William A. Seiter | Kiss Me Again / 1931

make believe

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julien Josephson and Paul Perez (screenplay, based on the operetta by Victor Herbert and Henry Martyn Blossom, Mlle. Modiste), William A. Seiter (director) Kiss Me Again / 1931

 

Kiss Me Again is based on a basically forgettable operetta by Victor Herbert that ran for 202 performances as Mlle. Modiste in 1905. whose major song, sung by Metropolitan soprano Fritzi Scheff provided the title for the movie version, and was a sensation back in the day. But listening to it at least 4 times in a movie musical is today, I’m afraid, something of a torture. I’ve never been

a Herbert fan, and although I know these serious vibrato-centered love songs were the mid-point between the wonderful comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan and the modern Broadway musical, I still find early century operettas something to endure.

 

    Made as a musical, moreover, this 1931 movie was almost immediately pulled by Warner Brothers because of the negative reaction that many studios felt during the same period against musical comedies, the mainstay of the earliest days of talkies which quickly lost audience interest. The studio believed that public disinterest would only last a few months, but when audiences continued to disdain such fare, they had no choice but to proceed with the film’s release, cutting a great many of its musical numbers, including almost of all Walter Pigeon’s songs. Kiss Me Again, accordingly, stands in a sort of netherworld between a comic talkie and a musical extravaganza that creates another level of discomfort.

     The ordinary shop girl Fifi (Bernice Clare), working in Mademoiselle Cecile’s (Judith Vosselli) designer dress store is hoping to earn enough money to study opera and make her way into the serious musical world, which creates problems, accordingly, for a motion picture trying to downplay its musical offerings.

      Fortunately, the very subject of the work is the interaction of the low and high cultures, the clash of the haute coutre and opera worlds with the seemingly ordinary soldiers, Paul de St. Cyr (Walter Pigeon) who loves a shop girl like Fifi along with the pretentions of Madame Cecille for whom her ex-husband Francois (Frank McHugh) now works, although still calling her darling to which she repeatedly responds, “Madame to you.” 

     The work also represents one of the most common issues of the day, the opposition of individuals of social standing to just such shop girls as Fifi, particularly when they fall in love and plan to marry such young men as Paul whose father is Count de St. Cyr (Claude Gillingwater), a parallel situation being played out by Paul’s best friend, Rene (William Everett Horton), who is in love with the General’s daughter, Marie, whom Paul’s father has planned for his son to marry.

      The central plot of this work centers around the Count’s attempt to pay shop girl Fifi to stop seeing his son. Of course, she refuses, but as in so many such stories, he is able to convince her that if Paul were to marry her he would lose everything, his inheritance, his friends, his social standing, and his own father’s love. Fifi is so very much he love with her soldier boy that she sees no way out but to abandon him, using the check the Count has written in order to study for the opera.

 

      As anyone who has seen such a work before knows, she will become a great star, find a way back to Paul, and, after many interferences, sing her way into the heart of Paul’s father and back into her former lover’s good graces. The couple will announce its marriage plans, and the father will finally give his assent.

    If the course of the film is predictable, however, it is the minor characters who hold any interest for an audience such a warhorse can hope to maintain. And in both cases, those minor figures stand as possible gay alternatives to the predictable heterosexual romance. 

     Edward Everett Horton, as we all know, was one of the most delightful of the “sissy” actors. In his study of gays and lesbians in Hollywood, William J. Mann argues “no sissy was more famous than Edward Everett Horton.” And others, such as screenwriter and director Frances Merion praise him as being “one of the kindest men in the theatrical business.” But on the screen, Horton, a versatile stage actor, was primarily what he himself described as “a mouse,” as Mann reminds us, another “euphemism for sissy or queer.” Generally, when playing the best friend of a vivacious straight man (straight in dialogue and on-screen sexuality) like Fred Astaire or Adolphe Menjou, or playing in films with scripts written by the likes of Noel Coward, Alan Scott (who wrote the scripts for nearly all the great Astaire musicals), or Hal Kanter (who scripted Hitchcock’s Pocket Full of Miracles, helped Tennessee William translate his play The Rose Tattoo into a movie, and wrote most of the jokes for Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis) turned him into a delightful harried, stuttering companion who shuddered along with the consequences of the plot, exaggerating the dangers of its central characters skating on the thin ice of love and good intentions. 

       In this film, however, working with the nearly always serious Walter Pigeon, his character seems merely bland and out of breath. The best scene that Seiter can stir up for him is when Pigeon as Paul de St. Cyr, on a mad search for his ex-girlfriend Fifi throughout Paris, takes his friend Rene along for the ride, the “mouse” in this case complaining that he’s dead on his feet. He tries to simply slow down Paul, who if he only listened for a moment to his friend might actually discover Fifi singing as Bellini in the very same bar. But the driven Paul has no patience to cool his toes and catch a moment of shut eye for which Rene keeps pleading, and misses out, accordingly, on meeting up with the lover he seeks.  

     Throughout Horton is used less as a “mouse” than as kind of shadow figure, following around Paul so that he might catch a kiss with his friend’s lover Marie when Paul bows in the other direction. And, finally, Horton’s character is sent away, along with Marie, to do off-screen what they have been promising to do all along in from of the camera, so that Paul can kiss and make up with his former Fifi now Bellini to end the movie.

       Fortunately, character actor Frank McHugh gets an opportunity to sing about his plight as “A Make Believe Ladies Man,” while the girls of Madame Cecile’s maison dress him up in genuine drag. This is not a scene in which McHugh appears simply dressed like a female, but one in which he is so outlandishly costumed that even the campiest drag queen might give him a round of applause. Effeminately prancing around while he sings, it’s clear that McHugh/Francois loves his momentary role as the gay funny man who stops the show and makes everyone finally laugh in the midst of so much perspiration for central characters’ aspirations.

       After that moment of high spirits, there is, unfortunately, nowhere left for a pansy to go in an early 1930s pre-code movie but, like Horton, to be ordered off stage or, in McHugh’s case, to turn into a desperately poor drunk who can’t even pay his bar bill in the Paris café where Bellini is singing.

     His final gig in the movie, however, represents an odd comeuppance for the upper class, as we discover Francois working, near film’s end, as the butler for the Count de St. Cyr, Paul’s blusteringly pretentious pappa, a coded drag role that Horton often plays.

     It’s ironic that in performing in a slightly larger role, Horton lost out to McHugh in this film who played the comic character that’s usually handed to Horton.

 

Los Angeles, April 11, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).