George W. Hill Tell It to the Marines / 1926

the arbiter of wit, sex, and good times

by Douglas Messerli

 

E. Richard Schayer (screenplay), George W. Hill (director) Tell It to the Marines / 1926

 

Although William Haines is nominally the star of George W. Hill’s Tell It to the Marines almost every critic or observer who has commented about this ostensibly heterosexual film, declares that it is Lon Chaney’s movie, primarily because of how obnoxious Haines’ character appears to be. The critic for the Silents Are Golden site’s comments are typical of the general feelings about this film:

“While not the strongest story line, the picture, nevertheless, garnered almost universal praise— and still does today. It was MGM's second highest grossing picture for the year with worldwide box office receipts of $1.6 million. It is most certainly a brilliant performance by Lon Chaney, and, as such, he is the reason the film has stood the test of time, and, in this reviewer's opinion, must have been the driving force behind the film's success in 1927…. Chaney biographer Michael F. Blake noted, ‘The film remains one of his finest performances and demonstrates that he could be a serious actor without any make-up.’

     One can go on and on with laudatory prose about Chaney—he is deservedly one of the most revered actors in cinema history. However, equal screen time (if not more) is given to William Haines as the wisecracking young recruit "Skeet" Burns. Haines excelled at this type of characterization—the obnoxiously egotistical cut-up who takes nothing seriously and, therefore, ends up getting himself in trouble. … Haines certainly plays the cocky, arrogant and obnoxious part to the hilt in Tell it to the Marines. Although he deserves credit for filling the role admirably, author Richard Schayer's creation leans so much toward the obnoxious that it is difficult to muster any compassion for Burns when the story calls for audience sympathy.”

 

    There is no question that actor Haines pushes his character’s “Skeet” Burns’ persona to the limits, not only abusing the travel plan in which the military pays the way to transport it new volunteers to their location of training by taking advantage of the free transportation from his hometown in Kansas to the San Diego Naval base only to escape military induction in order to haunt the race tracks in nearby Tijuana; but when he loses, he returns, using the Marines as a method of survival. He disobeys and evades nearly all of Sergeant O’Hara’s orders, slips away from the military base, basically going AWOL later in the film when his group is stationed on Tondo Island, ignores the pleading of his shanghaied “date” Navy nurse Norma Dale (Eleanor Boardman) to take her home, and comes close to raping her. He is clearly misogynistic and incorrigible regarding nearly all systems of authority. He most certainly, as several commentators have described him, is “a wise guy” in need of a comeuppance.

      Yet I’d argue that he is no more cocky or arrogant than many silent film heroes such as Fatty Arbuckle, Charles Chaplin, and even Buster Keaton when it comes to authoritarian control; and Haines belongs to a long tradition of anti-disciplinarian behavior that gets most thoroughly expressed in a movie such as Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970).

      There was a reason why, year after year, Haines was one of the leading box office draws and MGM’s biggest star. In a time when films openly challenged the bourgeois notions of family and hearth, openly gay actor Haines stood as a symbol to some of a break with a government and society out of touch—particularly with those of the “roaring 20s” generation and even men who had returned with a broader view of society from World War I—with their contemporary concerns. The Prohibition laws and the still basic Victorian approach to policing by many police forces, prisons, and local governments were appropriate targets, for these individuals and others, by figures such as Haines, about whom William J. Mann in his important study of Hollywood gays, Behind the Screen, writes:

 

“His [Haines’] unique screen characterization was merely an extension of his real-life personality: manic, witty, and irreverent. Haines’ humor and values had been honed among the drag queens and gay sophisticates of New York’s Greenwich Village: that what comes through on-screen, and indeed, what made him so popular in the 1920s. …Haines’ campy city slickers were embraced by moviegoers precisely for [his] difference. His queerness, in effect, is what made him box-office gold. He’d ad-lib on the set, with writers inserting his quips as intertitles. His campy asides and comments became part of his screen persona, a gay sensibility at work within the confines of the studio system.”

 

      Even if throughout Tell It to the Marines Haines’ character “Skeet” is seen constantly chasing the girls, particularly nurse Norma, a woman beloved also by Sergeant O’Hara, we recognize

that—even if he might win the girl by the end of the film, as he does in this movie—he was still a wild card even after making significant changes, and stood fast as not truly being the marrying kind.

    When asked early in the film by Marine officers whether he’s ever been married, “Skeet” quips, laughing and observing (through an intertitle card) “Who me? I’m America’s Sweetheart!”—almost breaking through pretense of the screen in the truth of his statement.

      Mann describes him as swishing a lot throughout the film. I can’t say that I would describe his insistent maneuvers to get around his Sergeant’s injunctions as representing a “swishy” manner, “behaving more like a woman rather than a man,” but “Skeet does seem to attract the Navy sailors in a way that he did in real life as well.

      At one point, as he sails with his Marine crew to their first off-base location, he meets up with a hunky sailor going down the narrow circular staircase just as he begins to attempt to go up. The following conversation suggests a kind of immediate gay link-up between the two, rejected by Skeet because of his supposedly “macho” desires (he is, after all, supposed to be attracted only to women).  

    

Bill Duff: Say, Marine... you almost ran into a murder!

