unknown director | The "Pay-as-You-Enter" Man / 1913 [lost film]

the thanksgiving sissy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Maibelle Heikes Justice (screenwriter), unknown director, The 'Pay-as-You-Enter' Man / 1913 || lost film

 

Evidently influenced by Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol Maibelle Heikes Justices’ screenplay for The ‘Pay-as-You-Enter’ Man is a holiday tale involving Henry Rosser (Richard Travers) who has worked behind the silk counter of a large department store for 20 years, his salary having grown to the plump sum of $20 a week. Yet with that salary he has managed to buy a miniscule house in the suburbs and raise several children.

     The family looks forward every year to Thanksgiving, but Rosser has been unable to afford a turkey because of his innumerable small purchases including the payment on the house. On the eve of the holiday, on his way home via the ferry, he meets up, quite by accident, with a friend exciting a saloon, a huge gobbler under his arm, which he explains he has just won in the bar raffle.

     Feeling he has little to lose Henry decides to take a chance on the next raffle, which he wins!

     But at that very moment the police enter, arrest the proprietor for running an illegal lottery, and hold Henry and his huge turkey, taking him off to spend the night in a police cell. Facing a night of misery and the shame it will surely bright his wife and children, Henry dares to call his employer, Mr. Straussman (E.H. Calvert), whom he has never before met.

      To his surprise, Straussman not only shows up to bail him out, but gives a $50 bonus and promises him a substantially higher salary.

      The next day the family celebrates eating up the turkey to the very last bone—but not the turkey which Henry has won, having brought them so very much luck, but another turkey he purchased, keeping the lucky gobbler as a pet, a bit like the annual White House celebration of a pardoned turkey.

      Thanks to the research of cinema writer Shane Brown, we know that somewhere embedded in this family story that today might have been produced by Hallmark, is a sissy, about which an unnamed film reviewer of the day took great umbrage, asking “Why interject the abominable ‘sissy’ in the score—such stuff is not comedy.”

       Apparently, in this lost film a sissy suddenly appears for no apparent reason, a precursor surely—just as was the manager of the matrimonial agency in Hilda Wakes—of the numerous 1930s cinema pansies—effeminate and persnickety young men whose appearance seemed to be justified only by the comic laughs brought on by a primarily heterosexual audiences who saw homosexuality as something to be laughed at—during what was described by film critics of the day as the “Panze Craze.”

       The sissies of the mid-1910s, accordingly, can be recognized as a way of slipping homosexuality into cinema, not as an attempt to speak out upon how to alter a child’s gender confusion as Brown sometimes suggests its role might have been. The fact that, as the critic claims, it needn’t have at all appeared in this narrative, speaks loudly to my argument that film needed queers.

 

Los Angeles, September 1, 2022