by Douglas Messerli
Allan Dwan (screenwriter, based on a
story “D’Artagnan of Kansas” by E. P. Lyle, Jr, and director) A Modern
Musketeer / 1917
Strangely enough the author of the 1918 Photoplay
review felt it most certainly was, but in reverse, Fairbanks masculinizing
the original D’Artagnan by virtue of his manic leaps, jumps, and absurd
acrobatics:
“Draft
the dictionary, order the thesaurus into intensive training, mobilize the
superlatives and equip the book of similes for the first line trenches
"A Modern Musketeer" has arrived. Here is Douglas the Fairbanks at
his most Douglasish and eke at his Fairbanksest. Here is the breaker of all
speed records in the speediest of all forms of entertainment making all his
past performances look like the funeral march of a colony of paralyzed snails.
Here is Briareus threshing about with every one of his hundred arms at once.
D'Artagnan, forsooth! Fairbanks makes the Dumas swashbuckler seem a popinjay, a
milksop, a wearer of wrist watches in times of peace, a devotee of the sleeve
handkerchief, a nursery playmate, and eater of prune whip, a drinker of pink lemonade,
a person susceptible to hay fever, a wearer of corn plasters, an habitue of
five o'clock teas, a reader of ‘Polyanna.’”
And I will say both his D’Artagnan and the cyclone force of Ned are
quite queer in their behavior in their excessive hyperactivity aimed primarily
to help women out of straits they were perfectly happy to be in or in which
they were never truly involved. Both represent the kind of courtier who might
toss down a cape upon a muddy street where a woman was about to walk with such
a force that the mud would be sent straight into her eyes. Or, perhaps, he
might first jump into it just to test it out, slinging mud both upon himself
and everyone about. God forbid that he get excited; this boy not only climbs
quickly to the roof of the village church, but straight up its steeple to sit
in its weathercock. As D’Artagnan he spends more time during a duel in the
rafters than swashbuckling it out on the floor below.
One might further observe that this film
represents the queerest mish-mash of genres that ever made it to the screen,
beginning as it does as sort of comic swashbuckler, occasioned by the fact that
his mother, loving Dumas, read him The Three Musketeers before and after
his birth so many times that he believes he is himself D’Artagnan. In
“reality,” if such a word has any meaning in this series of vertiginous tales,
he is just a small town Kansas boy born in a cyclone which
Given their location, the film quickly
falls into the genre of a Western, which includes Indians (both a sympathetic
portrait of the Hopi Tribe and a negative portrait of a renegade Indian
Chin-de-dah [Frank Campeau] who uses the former cliff-dwelling Puebloans [Anasazi]
tribe’s homes as their hideout) and bandits who plan to steal Elsie rather than
rob a bank.
Vandeteer, himself as evil as
Chin-de-dah, almost falls to his death, but Ned saves him on the condition that
he write out an admission of having involved James Brown in a former scam, that
he give up any claims to Elsie, and pay him a large sum of money which he
shares with Brown.
So does Ned win the girl, although we are
certain that he won’t be able to sit around long enough for the marriage and
certainly could never sit still long enough in her arms for them to truly make
love.
Indeed, in this film, despite his
constant attempts to save women from harm, most of the time he and D’Artagnan
are awarded slaps and words of abuse from women who never wanted their help in
the first place. And even for the grateful girls, his rewards are a brief kiss
and wave goodbye as he leaps off into another adventure.
Other than the end-of-the-movie kiss he
receives from Elsie for saving her life, most of the rewards Ned receives come
from males, Vandeteer’s French chauffeur who is so delighted by Ned’s ingenuity
and his love of all things French, that he attempts to award with a big, long
kiss (in French declaring that Ned is the most wonderful man he knows and
cannot resist kissing); and
And then are the inevitable analogies to that touchstone of gay movies, The
Wizard of Oz, which also has no real LGBTQ figure unless you count the
sissy “dandy-lion.” Like that other Kansas hero, Dorothy, Ned takes his own
cyclonic self out of the land of alfalfa and wheat to a strange new world where
he becomes the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion all in one, employing his
quick thinking, his love for the girl and the adventure, and his courage to do
battle with this film’s version of the witch, Chin-de- dah, whose ruby shoes in this case is the special necklace
which the Indian wears, claiming it makes him imperious from harm, which Ned
cuts from his neck as his reward to having saved the day. The only major
difference is that, in this case, Kansas doesn’t really want to return home.
Finally, there is Fairbanks himself, who
through this early trial-run of his later swashbuckling adventures, plays the
role fully in camp mode, preening to the camera and mocking his own efforts as
he shows off D’Artagnan’s extraordinarily long curls and his absurdly-shaped
moustache as well as Ned’s cyclonic efforts to climb, jump, leap, and ride atop
every inanimate and sometime animate figure he encounters. Certainly, in his
duels and battles this hero puts his whole body into the effort, making physical
contact with more men than make up an American football or British cricket
team. In short, Fairbanks employs all the standard gestures of what is defined
as masculinity to reveal their real purpose, to butt up against a fellow male
like two stags locked in a horny duel.
So, in the end, if this film isn’t truly
gay, it’s certainly queer, and ought to be recognized as such.
Los
Angeles, July 23, 2022
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2022).
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