Sidney A. Franklin | The Hoodlum / 1919

exploring genders

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bernard McConville (screenplay, based on the novel by Julie Mathilde Lippmann), Sidney A. Franklin (director) The Hoodlum / 1919

 

In the 1919 Sidney A. Franklin film The Hoodlum Mary Pickford plays the spoiled granddaughter of a wealthy business baron who begins the film meeting with his board as they determine how to crush yet another business challenger. They have already, they admit, put an innocent man behind bars in order to cover over their own crooked methods, and now they plan yet more such illegal activities, business magnate Alexander Guthrie (Ralph Lewis) suggesting that no great industry exists that hasn’t had human martyrs desperate to be killed on the cross of their company commitment.

      Meanwhile, Amy Burke (Pickford) is throwing a temper tantrum for the upstairs butler who will dare not interrupt her grandfather’s meeting so that she might tell of him of the strange jumping fit she has witnessed in her pet cat. Finally, she is so incensed that she herself walks into the meeting in her nightwear, shocking all of his colleagues, yet going unpunished by Guthrie who obviously dotes on the young monster.

     He mullifies her by telling his granddaughter that she shall soon be traveling with him to Europe, and almost immediately she envisions shopping trips for the needed “shoes, hats, dresses, stockings.” Meanwhile she is late to school once again. She drives like a maniac, the chauffeur along for the ride, as she attempts to outrace a motorcycle cop and, after an exciting car and motorcycle chase involving two policemen, she  crashes into a hayrick, blaming it all of her innocent chauffeur. Like her grandfather, Amy is clearly ready to have others lose their reputations and freedoms in order to satisfy her whims.

       Changing her mind a few days after going on her spending spree, Amy determines she doesn’t really want to travel at all, and is now in the midst of another grand funk over the fact that the maids are trying to help her pack by asking which articles of clothing she wishes to take along.

     By coincidence her father, John Burke (T. D. Crittenden), a sociologist returns from “parts unknown.” He is intending to move now to Craigen Street—in the heart, we soon discover, of New York City’s lower East Side—to write a book about life in the city slums. Having no idea where Craigen Street is, she insists that he explain to her grandfather that she wishes to join her father; but even he dares not cross the dictatorial man, knowing that once he is set on something he will permit no changes of his plans.

     Amy is forced to tell him herself, and his anger is immediately apparent. But when she threatens that if she is forced to join him on the ship, she will jump overboard and drown, he backs off, refusing to even discuss it, seemingly dismissing her from his attentions in the process.

     The girl joins her father as they taxi into the midst of human chaos she has never before encountered. Franklin makes good use of the vast repertoire of character types, Irish, Jewish, black, small boy ruffians, untended babies, and any other kind of stereotype one might imagine seemingly all living within the same block. Amy is at first disgusted, but quickly spurns every attempt of the neighbors to greet her and her father.

      Burke has hired a cook to care for them, but Amy rejects even her best intentions, utterly spurning any attempt to help by undertaking such a lowly action as peeling potatoes. When the man across the way, William Turner (Kenneth Harlan), pulls in their clothes line to wipe his hands a towel, she scolds him publicly as if he were robbing them.

 

    Two girls her age stop by to introduce themselves, seeking out her company (“Say kiddo, we wants to be friends”), but she quickly spurns them suggesting she’s far too “fatigued” from the trip to discuss anything. And it is clear, she is nearly physically sickened by the mass of human flesh that presses in upon their small, rented rooms.

     Desperate to escape, and wishing now she had joined her grandfather, she leaves their quarters walking into the throngs. But she soon becomes lost and a heavy downpour forces her to crouch with others under the doorways. Without even enough money to purchase an umbrella, she finally gets up the courage to steal one, but in her race away from the vendor madly crashes into a gentleman also with an umbrella, Turner, who when she spins away in anger to leave, tells her that she’s heading in the wrong direction.

     With what is left of his umbrella, he accompanies her back to Craigen street where, so the intertitles tell us, she is relieved just to have someplace in which to keep warm and sleep.

     The intertitles also tell us that Amy has finally become resigned to the life of the slums, and by the next morning at the breakfast table she is in a better mood. Her father explains that she if wants to get along with the neighbors she must dress and act like them, otherwise they will become suspicious and jeopardize his book, his life’s work.

     It is at this point that a rather unpromising film suddenly turns into something quite significant in early silent film history. Amy must decide which of “them” to dress and act like, and she chooses, quite naturally, the wildest version of the street people among whom she lives, the ruffian street boys right out of later films such as Street Scene (1931) and Dead End (1937). Surely, given her own temper and behavioral outbursts Amy cannot possibly choose to be like the girls closer to her age, already cultivating a slum-dwelling version of a female click.

