Herk Harvey | Cindy Goes to a Party / 1955

how to win at musical chairs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Margaret Travis (screenplay), Herk Harvey (director) Cindy Goes to a Party / 1955 

 

Herk Harvey’s Cindy Goes to a Party is a lesbian’s nightmare. But it is also a nightmare for all of those who feel outside of the social norms and niceties of youth. Cindy, who begins the film playing basketball with Dennis, is obviously a tomboy, who prefers sports and fishing to personal birthdays and social soirées.

 

    Like all children, however, she is hurt when she discovers that Dennis is going Mary’s party and she hasn’t even been invited. She pretends it doesn’t matter, but like all outsider kids, it truly does. And what else is a child to do in such a situation but—according to the moral authorities of the mid-1950s—to dream up a spunky fairy godmother to help her learn how to be a lady and a proper guest at the party, just case she might get the chance to attend. But first she has to agree that she will tell no one of the fairy’s existence, always a necessity for queer kids who spend a great many hours talking to their “other” self.

      “Even Dennis?” asks Cindy. She can mention it to Dennis, her fairy godmother allows, since he’ll probably need her help too—suggesting Dennis may not be the full sports enthusiast he pretends to be, preferring simply to hang out with his tomboy friend: read “future queer kid.”

      Margaret Travis’ screenplay, in fact, might have played out as a joyfully campy tale, were it not that the rules about attending Mary’s (read any “normal person’s party) are so numerous and perniciously restrictive that it sounds a little bit like Cindy had just been sent away to a reassignment sex camp.

      Among the many rules the fairy’s wand waves out, some are simply the standard issues of the 1950s etiquette: “Be on time,” “Leave on time, “Join in the games,” “Don’t be too noisy or too rough,” “Don’t break things,” “Be polite,” and “Be considerate of others.” These are all basically nice liberal parental advisements.

       But Cindy is also given a frilly new dress to wear to help make her pretty, her hair wrapped up with paper and clips (by her mother, not her fairy friend) to permit her a few next day curls. She’s advised, moreover, “You should be clean and neat when you go a party,” suggesting that all exercise and sports activities are simply off the chart.

      The games poor Cindy must suffer at the party mostly revolve around musical chairs, one of the most ostracizing tortures of all childhood play, if I remember correction, a game in which one’s peers, the moment the music stops, rush to pull out the chair from where, if you’re not fast and pushy enough, in which you were just about to sit. Cindy’s been told, nonetheless, to “Obey the rules of the game” and “To be a good loser and a good winner.” The last is important for the good luck Cindy, who eventually wins the last chair.

       In short, Cindy has been advised to play along with all the rules established by her heteronormative peers. No roughhousing Cindy. No questioning of their seemingly polite but often just as dismissive manners. “Remember your table manners,” insists Cindy’s fairy godmother, rules written into law by Frances Benton and before her, Emily Post, Miss Manners following in the 1970s and 80s.

     By the time the dreamy good fairy gets through with her, Cindy has turned into a gushing cheerleader absolutely delighted when Mary’s sister turns up the next morning explaining, quite awkwardly and most suspiciously, it seems to me, that she was to have delivered the invitation to her for the party three days ago, but forgot. One can only wonder whether Cindy’s mother might not have been spending some of her daughter’s dream hours on the phone to Mary’s mother.

     When this movie finally lets up on the restrictions that Cindy needs to know in order to attend Mary’s party, even I, who hated basketball and probably never once got the ball into the crater of the hoop, might want to wander back off to the garage hoop to try my luck with a few tosses of the ball. By this time, poor Cindy has been indoctrinated into the Future Cheerleader’s Society on her way to becoming Homecoming Queen. And Dennis may have lost his future female bestie just at the age when he may most need her to help guide him through his locker room rage.

     To say the film means well is to admit that all of heteronormative values are there to help you through the difficult times you will surely encounter as a young girl, warning: “ignore these rules, gurl, and you’re likely to be stuck out on the concrete driveway tossing a basketball into the hoop for the rest of your life.” Someday, I hope, Cindy might be able to tell Mary that her party was an absolute bore.

 

Los Angeles, May 24, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).