Hal Roach | Clubs Are Trump / 1917

fey friends

by Douglas Messerli

 

H. M. Walker (titles and scenario), Hal Roach (director) Clubs Are Trump / 1917

 

Before he became our beloved Boy, Harold Lloyd tried out a number of rather unpleasant personae, including in this short from 1917, one of a series starring his Lonesome Luke, although Luke seems here to be less lonesome here than sexually confused.

     Lloyd and Harry “Snub” Pollard play a couple of wandering “lascars” who seem far more interested in one another’s company than the women they ridiculously attempt to pick up, first in a park during a period when nearly every woman in the city appears to be sitting on a bench courting her boyfriend.

     Rather explicably, Luke and Snub work as a team, joining a single couple as a pair of would-be mashers. As a team they only temporarily split up, while still working nearly side-by-side to interest the ladies whose lovers have dozed or who are even looking in another director. All to no success, as the boyfriends quickly slap, bash, and toss them off.

      Trying again and again, they so irritate one gentleman that he picks them up as pair, one under each arm, and tosses them into what appears to be Echo Park Lake in Los Angeles.

       The two, wading out of the water sit comfortably back-to-back to dry off and doze, dreaming about a book they seem to have acquired on “Cave Man” etiquette.

       In the dream they suddenly find themselves back in the earliest days of man, when to get a lady wasn’t at all that difficult if you had a big enough club. You simply hit the man possessing a woman over his head with the club, knocking him out, and dragging off the girl as your reward.

        Our love-starved boys attempt that a couple of times and find that it works—except when are complications, as there always are, particularly when another man with an even a larger club sneaks out of brush and clobbers them over the head or gangs up with others with the intention of doing them in.

      At one point, for example, Luke, while attempting to conk a man over the head and steal his beauty, is knocked out himself by the man who accidentally swings his club over his shoulder. Snub, taking advantage of the situation, drags the girl off, Luke gradually coming to. Slowly the original man, still unaware that his lady has been stolen, reaches around to give her a hug, mauling Luke in her place. He’s ready to give her a kiss and a hug until feeling her face he discerns the growth of facial hair he hadn’t expected, turning to see his lover is none other Luke, who immediately runs off in terror of what might come next.

       Alone both Snub and Luke try to find women, one beautiful girl, tossed away by her partner, comes rolling down a mountain right into his arms. But neither he nor Snub can seem to keep up the stout and hefty clubbers, losing every woman they encounter. And finally, one after another, they are dragged by to the camp to work as laborers just as do the women.

       Obviously the two friends are seen as far too effeminate to be left to themselves, and are brought into the camp to do women’s jobs such as rubbing twigs together to light the fire and grinding the mill with a primitive wheel.

        The two at least delighted to be reunited, together finally escape, coming across of party women washing clothes in a stream, and joining them with delight. But here to they are discovered as the goliaths sniff them out and chase them off, Luke and Sub finally awakening from what has become their mutual nightmare.

        So joyful that that they still are alive and together, the friends kiss, hug, and walk off hand in hand, a policeman observing them presuming, as he makes clear with his pansy gestures, that they are homosexuals and goes on the chase.

 

      Unfortunately, this film doesn’t quite know where to end, inviting them on several other chases through a keystone cop-like adventure which includes pushing dozens of open boats out onto the lake and a policeman caught up in the truck of a tree—all rather pointless and not very humorous events.

       Indeed, except for Lloyd’s and Pollard’s confusions of gender and their obvious preference for one another’s company, this entire film would be dismissible and in its misogynistic, quite literally cave-man view of women completely unredeemable. But Snub and Luke’s inexplicable relationship makes it nearly bearable to watch.

      What Roach and Walker were trying to explore in their obvious references to homosexuality, however, will perhaps never be explained. Surely with their clumsy ways with women, this pair are far better off as a queer couple.

 

Los Angeles, November 7, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).