Cecil B. DeMille | Male and Female / 1919

lords, kings, and queens

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jeanie MacPherson (screenplay, based on the play The Admirable Crichton by J. M. Barrie), Cecil B. DeMille (director) Male and Female / 1919  

 

Cecil B. DeMille’s hyperventilated epic version of J. M. Barrie’s patriarchal and class-structured comedy The Admirable Crichton was renamed Male and Female because the director and his studio chieftains doubted whether the US public knew what “admirable” meant, afraid they might confuse it with the word “admiral,” and presume it was another British ship-side adventure. Strangely the film almost becomes that as the entire Loam family, Lord Loam (Theodore Roberts), Lady Mary Lasenby (Gloria Swanson), the Honorable “Ernie” Wooley (Raymond Hatton), Lady Agatha Lasenby (Mildred Reardon), and Lady Eileen Duncraigie (Rhy Darby), along with the head butler, Crichton (Thomas Meighan) and the scullery maid, Tweeny (Lila Lee) sail off on a yacht for the South Seas, where they crash into and are stranded upon a uninhabited island in the manner of Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, and various other tales of European survival of the fit.

     Before that voyage, however, we are introduced to this despicable lot, mostly through the key hole peeps of their page boy, Buttons (Wesley Barry), who looks in upon them while they still sleep—which, other than make their underlings unhappy, is about all they do in their meaningless lives. Their butler, Crichton is as a hopelessly in love with Lady Mary as the scullery maid Tweeny as she is with him. But sex doesn’t seem to be included in any of their schedules, particularly since the most energetic of group, Mary, is about to wed the fop Lord Brockelhurst (Robert Cain) who, so an important intertitle informs us a minute or so after Crichton has been reading a poem about Babylonia:

 

 “But there is no one – though knowing little of Babylonia Kings – as extensively informed on certain “Queens” in the Cleopatra Ballet.”

 

    Through its use of quotation marks around the word “queen” we can presume the 1919 title is winkingly telling us that Brockelhurst knows the effeminate gay dancers of the Mikhail Fokine- choreographed ballet Cléopâtre, which had its premiere at Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in 1909, in which Fokine himself performed, who like many of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes dancers—the company which in 1918 had revived that ballet—was himself a gay man, despite his long-time heterosexual marriage.

     I should also mention, since there are always those who deny the word could possibly have meant what it does today, during the period of DeMille’s movie, the word “queen or quean” signified what I have just suggested, according to Kenneth Hudson’s A Dictionary of the Teenage Revolution and its Aftermath, and was regularly used beginning in the late 19th century and throughout the early 20th century. *

    In short, despite the aesthetic pleasure Brockelhurst takes in the maid’s ankles and his determination to marry—a ceremony generally required of a man of his estate—Lord Brockelhurst is presented to us as a queer, later seen waving goodbye to his fiancée Mary and her family with the traditional foppish prop, a large white hanky.

    The above is the only reason my discussion of this basically silly film—although it was of immense importance to Gloria Swanson’s career, particularly in her relationship with Cecil B. DeMille—exists in these pages. For the rest of the film is a heterosexual fantasy in which the shipwrecked family of the upper crust is suddenly forced to depend upon the ordinary survival skills of Crichton. 

 

    How Crichton, working as a butler has somehow managed to develop the ability to start a bonfire with a monocle and kindling, build a palm lean-to, and finally construct an entire wooden house replete with windows and other decorative adornments, let alone manage to force these lazy simpletons into providing game, sea-food, fruits, and wine for their daily table is never explained. What is apparent, and is perhaps the subtle moral of Barrie’s tale, is that Crichton creates a new society very much like the old one, except that he is now King, and they the servants who deliver the lavish dinners to him.

    The stubbornly independent Mary has now suddenly been transformed into a woman with a schoolgirl crush on her former butler that competes with Tweeny’s loyal love for the man. If Crichton is admirable, he is unfortunately just as patriarchal and misogynistic as Lord Loach and the system his ilk have created.

      A similar fantasy—based on the intolerable lines of a poem by William Ernest Henley**, “Ire ever the knightly years were gone / With the old world to the grave / I was the King of Babylon / And you were a Christian slave”—is embedded within the other tall tale to give the film presumably what DeMille perceived of as “epic dignity.”

     In that interruptive interlude, Meighan truly gets be the King of his dreams to Swanson’s Christian slave, who refuses to give in the Babylonian’s sexual demands. Accordingly, despite his love for her, he sends her to the lion’s den where she is proudly killed.

     DeMille had determined to cut the scene from the film because of its dangers, but the plucky Swanson demanded he restore it, finding herself actually face to face with a trained lion, DeMille and his crew standing on the sidelines with a revolver and whips in hand in case the worst might happen. Indeed, as the film shows us, as she fell to the floor, the lion placed his paw upon her, fortunately going no further. And even today it remains on the most memorable stills of all of silent film.

      In the primary narrative of the film, however, just as Crichton and Mary are about to be wed by the minister in their midst, a ship appears on the horizon, Crichton forced to interrupt the event in order to set off the fires on a nearby mountaintop as a signal. The group is saved and returned to England, where, as if their adventures were truly a fantasy, they return back to their normal snobbery and class distinctions, even if Mary still holds the torch for her island King.

      To save her from making the wrong decision, however, the now truly admirable Crichton announces that he will marry Tweeny and take his new bride to America, presumably a land in which he might again someday reign as King—at least of his own household.

     Presumably Mary weds Brockelhurst and lives the unhappy life she deserves, while the Lord runs off each night to the ballet. The pattern, established in literature, film, and reality, seems to have been a rather common one in Barrie’s Britain.

     

*My suspicion is that the term might have arisen even earlier since already in the 18th century groups of men in female drag often gathered for contests to see which of them might be the most convincing or, as today, outrageous. The winners were provided with a reward, perhaps a crown, which let them to be called a “Queen,” thus bringing together the usage that remains today, drag queen. We certainly know that quite lavish gatherings of that sort occurred in Weimar Germany, just a few years after DeMille’s picture.

 

**The poet Henley and his wife were the parents of a sickly child, Margaret, for whom Barrie cared for and read to, the girl becoming the figure of Wendy in Barrie’s Peter Pan play and fictions.

 

Los Angeles, May 14, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).