Urban Gad | Jugend und Tollheit (Lady Madcap’s Way) / 1913 [Lost film]

the young boy willing to kiss a woman in order to keep his man

by Douglas Messserli

 

Urban Gad (screenwriter and director) Jugend und Tollheit (Lady Madcap’s Way) / 1913 | lost film

 

One of the great actresses of the silent era, Asta Nielsen, not only represented herself as a feminist, but starred in several of her Danish filmmaker husband’s works in cross-dressing roles, including the remarkable 1921 film version of Hamlet. Before Garbo, Nielsen was the most recognized cinematic “diva” of film art. And her husband Urban Gad (born Peter Urban Bruun Gad), filming in both Denmark and Germany, was one of the great film directors of era.

      In comparison with her important suffragette film of the same year 1913, A Militant Suffragette, her comic cross-dressing soap-opera, Jugend und Tollheit (horrifically titled Lady Madcap’s Way in English) seems almost insignificant, particularly since it is now described as a lost film.

      Yet the story recounts yet another adventure where the actor took on a male role in to maintain her rights, in this case regarding the love she feels for Peter von Prangen (Hans Mierendorff, evidently named Peter Shanley in the English language version). The film begins with Peter receiving a note from his uncle requesting that his nephew marry Nora, the daughter of Schmidt, a wealthy banker. We later discover that the banker has threatened to ruin his uncle’s career if the marriage does not take place, but from the description we do not know whether or not Peter has realized this from the start.

       In any event, he feels compelled to obey his uncle’s wish, despite the fact that he is in love with Florence Ward (Jesta Müller in the German version, played by Nielsen). When Jesta/Florence hears of the situation, she determines that she must personally take on the challenge, and donning boy’s clothes accompanies Peter to his uncle’s home, presenting herself as Howard Long, a young man who, as one of Peter’s party is forced to participate in the male activities of the others. This includes smoking cigars, getting a barber-shop shave (both incidents of which are reprised in Reinhold Schümzel’s Viktor and Viktoria of 1933), and sharing the same bed chamber with her lover. Somehow, after a series of evidently amusing incidents, she manages to spend the night on the drawing-room lounge.

       The following morning, they travel to Schmidt’s estate. There, as Howard Long, Jesta/Florence does everything possible to hinder the meetings of Peter with Nora, including flirting with the girl. Apparently, Howard’s flirtations succeed, since the other guests witness the shadow on a window shade of Nora and a man kissing.

        Schmidt, immediately jumping to the conclusion that Peter and Nora have fallen in love, announces their engagement. But Jesta/Florence, having obtained the $10,000 note with which Schmidt has threated Peter’s uncle, eventually announces that it was she, not Peter, kissing Nora! Obviously, Howard must simultaneously have revealed his true gender, for the synopsis ends with Peter and Jesta/Florence being united, all the guests celebrating the fact.

        This early film quite obviously sets up a far more complex situation than the standard cross-dressing tales of the time generally expressed. The pattern of this film will be repeated over and over again throughout the century whenever a woman needed to alter a series of events of which the opposite gender was simply incapable, proving that women were far more flexible and cleverer than men.

 

Los Angeles, February 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).