Edward Sedgwick | Doughboys / 1930

barely surviving

by Douglas Messerli

 

Al Boasberg (screenplay based on a scenario Richard Schayer and a story by Boasberg and Sidney Lazarus), Edward Sedgwick (director) Doughboys / 1930

 

One of the early talkies, Edward Sedgwick’s Doughboys was carefully overseen by its star Buster Keaton playing Elmer J. Stuyvesant, Jr., whose own experiences were incorporated into the film—although given the lack of depth and stereotypical depictions of World War I, I’m not sure that might be something to burnish his credits.

    It’s clear, however, that Keaton wanted a far more serious film than the writers hoped to write for him, and it shows. Although Keaton’s deadpan face remains intact, the events behind his bemused confusion are often uneventful and of little interest. Even his accidental heroism is muted compared with, for example, the remarkable exploits of The General. This early talkie had clearly not yet found its rhythm.

    Although there’s nothing wrong with Keaton’s baritone voice, he seldom gets an opportunity in this film to say anything other than “yes sir” or to repeat his Sergeant Brophy’s (Edward Brophy) words back to him as if he cannot comprehend what has just been said.

     The situation is hardly original. Jean Renoir had already used a version of it, to much better effect, in his 1928 silent picture Tire-au-flanc (Slacker) in which a bourgeois poet and his valet are called up to serve simultaneously at the front.

    In this case, wealthy businessman Stuyvesant, attracted to one of his own factory girls Mary (Sally Eilers), waits outside the factory entrance near his car with his valet and chauffeur for Mary to pass by after her shift. Each time he asks her to dinner, an opera, a ballet, and each time she rejects him, disinterested in a man who possessing such wealth simply presumes he can obtain anything he wants—including her company.

     On one such venture, while nearby a rallying parade for World War I soldiers is taking place, they notice that the chauffeur has gone missing, evidently, so the valet suggests, caught up in the whirlwind of young men signing up before the draft for military service.

      Needing a new driver, since neither Stuyvesant nor his valet have ever driven a car, they visit the nearby employment service, without noticing that the rather down-and-out location has been reconverted into a military sign-up post.

      Confused by all the questions the desk sergeants asks him, particularly by the necessity of signing the form, he nonetheless politely answers the questions and signs. But he is so shocked in the next room when he has asked to take off his clothes, that he utterly refuses, the military men being forced to strip him and hold him down as if he were being raped.

      That is, of course, only the first of a series of humiliations he must suffer as, without seemingly his full knowledge—wealth in this case does not at seem to indicate intelligence or savoir faire—as Sergeant Brophy attempts to bring his new unit members down into military readiness. Among his fellow privates are Nescopeck (Cliff Edwards), a dumb ukulele player who performs entertaining pieces throughout the movie, a big ox of a fool Svendenburg (Victor Potel), and numerous other types, all representing worse military potential than Sgt. Bilko’s men in the motor pool of the 1950s Phil Silvers TV series.

     From the beginning Stuyvesant is determined to go AWOL which he describes on a phone call home as “resigning.” But when he discovers that his beloved Mary has joined up as a military hostess and entertainer, he stays on, hoping to woo her as a military man since his business credentials obviously did not impress.  

       And when he runs into her once more, this time in uniform, he indeed does make a new impression. Unfortunately, his Sergeant also loves Mary—although she thinks he’s a bore—and will tear up limb from limb any man that might come between them.

       Adventures are clearly in store, but are mostly diffused by not very successfully conceived comic scenes and by Mary’s claim in front of the Sergeant to have never previously seen the private who appears at her door. The lie, told in order to project Stuyvesant from his officer’s wrath, so seriously disappoints and disorients her lover than he wanders into the house of a French village merchant and sleeps in an empty bed in his daughter’s room, exhausted from his maneuvers and the belief that he is no longer loved.

    The ruckus caused by the merchant who, returning home discovers a soldier in his daughter’s bedroom, raises serious problems at the US military headquarters and leads Mary to believe that her private is romancing other women.

     Much of the film’s plot is centered upon their mutual misunderstandings, curtailed thankfully as both the men and the women’s hostess unit move closer and closer through the ever-present mud to the front.