Pvt. George Robert 'Skeet' Burns: Peddle your papers, Handsome! I'm poison to Gobs!

Bill Duff: And I'm a great cure for poison, Mr. Leather Neck!

Pvt. George Robert 'Skeet' Burns: Say, Baby... I think I'll declare war on you!

   If the conversation might sound somewhat like a series of violent statements, it’s actually quite campy: with Skeet’s comments about the other being “handsome,” the suggestion of Duff that “he’s a great cure for poison,”—that is, that he takes on all would-be lovers turning them into happy beings—and that Skeet, addressing him as “baby,” posits the idea that he might declare war on him, a metaphor for engaging in sex, all hint at their immediate attraction to each other. The problem is simply that one is a Marine and the other a Gob, an enlisted Navy man enemy of all Leather Necks since the Marine Corps became an independent branch of the military while remaining subject at sea to the Navy, and therefore technically a branch of the Navy. For Skeet, who cannot control his emotions, that means immediate battle, particularly when he senses that the other is possibly making a sexual slur or even coming on to him.

      Sergeant O’Hara quickly breaks up the fight, but suggests that if Skeet really wants a fight, why not do it in the ring, without telling his soldier that Duff is the Navy heavyweight champion.

    That betrayal is one of many that Skeet later points to in later describing O’Hara as a “double-crosser.”

     On Tondo Island, when Skeet shows some attraction to a local native girl, O’Hara insists that he keep away from her and announces that anyone caught fraternizing with the native women will be punished. Such a challenge, obviously, is just what Skeet has been waiting for. Sneaking out of his tent, he hurries off to a native ceremony which Zaya, the girl, is watching. She quickly takes him away to a private hut nearby, where she begins to try to kiss him, but in scratching her back and then inside her dress, Skeet wonders whether she might not have some sort of hygiene problem and resists her kisses, while she becomes increasingly sexually aggressive. When another native observes Skeet rejecting her advances, a fight ensues, which ends with O’Hara, and Skeet’s roommate Corporal Madden coming to the rescue as all the natives and the three men are forced to engage in battle.

      The Marines, bloodied and done in, carry the day, but when Skeet, appreciative of his saviors, attempts to shake O’Hara’s hand, he socks him in the jaw for disobeying him and putting the entire mission in jeopardy.

     These two incidents, among others, convince Skeet that O’Hara is arranging so that he can win over nurse Norma. But we know that Norma’s real reason for rejecting Skeet is probably closer to being racist, just as, sadly, are the scenes with the Tondo natives. Dale has heard, through gossip, about Skeet’s supposed courting of the native girl, and refuses now to even talk to him or write. It’s clear that despite her ability to accept even his untoward behavior to her, she cannot tolerate his interracial involvements with a native woman. One suspects that had it simply been another nurse, she might have forgiven him, but with Zaya he has gone too far. As she writes her insistent courtier: "I'm returning your letters unopened. Your affair at Tondo Island is common gossip and I thoroughly resent your writing me after that. Norma Dale."

      We know, furthermore, that although on the outside O’Hara is tough, he is deeply sentimental and loving on the inside, devoted not only to his nurse—who he knows, at heart, he’s not good-looking enough to truly win over—but deeply loves every Marine he has trained, particularly Skeet, whom he has attempted to reform despite Skeet’s insistent infractions.

 

      Later in Shanghai, the two men meet up with Norma once again, she refusing to even acknowledge Skeet. In a restaurant with O’Hara, she implores him, “Don't you think I'm right to never see him again?" But even here, where he could fairly bad mouth Skeet, the Sergeant demonstrates what a softie he truly is: "Never? Are you sure that's what you mean?" When she insists that is precisely what she means, O'Hara suggests, "I think you're turning him down just when he needs you most."

        It is these events that make Chaney as O’Hara such a loveable figure compared with the impetuous selfishness of Haines’ character.

      The two men come together again, this time to release the nurses, now located in an isolate Chinese city where disease has spread, from the control of warrior bandits. It ends, as such films inevitably must, with O’Hara being wounded ordering the others to retreat, while this time Skeet stays the course and fights on the save Norma and the other nurses as well as O’Hara.

        And accordingly, by film’s end with Skeet’s four-year enlistment finally over, he and Norma buy a ranch, now inviting O’Hara to join them as a “partner,” whatever that might mean. If nothing else it implies a kind a polyamorous adventure way before such things were common knowledge. The veteran obviously recognizes, however, that he and the Marine Corps were made for one another.

     As Skeet turns to go, he too has second thoughts and returns to the base, obviously ready to live out a few more years with his male companion in arms instead of his female partner in bed.

        No one else might have gotten away with such an obvious switch after having pretended to fight so hard for the hand of the female lead in a movie.

        But Haines could get away it, at least throughout the 1920s, because he was authentic and honest about his sexuality. Toto le Grand, the nom de plume of The Gay Cookbook author and former California chorus boy Lou Rand Hogan (born Louis Randall), mentions seeing Haines out at night being “crude, brash, and rowdy!” just as were many of his characters.

       Today, in a frankly more conservative era, we praise the gruff but loving representative of duty, while dismissing the arbiter of wit, sex, and good times who lived a life free of bluff.

 

Los Angeles, March 5, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).