Douglas Messerli | The Man That Got Her Way: Marion Davies in the 1920s [essay]

the man that got her way: marion davies in the 1920s

by Douglas Messerli

 

Between 1922 and 1929, in both silent and talking pictures, actor Marion Davies performed cross-dressing roles as a man in four films. In each of these works, particularly in Little Old New York and Beverly of Graustark, by pretending to be a male the character attained something that the male compatriots could not achieve. In all of these works, she returned before the end of the film, to her sheltered world as a woman, reaping the benefits of marriage and other feminine awards. But in her time as a male, she achieved degrees of independence and new perceptions that she could not have otherwise been available to her as what still considered to be the inferior sex.

 

      In fact, Davies’ cross-dressing figures were an important new phenomenon in the 1920s regarding LGBTQ depictions. The most common LGBTQ expression in cinema before this period were the numerous representations of males dressing up as women, almost entirely for comic effects. Indeed, these imitators learned little about the female sex and were not truly interested in the sexual possibilities made available to them in drag, except in a few instances in Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s and Harold Lloyd’s films. For the most part their characters simply brought about laughter because of the costume and the pretense, without the filmmakers caring at all to explore the other implications of gender changes.

      If second decade of the 20th century represented a more serious exploration of gender and the advantages (and disadvantages) that it provided to women in the ground-breaking films such as Urban Gad’s Zapatas Bande (Zapata’s Gang) (1914), D. W. Griffith’s Judith of Bethulia (1914), Mario Roncoroni’s (Filibus (Filibus: The Mysterious Air Pirate) (1915), and Joseph Kaufman The Amazons (1917), in the 1920s these early outliers served as influences for a far common exploration of women’s sexuality and power in numerous works such as Sven Gade and Heinz Schall’s Hamlet (1921), and in the films of  Swanström, Sloane, Czinner, Wellman, and Pabst.

       The majority of these were not US productions it should be noted, which makes Davies’ far more pop culture-based historical romances so very important and interesting. Except for The Clinging Vine, which studied the cross-dressing transition in reverse, Davies’ four films bravely took up the issue not as a comic trope, although there were certainly a number of comic results, but as a serious study of what life might be like for a woman given the opportunity of the man’s world, and how she would adapt both spiritually and sexually to those possibilities. In nearly every case, Davies’ women, just as the central character in Ernst Lubitsch’s Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I  Don’t Want to Be a Man) (1918), were only too happy to return to their feminine selves along with the limitations and benefits that brought with it. But her characters, nonetheless, discovered that even as a man they often remained attractive to the opposite sex—the first open hints that men might also be erotically attracted to their own sex—and, more importantly, that they were given the opportunity to bring about changes never previously possible to them as women, early feminist lessons that had already begun to be explored by Alice Guy (Blaché), Gad’s Zapata’s Gang and Hamlet, and Rancoroni’s Filibus.

     It might be argued that this female cross-dressing pattern was the most notable shift in the 1920s in the treatment of homosexual and transgender figures, despite the rise of other serious explorations of queer behavior.

 

Los Angeles, May 18, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).