Al Christie | Rowdy Ann / 1919

no secret love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Scott Darling (screenplay), Al Christie (director) Rowdy Ann / 1919

 

One of the very best of the early films of interest to LGBTQ audiences is Al Christie’s 1919 short Rowdy Ann. The work does not truly involve cross-dressing nor even sex, at least with regard to its central figure. Ann (Fay Tincher) is a wealthy rancher’s daughter and she might have easily been one of the numerous heiresses who go trotting through the silent films of the era, attracting every handsome male in sight.

     Instead, she serves as a kind of proto-feminist, lesbian hero who won’t get her full say until the 1990s, and even then she’ll have to tamp down her manic energy. You might say Rowdy Ann is a kind of early cinematic depiction of Calamity Jane without any of the soft edges you get in Doris Day’s depiction of her in David Butler’s 1953 film about the female ogre of the old West.

      But like Day, Tincher has the good looks which catch the eye of the cowboys with whom she keeps company, particularly the would-be hero of the story, Handsome Hank (Al Haynes), who attempts to woo her.

      But we’re getting ahead of Christie’s story. The film begins by showing Rowdy Ann’s bourgeois parents, her father having just received a near fortune for the herd of cattle he’s just sold in Kansas City, and the mother busy with her homebound knitting, taking away the wad of money to store in a safe place. Like most such bourgeois families, it is the man who makes the money and the woman who gladly guards over it and sees that it’s properly spent.

      Ready to celebrate his good luck, he’s looking forward to drinking a few swigs of his favorite liquor, but he’s apparently run out, and uses the excuse to go into town to buy another bottle and, of course, to chat up his friends in the local saloon.

      At the very same moment Ann is riding around just looking for some trouble with which might involve herself when word comes that some steers have escaped, the cowboy hands demanding that she fetch her father. Ann rides her horse home fast, but of course finds that he’s in town. At the saloon, unable as a woman to enter, she takes out her handy rope, and lassos it round her father, pulling him out and at the same moment shooting a few bullets into the crowd to hurry her father away from his liquor and his friends.

       On the way back to the ranch, she encounters Handsome Hank who makes a play for her, but before he can even imagine putting a kiss on her check, she’s shoved off his horse, pushed him into the lake and shot a few holes in his hat. She clearly wants nothing to do with men.

       And, as if to make sure Hank and the other cowboys get the message, after she finds that the foreman has just lost a boxing match with Handsome Hank, she pulls of his gloves and goes a few rounds with Hanks, jumping on his foot corn before jabbing him in the chin and chest. By the time she’s done, she has all Hank’s fellow cowboys in stitches in both meanings of that word, seriously laughing while attending to their bullet wounds.

        For Ann’s parents she’s gone too far this time in her legendary roughhousing, and they quickly send her off east to a college that will turn her into a proper young lady.

       Her cowboy friends all show up to send her off, shooting celebratory bullets into the sky while terrorizing the unsuspecting travelers within, including one especially “nervous nellie,” who keeps cringing and crawling away from her very presence, once she boards, for fear of what she might do next.

     And indeed, the traveler’s compartment is soon tormented by her rowdy ways. A few of the gentlemen travelers have begun a game of poker, which she watches for a while observing one of their group cheating the others. Out comes her gun as she accuses him of his crime, forcing him out of the sitting car and into the luggage car for the duration of the ride.

        During the night, the black porter (Blue Washington), whose wife he has smuggled onto the train in order to celebrate their honeymoon, comes calling for his honey. Hasty, as always, in delivering justice, she presumes he’s calling for her, and before he can even explain his position, she chases him straight to the caboose, out onto the roof of the train’s cars, and off the train altogether. Once again, she makes it clear that she is disinterested in the male gender.

       At the college, she hands the president a check for $1,000 (the equivalent of about $16,000 in 1919), and a letter from her father demanding that they make a lady out of their wild child.

       It just so happens that her first class will be dance, and the secretary hands her a bodice made out of tulle and gauze. She refuses to even consider wearing it, but when threatened of expulsion, quietly puts it on along with her holster and boots. Meanwhile the dancing teacher, Prof. Leavitoff (Eddie Barry) arrives in the room, to his horror discovering the same terrifying beast that has made train ride back to school so memorable! Hands up, wrists flapping in fear, he retreats to the back of the office chair in absolute horror—the ultimate of sissified gay men.

       But he is soon leaping and tripping—quite literally—with his fairy maiden students until they meet up at a show-down with Rowdy Ann, who looks so absolutely absurd in her holster-laden tutu that they giggle and make fun. She punches for or five of them out before storming off. She clearly nothing to do with the other girls who let a sissy lead them prancing through the meadow.

      A few weeks later, her teachers have finally gotten her into a dress, as she stands looking out a window with her now friendly roommate (Patricia Palmer). They are watching the arrival of another classmate, the school heiress (Katherine Lewis), who is that very evening about to be married to her beau. When the two show up, Ann is shocked. Her classmate’s fiancé is none other than the card shark she has shown up on the train.

       She explains the situation to her roommate, and as the heiress stops by to say her goodbyes, she tells her about the truth of her soon-to-be husband. But the young girl in love with the handsome cheater does not believe her, and soon returns to the touring car her lover has rented for the occasion.

      Seeing her friend get into the auto with the crook, Ann pulls out her trusty lasso, and whips it through the air to trip up the swindler at the very moment he is about to get in and drive off. Just in time, since the police immediately arrive and arrest him apparently for some other crimes he has committed or bills he has refused to pay.

      Thankful but tearful, the young schoolgirl returns back to school, Ann’s roommate gently reassuring her, while secretly signaling Ann to be sensitive to the poor girl’s feelings. Ann shakes her head, but the moment the girl crawls into bed slugs her for being so dumb. Ann clearly has no patience with women who fall in love with a man. No “secret love” for her, or perhaps a far more secret love than she might even now suspect.

       This Christie characterization is so wonderful that I wish Rowdy Ann might have become a regular, teaching young post World-War I ladies how to prepare themselves to become the sassy flappers that would soon be demanded of them.

 

Los Angeles, January 26, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).