William A. Wellman | Safe in Hell / 1931

devil’s island

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Jackson and Maude Fulton (screenplay, based on a play by Houston Branch), William A. Wellman (director) Safe in Hell / 1931

 

William A. Wellman continues to surprise us of his directorial breadth and wit, with a fairly new release by Warner Brothers of his long unavailable (almost 80 years) 1931 movie, described when first shown as definitely “Not for Children,” Safe in Hell. Although Wellman had already made some of the most respectable award-winning films, most notably Wings (1927), Beggars of Life (1928), and in the same year when he directed this film and four others, The Public Enemy (1931), Safe in Hell might be described as downright dirty and tawdry. Even the films I’ve named were surely later perceived by folks of the later Production Code as “problematic,” but Safe in Hell would never have been made after the 1934 code regulations and the never-ending efforts to clean up the industry by Joseph Breen.

    Screenwriter Joseph Jackson, co-writing with actress / playwright Maude Fulton, had already penned a couple of films that have made my queer list, including Cole Porter’s Fifty Million Frenchman; and just after Safe In Hell, One Way Passage (1932), also discussed in this volume. That same year, the writer, swimming with two other friends, got caught up in a rip tide in Laguna Beach and drowned.      

     Yet this film goes far beyond any simple gay issues of the day. Gilda Karlson (Dorothy Mackaill), working as a secretary, has already attracted the attentions of her boss, Piet Van Saal (Ralf Harolde), before the movie even begins, his vengeful wife making sure that she is not only fired from her current job but is rejected from other respectable job in New Orleans as well. Forced to work as a prostitute, Gilda she is sent out by her female pimp for a date in the first moments of the film. The man turns out to be Van Saal, attempting to come back for more; but this time Gilda refuses him, tossing a vase in his direction which appears to kill him, before lighting up a cigarette and tossing away the match, unintentionally starting a fire which destroys the building in which their meeting took place.   

 

     Hurrying off back to her flophouse apartment, she discovers that her only true love, the sailor Carl Erickson (Donald Cook) has just returned for shore leave. Having been made a petty officer, he now wants to marry her, but she refuses, confessing what has just happened and the profession in which she is now engaged. Carl at first reacts like nearly all brutal movie men of the period, slapping her face and ready to go further, but hearing the police at the door, suddenly decides instead to help her. She packs a quick suitcase and the two exit through a back window.

      Carl stows the fugitive away on his outbound ship in a large wooden container. By luck, the boat is headed for Tortuga, the Caribbean island noted for its refusal to extradite prisoners, and thereby drawing to its shores some of the meanest of murderers and scoundrels who have almost all absconded with enough money to allow them to remain for the rest of their lives in the squalid, infested island hotel. Carl puts her up in the hotel without seeming to fully realize, as one of the men later comments, Gilda is the only white woman on the island.

      To protect her, the dumb Swede decides to marry Gilda, but is told by the hotel manager that the only minister lives on the other side to where they should travel by car since the centipedes are heavy this time of year. When they reach the place, however, they discover the minister has died, Carl taking out his back-pocket Bible and conducting their own private wedding ceremony, a bit like Tony and Maria in West Side Story of decades later.

       Returning to the hotel, Gilda meets up with other hotel “guests,” she quipping to Carl, who still doesn’t seem to perceive the situation that he is putting her in, “You sure this ain’t the YMCA?”

      But these ain’t young boys either. The miscreants with whom she must deal are all hardened criminals, just waiting in their hot sweaty suits to lay their paws on the pretty lady who has suddenly been set down in their midst.

      Waiting for her to come down from her room the next morning, one by one they turn their rattan chairs toward the staircase, spread open their thighs, and in a brilliant near unison movement—surely at Wellman’s insistency—they slide down in their chairs with legs pushed out as if they were in a porno theater about to unzip their pants to release their cocks.

 

      I’ll let critic/commentator Will McKinley describe the lot from a later event, when Gilda finally does decide to leave her room.

 

“Like boys do, the hotel guests begin trying to impress the new girl by bragging about their exploits on the wrong side of the law. First up is the Cockney-accented Crunch (Ivan F. Simpson), so nicknamed for his propensity to chomp loudly on nuts and spit out the worms.

     ‘He wouldn’t hand over his spondulicks,’ Crunch explains, using a slang term for money. ‘So I had to wallop him over the nebber. And the silly blighter croaked!’

     Next up is Egan (John Wray), who spends most of the film in a rumpled jacket and tie (despite the tropical temps) with a three-day beard on his grizzled gangster puss.

      ‘You know what they call me, lady?’ he asks Gilda, rhetorically. ‘T.N.T. I got an international reputation for safe-blowing that nobody can touch!’

      Egan is interrupted by General Manual Maria Jesus Gomez (Victor Varconi), a pencil-mustached, monocle-wearing, Latin American revolutionary in a military uniform.

     ‘I am the only gentleman here,’ he laughs. ‘As a general of the Revolution, I kill all the presidents! And vice-presidents!’

      Gilda is unimpressed, but that doesn’t discourage Mr. Jones (Charles Middleton) from taking his turn.

