francis – frances
by Douglas Messerli
Nell B. Bronson and Robert G. Vignola
(screenplay), Robert G. Vignola (director) The Barefoot Boy / 1914 || difficult to obtain or lost
A struggling artist Harold Rives (Tom Moore)
has fallen in love with Eleanor Warren (Alice Hollister), but she, despite her
fondness for the young man, desires the comforts of wealth. The southern
planter Walter Hastings (Robert Walker), also in love with her, offers just
that, and she allows him to court her. When Rives sees the two together, he
falls into a jealous fit and is ordered from the house.
Soon after Rives hears that the two have married, and immediately after
the wedding Hastings and Eleanor leave for his home in the South. But despite
her married life Eleanor longs now for the joyful times of her youth,
intensified by the occasional messages she receives from Rives up north.
As time passes, Eleanor hears that Rives is now one of the foremost
artists of the day, and a wealthy man.
One day she receives news that her aunt back home has died, along with a
letter informing her that she has inherited the aunt’s estate. Now in a
position to become actively part of society, and knowing that Hastings has no
wish to become part of the societal whirl, she decides to separate, leaving him
behind a note informing him of her decision and intentions.
Back in her childhood home, Eleanor plunges into the social vortex,
meeting Rives once more, this time falling madly in love with him. But the artist, recognizing what Eleanor has
done, sees her now differently, as a woman more interested in her own
well-being and superficial pleasures than in true love and companionship.
Embittered by his wife’s faithlessness, Hastings develops a bitterness
for all women, and takes his daughter, Frances (Marguerite Courtot), into the
wilderness to live a totally primitive life, raising the girl as a boy.
Fifteen years later Francis is virtually a wild boy. Clad in trousers
and rough shirt, he contributes toward the family larder with his rifle and
rod. A surveying party headed by John Weir (John Mackin) enters the forest.
Francis becomes a favorite with the men, who are ignorant of his birth gender.
Meanwhile a tree in the wilderness falls, crushing Francis’ father to
death, and his cries bring Weir and his men to scene. Soon after, Weir
discovers that Francis is Frances, and he and has wife determine to adopt her.
By chance, the artist suddenly finds himself near the Weir home, Frances
spotting her friend in the forest and rushing to greet him. Amazed and startled
by the shift of gender, Rives pulls back, but is nonetheless pleased to
discover that the beautiful young girl in front of him and his “Barefoot Boy”
are one in the same.
Having long grown tired of his friendship with Eleanor, Rives is touched
by Frances’ youth and freshness, which moves his heart, he now asking Weir if
he might paint Frances in her feminine attire.
Spotting Rives taking the girl in her arms, Eleanor tells the girl of
her own relationship with the artist. Frances is horrified, having herself
fallen in love with Rives. But she soon discovers the truth, Rives declaring
that he is truly in love with the young girl.
The following day Eleanor appears at the Weir home, begging to see her
daughter, told by Weir that she is visiting her father’s grave. When Eleanor
finds her, she is sobbing over a simple mound of earth in which he is buried.
When the girl feels a touch on her arm, she turns to confront Eleanor, who
explains who she really is.
Frances suddenly seeing Eleanor as a heartbroken woman, takes her mother
into her arms, Eleanor pleading for the girl’s forgiveness.
At that very moment they hear a shot ringing from Rives’ studio, which
brings his servants to the scene where the artist lies on the floor dead, a
revolver still his hand.
This odd US film of 30 minutes in length shares many parallels with Paul
Czinner’s 1926 film The Fiddler of Florence, wherein the artist falls in
love with a boy who also turns out to be a girl whom he ultimately desires to
marry. But in the 12 years between Vignola’s film and the difference in the
Italian and the US sensibility makes the artist’s bisexual desires untenable in
1914, particularly given that the fact that he once also loved the boy/girl’s
own mother, which almost brings his attraction into the realm of incest. And
this film, far more than Czinner’s work, moreover, actually appears to explore
the transgender and transsexual experience.
Italian born Vignola, who the year before directed a film titled The
Vampire, about an innocent boy who had taken up with wild company, later
directed three films starring Marion Davies, including When Knighthood Was
in Flower, which I discuss in these pages. Indeed, Vignola lived in a
mansion in Whitney Heights that was owned by William Randolph Hearst, where
Davies often spent the night, without Hearst being troubled since the director
was homosexual.
This film seems one of the most fascinating of early queer US films, and
Vignola’s life certainly seems worth looking into further. Sidney Olcott,
director of Davies’ Little Old New York and Rudolph Valentino’s Monsieur
Beaucaire—the film that led a great many to wonder if Valentino was indeed
gay—moved in with Vignola after Olcott’s wife’s death in 1949 until his own
death later that year.
Los Angeles, June 28, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June
2022).
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