     Thankfully the audience, in near despair over the uneventful plot, is thrown out the proverbial bone to gnaw upon. Since their unit is being sent up to the front line the very next day, Nescopeck suggests Stuyvesant join the male actors upon stage in drag just so that he might get close to Mary and straighten up the misunderstanding between them.

      That opportunity seems never to arise, but the scene of Keaton in drag without a clue of the choreography the other men have practiced, at least presents a series of comic moments in the manner of Renoir’s The Grand Illusion (1937) and the later World War II navy drag number in South Pacific a decade later.

      The real delight here, however, is that after the central number, a male dancer suddenly enters, grabbing up Keaton as his partner to perform a danse Apache for which Stuyvesant is not only totally unprepared but, employing Keaton’s acrobatic abilities, makes for a truly stunning realization of the mock S&M sexual encounter which the women in this dance are forced to portray. In this case the situation renders it quite real as the male dancer pulls Stuyvesant through his legs after which the soldier crawls up upon his back and topples off to the floor before once more the maneuver is repeated even more emphatically. We quickly recognize that the dance itself is a kind of struggle over sexual dominance, the hurt woman, in turn, threatening the male, while he attempts to control her and force her back into a suppliant position. If the piece goes on a bit too long, it is still a fascinating deconstruction of the long-controversial dance.

 

   Still having unresolved Mary’s misunderstanding, Stuyvesant reaches the trenches willing to volunteer for the most dangerous missions which, given the Sergeant’s recognition of the private’s total incompetence, he ignores. That, of course, cannot stop our intrepid would-be hero, as he crawls without permission on the heels of Nescopeck’s attempt to bring back a German prisoner so they might get him to confess the German plans.

      Stuyvesant brings back a prisoner, but when they turn him over they discover that it is Nescopeck. Now under trench arrest, the private sneaks away once more, this time coming upon a whole nest of German soldiers. Unfortunately—or perhaps for his sake, most fortuitously—one of them is a former employee, who is delighted to see his former boss, complaining that they have run of out of food and ammunition.

       The befuddled Stuyvesant, feeling sorry for them promises that if he can return to the US trench he will bring them back whatever food they order up, of only they can give him a Lugar with which he might bribe the cook. He wraps up the gun, without knowing it, in a map of their fortresses and details of their plans. When Stuyvesant returns with the map and gun, Sergeant Brophy realizes what the soldier has brought back and immediately sends him to military higher-ups who recognizing that this document reveals nearly all the German secrets, declare him a hero and send him back behind the lines as a reward.

       There he meets up again with Mary, who by this time has forgiven him, and together they run off in what they believe to be an ambulance to deliver up the victims to the hospital. What they don’t realize is that the truck is actually filled with ammunition and a German bomber is on their tail. Finally realizing what they have as their cargo, they escape as the truck is blown up, finding themselves once more at the front line. It looks like Mary and Stuyvesant are both nearly done for, until once more his German friends shuffle into view to report that the War is now over, the former employee wondering if he might get his job back.

      The film ends in a silly episode back in the board room of Stuyvesant’s offices where he declares the production of a gold ukulele, obviously in honor of Nescopeck, before the sounds of a nearby riveter reminds them all of wartime bullets, all suddenly throwing themselves to the floor.

      If throughout the film Keaton’s Elmer J. Stuyvesant, Jr. barely survives, we feel none of the awe, amazement, and pure delight for his survival as we do in a work such as Steamboat Bill, Jr.

      Some critics argue that this film demonstrates that with the rise of talkies Keaton’s career was far from over, that this film and others like it still reveal his talents, while commending him for attempting to take on more serious subjects. But if Doughboys is any indication, they must be thinking of another actor than the great Buster Keaton of Sherlock, Jr. (1924), The General (1926), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), and The Cameraman (1928). For this Keaton seems to have not only lost his sense of timing, but his sense of humor. And if it’s true, as Keaton is said to have believed, that this was the best film he made for MGM, I have no desire to see the others, saddened as I am for their squandering of his immense talents.

 

Los Angeles, November 10, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).