Robert Z. Leonard | Marianne / 1929

the amorous adventures of anatol

by Douglas Messerli

 

Laurence Stallings and Gladys Unger (screenplay, based on a story by Dale Van Every), Robert Z. Leonard (director) Marianne / 1929

 

World War I has just ended and the American troops will soon be returning home. But the company of field soldiers at the center of this film finds itself in the small French village of Bienville and has no choice but to bed down in a local barn next to a large home owned by a feisty French maiden, Marianne (Marion Davies).

     True to the stereotype, these American GIs are horny and tactless, and getting a look at her beauty several of them immediately attempt to bed her. She makes it clear, however, that she is not that kind of woman, and speaking convincing French with heavily accented and mangled English (like the later Spanish guitar playing comedienne attempting to speak English, Charo) Marianne keeps the boys away from her three adopted war-orphaned cherubs and her last pig, Anatol, almost the children’s pet.

      With the singing and dancing talents of Soapy (noted ukulele player Cliff Edwards, and later the voice of Jiminy Cricket) and Sam (Benny Rubin), along with the beefy charm of Stagg (Lawrence Gray), Marianne has a difficult time keeping the boys out of her busy house and Stagg, in particular, out of her lonely heart.

      Paid by Lieut. Frane to slaughter and cook up Anatol for the General and his associates, Marianne not only becomes distressed at having to give up the pet but by the fact that the starving privates in her barn steal the cooked cochon leaving behind only the bones; Frane (Scott Kolk) has Stagg arrested for the robbery and locked up in the military prison.

      In this, the final of the four films of the 1920s in which Davies gets up in male drag to save the day, she becomes a French Lieutenant who beseeches the General to free Stagg. His assistant quickly sees through the disguise and is busy trying to seduce the Lieutenant when the General encounters him in the outer office. In the few moments after when Lieutenant Marianne charges into the General’s office—he expressing shock that “he’s gone into my room,” and the major responding, “Well I thought that’s what you wanted sir”—provides us with few moments of gay innuendos which permit some bawdy fun.

 

           The General: State your business, but from what I’ve seen

                                 out there I don’t think I should listen to it!

           [The Lieutenant moves forward putting his hands upon the

           General’s chest, “Oh Général please!”]

           The General: [backing away] Not in this army!

 

     When the Lieutenant, in order to end the awkward situation reveals her sexuality, the General assumes that she has come disguised to tell him something about his Major, but he wants no part of that either. And so it goes until she can finally explain that she has come to plead for Stagg’s release.

       Beyond these few moments, however, the film requires Marianne to continue in drag as she meets up with her freed private, by now having added an unconvincing moustache to her disguise, carrying on a momentary clever maneuver far further than humor allows.

       That is, in fact, the major problem with the entire film. There are plenty of good moments of song and dance, but a lovely duet of “Just You, Just Me” is carried far beyond Davies’ singing talents, and a funny pick-me-up song performed by Edwards and Rubin is deadened by the fact that Davies, in sorrow, seems to have passed out and misses the entire pleasure the song was performed to provide.  

      Not only does Marianne get the opportunity to sing a goodbye ditty to the company, but is asked to perform in all over again as Maurice Chevalier and Sarah Bernhardt, which she does fairly successfully; but when asked to sing it one last time as a doughboy, the piece falls flat.

   Sometimes it’s hard to know whether Soapy and Sam are vying for the attention of French sweethearts of Marianne and the girl from Neuchâtel or an opportunity to get into one another’s arms, which along with the several scenes of soldier boys dancing together adds to the gay festivity of the film, but also somewhat dilutes the pre-code heterosexual horseplay—which is just fine for those of us who like the queer humor of such films, but helps to bring Stagg’s attempts to convince Marianne that he’s serious about his love for her into question.

      And by the time Marianne’s true love, fellow Frenchman André (George Baxter) arrives back home, revealing that during the battles he has lost his eyesight, the movie itself has turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to its audience as, instead of ending as a lovely melodrama with the American soldier boys marching off with only their memories of their gay times in France, requires us to believe that André later gives her up to become a priest, and that Marianne is willing to run off to 42nd Street to become the wife of an owner of a local demolition company, co-owned by Stagg’s ex-soldier buddies Sam and Soapy.

       Davies gives it her best, which is sometimes quite wonderful, but by film’s end our mind wanders as we wonder whatever happened to her three cute kids?

       And, as I have observed in my comments about The Hollywood Review of 1929, although Davies did make a few important films in the early 1930s, her career did not truly benefit by the talkies; by the end of the 30s she retired from the screen—poor girl, with the consolation of the pleasurable palace that Hearst had created for her and himself in San Simeon.

 

Los Angeles, April 30, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).