Wilfrid North | Bunny's Dilemma / 1913

no wedding bells

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wilfrid North (director) Bunny’s Dilemma / 1913

 

In her 1914 interview with John Bunny—only a year after the 11-minute movie I am about to discuss—the famous Djuna Barnes describes the actor as not at all being the humorous figure he is in the movies:

 

“Having pieced together necessities of the soul and the humor that gets past with the solemnity that holds the two down to earth as ballast, and having attained with the piecing a weight nearing the 300 mark, John Bunny, moving picture actor and little friend to the thin, looks at you out of prolonged almond eyes wherein is the shadow of the veil drawn aside, and a great sadness that seldom reaches his public.”*

 

Bunny spends most the interview touting his intelligence for having left the stage to appear in movies, and his determination to make movies better. But despite his declaration of his love of baseball, the sea, his wife, two boys, and friends, his greatest joy seems to be the idea of being “set...adrift in a log.” In short there is something in Bunny’s comic performances that is also sad, a kind of loneliness that accepts the status quo with equilibrium the way Buster Keaton would later come be described as a “comic of resistance” as opposed to those comics like Chaplin, the Marx brothers, and others who were comics of “energy, enterprise, mischief, and mayhem.”**

      Even when Bunny acts to counter and protect himself from what he sees as danger ahead, it backfires on his character, leaving him after with even less that that with which he began. He is left without, lonely, sad, a bit like being adrift in a log.

       A perfect example of this is the 1913 film Bunny’s Dilemma, directed by Wilfrid North, who was evidently the go-to director for cross-dressing comedies of the second decade of the 20th century.

      In this instance, Bunny was living apparently with a man described by the script as “Cutey” (Wally Van), but who the Moving Picture World synopsis names as Jack Holmes. Why the two men are living together is never established, but as in many of Bunny’s films it takes only the slightest of circumstances to get Bunny to dress up as a woman.

     The cross-dressing transformation is occasioned in this case by a message he receives from his Aunt Eliza (Flora Finch), who announces that she shall soon be arriving to visit him, and be bringing along her cousin Jean or in the original script Sally (Lillian Walker), whom she desires him to marry.

      Since Bunny has managed to be a bachelor all of his life, his sees no reason to change his ways, and to trick the insistent aunt, whom he has never met, he confides with his roommate “Cutey,” the two of them cooking up a plan where Jack will masquerade as Bunny, and Bunny will dress up as a female maid.

     No sooner has Bunny gotten into female dress than the aunt and Jean arrive, the younger woman being so beautiful that he is tempted to immediately disclose his real identity. But Jack, also quite smitten with the guest, immediately takes over, demanding the maid to set out preparing tea and dinner, while he begins to flirt with the young lady, Bunny stubbornly watching over them as he performs his activities with regret.

 

     By this time Bunny has become so smitten with Jean, that he writes her a letter, pushing it under her bedroom door. In the letter he sweetly asks her to meet him in the arbor near the garden early the next morning.     

      She, believing it is the attractive “Cutie” Jack, quickly prepares for the early morning tryst, but as she quietly passes Aunt Eliza’s door the old woman hears her footsteps, and, rushing out of her room, confronts her cousin. Seeing the letter in the girl’s hand, she grabs it from her, declaring that Jean will not be able to keep that appointment, determining that she herself will take her place.

       Covering over her face entirely with a hat and veil, she arrives at the arbor, where Bunny flirts with her, finally attempting the raise her veil for a kiss, when he is startled to discover that it is not the beautiful Jean, but his aunt.

       Even more painful is Bunny’s discovery that Jean and Jack, in the meantime, have crept to the spot out of curiosity, observing the entire farce.

       Bunny’s crestfallen face breaks even the stern visage of Aunt Eliza who opens her heart just enough to allow Jack to bear off Jean as the prize, she willingly accepting his offer. Poor Bunny sits meditating on his sins of deception, eventually deciding that it is all for the best. He will never marry.

        Perhaps, we must admit, he is among those whom in his day were described as not being the marrying kind, another word for a homosexual when there were few proper words in the US to describe someone like him.

        Bunny himself was happily married, so he claimed; but his character, just as Barnes described him, seems alone and endlessly sad.

 

*Djuna Barnes, “John Bunny” in Interviews (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press), p. 120.

**See Adam Gopnik, “Silent Treatment: The Case for Buster Keaton,” The New Yorker (January 31, 2022).

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).