    The choice to become a tomboy in the manner of Rowdy Ann released in the same year is fascinating in the context of what was about to emerge regarding the many soon-to-follow early 1920s films featuring a woman half-way between the complete gender reversals that the film industry would soon see in Sven Gade and Heinz Schall’s Hamlet (1921), Karin Swanström’s Flickan i frack  (The Girl in Tails) (1926), Paul Sloane’s The Clinging Vine (1926), Paul Czinner’s Der Geiger von Florenz (The Fiddler of Florence) (1926), William A. Wellman Beggars of Life (1928), and G. W. Pabst’s Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box) (1929).

     Had she remained in the Fifth Avenue mansion with her grandfather we might even imagine Amy as exploring the same territory as Ossi Oswalda did in Ernst Lubitsch’s Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don’t Want to Be a Man) of the year before Pickford’s film, 1918. In fact, the similarities between Ossi and Amy are notable.

     But in the very next scene of The Hoodlum she has become one of the male street urchins, although still dressed as a girl. Now best friends with the tough kid Dish Lowry (Buddy Messinger), she holds a regular crap game with presumably loaded dice, winning money off of Dish’s best friend (Ernest Butterworth Jr.), and the black boy, named in the racist manner of the day, Snowball. Amy wins time and again, surviving police chases, including one into a basement coal bin, and in and out of fences and outhouses that might match the antics of Charles Chaplin in a work A Dog’s Life (1918). At one point in their attempts to outrun the cops, Amy takes refuge in the huge overcoat of a new tenant on the floor above them, rooming with Pat O’Shaughnessy (Andrew Arbuckle), Peter Cooper, who unbeknownst to her or her father is her now heavily bearded Grandfather come to spy on what has happened to his Granddaughter living under such conditions. In his journal he describes her with disgust as a “hoodlum,” something he could never have imagined.

      At another moment, after watching Snowball performing a Ragtime dance routine or something similar, Amy and Dish dance a wild version of the Shimmy.

      Despite her street-life machinations and wild behavior, however, Amy also has developed a good and caring heart, involving Peter Cooper in an attempt to help out a poor family with several starving children whose father lies drunk and whose mother is sick in bed.

     When she approaches the new tenant, Cooper screams out that there are organizations to support just such starving people. Startled by his outburst, she vaguely suggests that for a moment he has sounded just like her Grandfather, Cooper suddenly thinking better of his behavior, later bringing the family groceries, and providing them with the funds in order to survive.

    At another point, Amy finds a way to settle the decades-old daily battles between O’Shaughnessy and his neighbor Abram Isaacs (played by the well-known Jewish comedian Max Davidson). Amy arranges for a local Pugilist (Paul Mullen) to begin beating up O’Shaughnessy, she running to Isaacs for help, claiming that the stranger was saying bad things about the “Jew,” and O’Shaughnessy spoke out in support of Isaacs. Isaacs comes to the rescue, supposedly saving O’Saughnessy’s life as he tosses the Pugilist down the staircase, the two endless battlers now becoming best friends.

    Just as Amy has changed her life so too does Peter Cooper who by work’s end has even adopted Dish Lowry, implanting him in his Fifth Avenue mansion.

    Even though Amy performs as one of the boys, however, like Sissi she is still heterosexual, and has fallen in love with her neighbor Turner. But before she can enter into full womanhood, this film requires her to temporarily give up, like Lubitsch’s character, her female identity. It is as if to understand her own being she must not simply perform with and as the other gender, but must become it. Discovering that Turner has spent years in the penitentiary, set up by her Grandfather  as the fall guy mentioned in the first scene of this film, Amy suddenly realizes that she must break into Guthrie’s vault and find the second set of financial books which will prove Turner innocent.

 

   Dressing entirely in male garb she joins Turner as they break into her own familial home, pretending to have once worked in the house as a servant (“I was the house maid to the young dame’s sparklers.”).

    They are caught in the act by Guthrie and his goons, but when he recognizes the male thief to actually be Amy, it is suddenly revealed that no one is truly who they been perceived to be: Turner is innocent; Amy, so Turner discovers, is Guthrie’s granddaughter; Amy’s Grandfather is Peter Cooper; and the street kid Dish Lowry is now a boy living in the old man’s house. Upon discovering Turner’s identity Guthrie promises to fully vindicate his honor, an offer Turner will accept, he proclaims, only from Peter Cooper. Although Guthrie clearly does not get his proper punishment, at least he is forced to redeem the situation. And Amy, obviously, gets her man and a chance finally to enter into mature feminine adulthood.

 

     The final scene is their marriage, but even here the married couple shift “identities,” so to speak, getting into one car, closing the car window blind, and moving into another car that travels in the opposite direction—suggesting that they will not proceed in the same direction or behave in the same manner as their ancestors have. And of course, there is John Burke, Amy’s father, who has presumably now recorded all this social history and provided it with some significance.

 

Los Angeles, June 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).