Walter Wright | Dollars and Sense / 1916

ride and residue

by Douglas Messerli

 

Walter Wright (screenwriter and director) Dollars and Sense / 1916

 

Walter Wright’s 1916 silent comedy doesn’t quite know what to do with itself, whether it wants to be a voyeuristic Keystone Comedy, an encounter between Eastern and Western US cultural stereotypes, or move into the more uneasy territory of total gender confusion. On the latter, it takes an attitude of letting the audience determine where it wants to go with its possible, but terribly shy, insinuations. I feel, given Wright’s early Sennett film surreal-like contributions such as When Ambrose Dared Walrus (1915), Love, Speed and Thrills (1915), and Love’s Protegé (1920), that we must surely need to more carefully explore this director’s odd cinematic contributions; but there is very little currently available of either personal information or his actual films.

 

     Small town girl Hetty Obbs (Ora Carew, originally one of Max Sennett’s Bathing Beauties) seems perfectly happy with her cornfed and corny boyfriend (Joseph Belmont, also a Max Sennett actor), who quite literally dines on field corn, not truly that edible, the corn humans eat being of a slightly different species, sharing the cobs with his ever-hungry horse.

      Hetty’s constantly sleepy father, when he’s not busy correcting his children’s manners runs the small-town local hotel, and dreams, on one occasion, of ridding himself of the numerous family pets, by grinding them out as “hot dogs,” the sin for which his wife (Blanche Payson) demands he consume them as if in an annual hot-dog eating contest. It’s a rather perverse, slightly surreal scene which characterizes this director’s ambling attentions and makes him worthy of further consideration.

      Hetty also has a twin brother (played also by Ora Carew), who is somewhat of a trickster, which comes into play in several early scenes, but most notably dominates the central action of the film.

       A preposterous trio arrives in town, a high-hat foppish gentleman, Algy, an English Heir (Malcolm St. Clair), a “scheming lawyer” (Joseph Callahan), and a valet who stands endlessly with luggage in hand (Lige Conley). St. Clair directed most of the later Laurel and Hardy films and acted in the notable drag film of 3 years later, A Yankee Doodle in Berlin (1919); and he might almost have turned this film into a campy gay movie if Wright would have permitted it. Lige Conley, a Chaplinesque-like comic, could have also moved this work into new dimensions. But Wright steers seemingly into a far more predictable fantasy comic work as the lawyer announces that, quite inexplicably, a will has been left declaring that Hetty will inherit an estate only if she marries Algy; but if one of them refuses, the other gets the estate without any restrictions.

      The IMDb description seems to suggest that Hetty uses her twin brother to trick Algy out of his inheritance. But, in fact, the twin determines on his own to replace Hetty on a long buggy ride with Algy which all the greedy parties have arranged to get the incompatible young folks together.

      The scene where Carew, playing her male twin attempts to dress up as a woman and behave, rather unconvincingly, in the matter of his female twin sister is perhaps the most fascinating queer moment of this movie. The transformation of a female in male drag attempting to become a female in drag is quite memorable and speaks volumes about transgender dysphoria, although this movie doesn’t quite comprehend that concept yet.

      The result of the trickery may seem hilarious to the voyeuristic couple of Hetty and her country lover, but is overly long and laborious to cinema audiences, as Algy and his impersonating female lover fall over a cliff, meet up with a bear who is obviously a human in costume, and are pulled up and down the cliffs by a Keystone comedic police force, one of whose members appears to be a sissy, expressing the dangers in exaggerated gestures and refusing to join the antics of the others.

       By the time it’s over, Algy manages to write a note that he’s abandoning all hope of ever converting the country girl into a properly behaving woman, proving himself a full sissy as he cowers in the police wagon which the bear himself is now driving. Hetty and her lamebrain boyfriend get rich, while what happens to the far more engaging male twin isn’t pursued. Too bad; I so very much preferred Hetty the nasty boy to Hetty the silly simpleton small-town, vengeful priss.

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).