Lem B. Parker | Sissybelle / 1913

a painful lesson

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edith W. Roberts (screenplay), Lem B. Parker (director) Sissybelle / 1913 || lost film

 

Another of the “sissy” films of the early twentieth-century, Lem B. Parker’s Sissybelle features Percy Putnam (Roy Clark), the seven-year-old darling of a wealthy mother (Eugenie Besserer) who has cabined him away in the nursey to play with dolls, just like his little sister, hoping that he might not be contaminated by the naughty boys of the street. She also teaches him sewing. And every time he has an ache or pain of any kind she puts him to bed immediately and calls the doctor.

      Tired of his effeminate son, Percy’s father (Henry A. Livingston) lifts him up out of his room and sets him out, symbolically speaking, in the back alley to await what the neighborhood hoodlums hand him, the enforced lessons, he insists, that every boy needs to face in order to learn the “manly” art of self-defense.

      Actually, he does even worse by sending the boy to the country and drawing up a contract between himself and a gang to help make sure Percy gets some hard blows in order to come back as a man. 

     This is certainly one of the most extreme films on both sides of the effeminate / macho syndrome concerning male behavior.

      Since I was unable to see the film, I don’t know what happens to the poof of a tyke, but we can be sure he ends up in tears and returns with a dirty face, perhaps even a black eye, and a few broken ribs. There’s no girl in the wings here, just the unnecessary handing out stereotyped patterns by both his pater and mater, and of the course the writer and director who dreamed up this short film. Whether young Percy grows up to be a heterosexual or a homosexual is not the issue here. It is all about heteronormative notions of behavior predetermined by both parents, who ought to be shot for having named their son Percy and treating him like he were a cardboard cutout.

        This was a Selig Polyscope Company production located in the Edendale district of Los Angeles, one of about 3,500 films made by the Studio, all but about 200 now lost.

 

Los Angeles, September 30, 2022