truck and begins to pull on the line, Gleason shimmying down the pole. As Gleason readies to duke it out, the burly driver (Billy Gilbert) opens his mouth to speak in a high, effeminate voice, “Pleaaase! I merely wanted to get by. I’m in a hurry.” Gleason, realizing that he’s merely dealing with a pansy, mugs in imitation, as the driver, staring back with a smile of appreciation and flirtation, drives away, his name I. M. Sweet being revealed on the back of his truck.

      In any other movie, the film would move on to its far more important heterosexual concerns. But this film continues in a strange trajectory that involves issues of child abuse and, from some perspectives I am sure, even a kind of pedophilia.

      In the very next frame, we see a mean couple shouting out their anger about an escaped boy, and a moment later we see the boy, Rooster (Bobby ‘Wheezer’ Hutchins), running and hiding under a drop cloth left beside Gleason’s truck. The angry man (Frank Austin), at first seeming to be the boy’s father, demands to know if Gleason has seen “a little rat around here, a boy.” Gleason hasn’t a clue what the man is talking about.

      But in the next moment he discovers the boy hiding under his canvas, the nasty adult offering him now $10 if he finds him, and quickly changing it to $15. What we quickly discover is that this despicable man is not the boy’s father but the head of an farm that is paid to keep orphan boys, most of whom, as Rooster later tells us, have already escaped the regular beatings and other forms of abuse they are forced to suffer.*

      Observing the boy’s wounds on his body—Rooster even willing to show him those on his ass, but Gleason backing away from such sexually explicit evidence—Gleason absconds with the boy, taking him to his own apartment. He introduces the boy to his female neighbor, Anita (Antia Garvin), demands the kid take a shower, and gives up his bed to the boy, only to discover in the morning that Rooster has crawled into the couch in which he spent the night to cuddle up to the older man.

     This little film turns out to be one of Gleason’s best films, as he quickly reveals his love for the child, despite his characteristic grouchiness. And in the end Antia and Gleason even determine to marry to keep the child safely in their hands as opposed to the inquisitive detectives.

     Yoo-Hoo is actually a lovely greeting to a world that freely and with good cause broke the rules of the early Depression morality, allowing us to say hello to other moral perspectives until it all came crumbling down in the restrictions on film established in 1934. Yet strangely, despite this film’s interesting revelations, its moral heart offers up an escape from the perversions of the general culture as if defines them.

 

*The state offered up abandoned children and young juvenile offenders to farmers even through the 1950s, basically enslaving the children into labor on Midwestern and farms in other regions. My playwright friend John O’Keefe describes just such a life in his play Reapers describes his own experiences as just such a child, including some homosexual engagement. He once told me that he had been sexually abused as a young child on several occasions.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2024

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2024).