       ‘I’m a lawyer; crooked as they make ‘em,’ he says, squinty-eyed and hunched over a champagne glass. ‘I put a police commissioner on the spot, and they took him ‘for a ride.’ The rest of these fellas are all small fry compared to me.’

      Finally, Gilda asks Larson (Gustav van Seyffertitz) the senior member of the gang, about his claim to fame, affectionately calling him ‘dear old Grampa.’

      ‘I burned my ship; unfortunately the passengers and the crew were either drowned or roasted to death,” he says. “I and the cook, we managed to save ourselves. Unfortunately, he met with a little accident afterwards. I collected the insurance for my boat —$80,000— and I hope to live happily ever after.’”

 

     The worst of the island residents, however, doesn’t even participate in this “welcoming” gesture. The island jailer and hangman Mr. Bruno (Morgan Wallace), a portly man so constantly sweaty and oily that to follow in his wake one might be afraid of slipping in the puddles he leaves behind.

       When he does arrive, soon after, describing his official role to Gilda, insisting that despite the island’s lenient extradition policies that law and order is strictly kept in his jails, General Gomez scoffs: “In my country we leave that to the ladies,” Bruno reacting, “Gossip, heh? So they say my jail is worse than my gallows, heh?” Their short dialogue suggests that the real punishment of Bruno’s prison is the sodomy that goes on within.

      General Gomez, in turn, reveals himself to be a gay man with his uncontrollable high squeal of a giggle he lets out now and then. Even when he offers Gilda his own suite, far larger and cooler than her small room, he adds, “I won’t be there”—giggling girlishly—“but occasionally!” Gilda immediately gets the message, imitating his high squeal, “I don’t want you to be lonesome.” She tosses water into his face, filled with “wigglers,” she reports, to keep him company. Later, when Gomez brags about being the only “gentleman” of the group for having killed presidents and vice-presidents, Gilda continues to mock him: “You’re exclusive,” she hints of his sexuality, turning the last word into the standard giggle of film fairies.

 

     The only seemingly decent people on the island are the hotel’s owners, the front desk clerk, bar tender, and cook, Leonie (Nia Mae McKinney) and her husband who serves as porter, Newcastle (Clarence Muse). Unlike almost any other movie of the time, these black figures speak in standard American English even though their lines were originally written in “Negro dialect.” These two performers—McKinney in particular having just starred in King Vidor’s African American musical Hallelujah—had evidently enough clout to refuse to perform their scenes in the derogatory dialect of blacks in Hollywood movies. But Wellman’s biographer adds that it may also have been the director’s decision, who liked to refuse the convenient cliches of the day. McKinney also gets the opportunity to sing “Sleepy Time Down South,” written by Muse, Leon Rene, and Otis Rene, the first performance of what later became a jazz standard. Her performance is truly revelatory, and represents one of the only uplifting moments in the film.

      Meanwhile, our dear filthy “boys,” once rejected by Gilda, spend most of their time simply leering, eventually becoming friends with the girl once she determines she can no longer bear to remain hidden away in her room.

       The true villain of this work, other than Van Saal, is Bruno who intercepts all her letters, containing money, from her beloved Carl, while plotting other ways to get her into his bed. No sooner has she befriended the hotel residents, however, than Van Saal suddenly shows up in her bedroom. He has evidently faked his death and forced his wife to collect on his $50,000 life insurance policy, abandoning her the moment when he receives the check. She reports him for fraud, which explains his arrival in Tortuga.

        For Gilda, suddenly it means her freedom, since she can longer be arrested for killing a man who is still very much alive. Just before she has gone to her room, however, Bruno, pretending to worry about her well-being, hands her a gun for self-protection. She has attempted to refuse it, but he has insisted that she may be in danger.

       At the very moment when Gilda plans to contact Carl and escape her island prison, however, Van Saal tries yet again to force himself on her, this time moving toward outright rape. Gilda pulls out the gun, shoots, and this time truly kills him.

       At the trial, Jones, the former lawyer pleads her case as self-defense, and with all the hotel “guests” testifying on her behalf, it’s clear she will be exonerated.

      But Bruno, taking her aside, reminds her that even if she is found innocent, he will arrest her for possession of a deadly weapon—the one very one he had planted on her. He assures her that the sentence will be six months in his prison camp where, of course, he will provide her with comfortable living quarters in return for sexual favors.

      Trapped again, Gilda rushes out of the room and returns to the courtroom, declaring to the judge her guilt, insisting that she was lying and intentionally killed Van Saal. It is clear that she would rather be found guilty and hang for the killing than to break her vow to Carl.  

     While awaiting her execution, she is startled by Carl’s return. He has found a new job in New Orleans and plans to take Gilda back with him. Fearful that Carl’s return will lead to Bruno finding a way to imprison him, she sends her faithful lover on his way to set up their new home while promising to soon join him, as she marches bravely off to the gallows.

        Once more, Wellman, far more sophisticated than most other directors of the time, presents us with a believable gay character and hints at the gay behavior of prisons; unfortunately, in this case they exist in hell.    

 

Los Angeles, January 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema Blog (January 2024).