Gregory La Cava | The Breath of the Nation / 1919

the first bootlegger

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gregory La Cava and Grim Natwick (animators), Gregory La Cava (director) The Breath of the Nation / 1919

 

Until recent assessments of Gregory La Cava’s career and film series devoted to his works, most filmgoers were probably unaware of La Cava’s early career as a cartoonist, his later work as an animator, and his life-long alcoholism which helped—along with Mary Pickford’s inability to accept a director of spontaneity and last-minute changes—to end his career. Pickford’s dismissal earlier in her career of Ernst Lubitsch and her suit against the wonderful director La Cava are incidents for which I cannot forgive “America’s Sweetheart.”

    Fortunately, we now have a sample of his early animation in the release of the short cartoon film, “Breath of a Nation,” punning on the famous D. W. Griffith work, as well as presenting an early indication—La Cava was only 27 when this cartoon was released—of his attitudes toward alcohol.

     La Cava was also committed from early on to collaboration—later in his career he worked intensely with the actors themselves in rewriting scripts—and in the film we see the work also of his friend Grim Natwick, whom La Cava had encouraged to become an animator, who here contributes the images of the petticoat-showing soda shop waitress and other female figures, and who later went on to draw the infamous Betty Boop.

     The date is July 1919, with Prohibition imminent, the Eighteenth Amendment being finally enforced in January 1920; but as commentator Scott Simmon points out, because of the “war-time” national prohibition law, the banning of alcohol was already “effectively under way.” At least is now in effect in Judge Alexander Rumhauser’s house.

     Borrowed from the 1910 newspaper cartoon strip “Silk Hat Harry’s Divorce Suit,” originally drawn, according to Simmon, by “Tad,” “the pen acronym of Hearst sports columnist and cartoonist Thomas A. Dorgan,” Judge Rummy, as he was known to friends, is a far-gone alcoholic, and his wife is about to do something about it. She begins by throwing away all of the Judge’s stash of bottles—the cupboards in which they are contained also holding the Judge himself—and demands her husband attend a local temperance lecture on “The Horrors of Drink,” he himself serving as the “horrible example.”

 

    Across the street from Sodapop hall, the location of the lecture, is Silkhat Harry’s Soda Fountain into which the Judge observes a wide variety of the city’s citizens, men and women, entering. One man, observing the sign for “Hyacinth Fizz,” enters, at first in spirit if not in reality, while others push around, under, and it appears, even through him in their rush to get inside.

    A gay fop flamboyantly waves at the judge before spotting the sign for “Fruit Sundae,” kissing the air and entering. Soon after, the fop exits, now muscled up and mean, tying the local lamppost into a knot. The judge can only wonder what has been in that Sundae.

 

      The Judge enters, spotting the entire back room in near “riot,” dancing for joy. “Why the riot?” he queries Harry, who confides to the Judge that he’s invented a “substitute,” making him perhaps the very first bootlegger to enter a cinema frame. 

      The Judge wants to know if it is “effective,” the truth of which Harry proves by feeding a drop to a mouse who soon after boxes the ears off the soda fountain cat. How can the Judge resist? After drinking up Harry’s special, he dances upon the countertop before flying off after the waitress into the backroom.

      Even a minister about to enter the lecture hall across the way notices the sign for the “Pineapple Temptation” and cannot resist. The drink sends him literally rolling down the streets, which the Judge’s wife observes with disgust just as she is about to enter the lecture hall. She detours as well into the soda fountain shop, giving Harry her special stare, which transforms him into nothing more than bug which goes scurrying off.

     Entering into the back room, Mrs. Rumhauser quickly clears the place out, the Judge running for the water wagon and riding off as a passenger in cold comfort.

     La Cava visited sanitoriums to dry out several times throughout his life, without obviously kicking the habit. And it should come as no surprise that the great director of Bed of Roses, My Man Godfrey, and Stage Door, to name but a few of his many significant films, was a close friend of W. C. Fields, whom he directed in his silent picture days in So’s Your Old Man (1926).

 

Los Angeles, March 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).