Tim Whelan | It's a Boy / 1933

mouse into man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leslie Howard Gordon and John Paddy Carstairs (screenplay, based on the English adaptation by Austin Melford of the 1926 play by Franz Arnold and Ernst Bach, Huura, ein Junge), Tim Whelan (director) It's a Boy / 1933

 

What is far more important that the story of this truly silly farce is that the film established a character for the previous “mouse” (Horton’s own term for his early on-screen characterizations) or “sissy” which actor Edward Everett Horton—the star of this clumsy if often truly humorous vehicle It’s a Boy—had long been playing, creating a new persona of a slightly daffy, perpetually jittery, and generally confused heterosexual with perhaps even a slightly checkered past whose sole purpose in life was to support his best friend and maintain his marriage—although in this case the story simply concerns his attempt to get married.

      Horton’s new figure, his character in this case holding the moniker of Dudley Leake, allowed him not only to become the famed side-kick of Fred Astaire—playing Egbert in The Gay Divorcee (1934, the very year after this transformation), Horace Hardwick in Top Hat (1935), and Jeffrey Baird in Shall We Dance (1937)—but to survive the radical shift in the Film Production Code in which the homophobic, racist Joseph Breen banned all suggestions of queer behavior. Among the dozens of pansy performers of the early 1930s, including remarkable lead and character actors such as Horton, William Haines, Bobby Watson, Johnny Arthur, Tyrell Davis, Ramon Novarro, Franklin Pangborn, and numerous others, perhaps only Horton and Pangborn walked out of the pre-Code films into the dreary desert of sexless movies that began to appear in 1934 and 1935, continuing for decades after. Novarro also survived, but with an incredible metaphoric limp and real alcoholism, finally being murdered in 1968 by men who had answered his call for rent boys in a botched robbery attempt. The other pansies of the early 1930s movies were tossed to the side.

     In It’s a Boy you can actually see, even if it may have unintentional, how Horton was saved from Breen’s lowering beam. Indeed, the whole movie is centered, despite its many subplots, on the attempt to get the gentleman of the unmarrying kind married. And the viewer has good reason to imagine, given the road blocks put in his way by the bride’s father, Eustace Bogle (Alfred Drayton) and those imposed by Dudley himself that the affair will never take place.

      First of all, everyone who attends the bachelor party the night before the wedding goes home totally plastered, particularly Dudley and his best man, James Skippett (Leslie Henson). Skippett is clearly a best man in more ways than one, and in any movie earlier in the decade would have been openly presented as a kind of offstage lover—although Dudley and Skippett would also not have been central characters. Even as these men leave the party, Skippett dons the tablecloth to become the bride, linking arms with Dudley to suggest they are bride and groom.

 

     A while later the duo arrive back in Dudley’s mansion so drunk that they end up sharing a bed, one dressed in a pajama bottom with formal shirt and tie covering the top half of his body, the other in a pajama top matched with a formal pair of pants, making it clear that they shared something more than just the bed.

      The wedding is planned for 12:00, but Dudley’s butler can awaken him finally only at 11:55. As he explains to Skippett whom he discovers sleeping in his bed: “Do you realize we’re going to get married in exactly 5 minutes time,” to which Skippett replies, “What, you and me?”  

      There are other minor complications. The evening before Dudley, in a drunken confession, has admitted to his friend a discretion many years earlier. On the eve of the Great War in 1914, he was evidently attracted to a Miss Piper, and, he admits, he made “a false step” (the two drunk men falling on stairs as he reports this): he enlisted. He recalls nothing else and never saw Miss Piper again. But two years later he received a note from said Miss Piper wanting to know what he was going to do about “his responsibility.” In short, Dudley believes he may have a son, surely a detriment when one is about to be married.

       The audience, taking one look at Dudley seriously doubts the possibility that even as a young man Horton’s character could possibly have bedded Miss Piper—just as later in the movie Top Hat, Horton’s wife Madge Hardwick can hardly imagine that any other woman might take an interest in her husband, and doubts even that years earlier in Paris that he may have been infatuated by a Fifi or Kiki. But the young man, Joe Piper, just happens to show up that very next morning, claiming to be his long lost son and demanding a substantial sum of money.

 

      How could Dudley, with all that going on, and given his naturally confused and jittery sense of being ever be expected to make the wedding in time? But the Bogles, particularly the father—despite the insistence of Dudley’s fiancée Mary (Wendy Barrie) and her mother (Helen Haye) to wait just a little longer—calls off the wedding.   

     What follows, accordingly, as the groom-to-be and his fiancée finally meet up in her home, is a series of fibs involving a meeting that Skippett claims he insisted Dudley take that morning with a noted author…picking the name up for a book in the Bogle living room…John Tempest—who without any of them knowing it is actually a woman who is also a friend of Mary Bogle’s and is now part of her wedding party holed up in her house. This is, after all, a farce!     

     Bogle senior demands to meet John Tempest, and the lies pile up as Joe Piper, who shows up to blackmail his “daddy,” is forced to play Tempest, and, after it is discovered that Tempest is really a woman, required again to dress up in drag to perform as the female writer. To make sure things are even more confusing, Skippett also dresses in drag to perform as the female who goes by the pseudonym of Tempest, Mr. Bogle finding himself quite attracted to the woman scrivener.

       In short, since it is 1933, not yet 1934, and the movie is a British production, director Tom Whelan gets to turn Horton into a straight man and still film it as a gay movie at the very same moment.

       Unexpectedly, Dudley does finally take action, rushing off with his fiancée to the marriage register and proceeding with the ceremony—that is until Bogle shows up with Joe Piper ready to call the wedding off all over again. Fortunately, a theatrical deus ex machina arrives just in time in the form of a policeman who has long been on to Joe Piper and his mother’s attempts to blackmail many young soldiers over the years. Besides Joe doesn’t truly need any more money, the real father having handsomely settled with him years before—that man, so we discover, being none other that Eustace Bogle.

      I like to think of Mary Bogle being the girlish version of the later Madge Hardwick, a clever being who no longer is afraid of loosing the love of a husband who never did pay much attention to her or any women for that matter. Besides she’s busy in this version of an ongoing saga with Horton’s close male friend, Jerry Travers (Astaire in Top Hat), in trying to marry him off to her woman acquittance, Dale Tremont, who threatens to marry a real poof, a dress designer. More of that later.

 

Los Angeles, April 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).