Sidney Olcott | Little Old New York / 1923

irish blarney goes dutch treat

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luther Reed (screenplay based on the play by Rida Johnson Young), Sidney Olcott (director) Little Old New York / 1923

 

Sidney Olcott’s Little Old New York (1923) was Marion Davies’ 17th film, and the second of four movies she made during the 1920s in which she performed as a male in a cross-dressing role. In this case, the Irish lass, Patricia O’Day, whose very ill brother Patrick (Stephen Carr) has just been named as the inheritor of the fortune of a million dollars left by his uncle Richard, who through a loan from his brother John, made a new life in the United States.

      Since Patrick dies on the voyage to the States to claim his fortune, O’Day’s stepson, Larry Delavan (Harrison Ford)—friend to American icons Robert Fulton (Courtenay Foote), Washington Irving (Mahlon Hamilton), and Henry Brevoort (George Barraud)—is now set to inherit the money he had previously presumed would be left to him. But at the very last moment, Patrick shows up, actually Patricia (Davies) looking as best she can like a handsome, if somewhat effeminate young boy, fresh off the boat.

       If at first the relationships between the O’Days, son and father (J. M. Kerrigan), and Delavan are rather curt, Pat having to demand that he prepare a bed for his ailing father, the host puts them in the kinder hands of his manservant Reilly (Charles Kennedy), and before long Pat begins to turn his Irish charms on the new ward in whose home he now resides. 

      Pat is openly rude, however, to Delavan’s fiancé Ariana du Puyster (Gypsy O’Brien) who, having just spent her mandatory year abroad, has returned from English with all the airs that an American female rube deems proper, wearing her lorgnette as if it were a scissors. And he is dismissive of Delavan when he joins his fellow all-night celebrants for a spree of drinking and gambling. But basically, Pat has fallen in love with him, and he, demonstrating some confusion, even if the script tries to bury his gender double-vision, by his attraction to the boy. Neither the studios nor producer William Randolph Hearst, Davies’ real lover, would have approved of even a gentle kiss on the boy’s cheek, but there are moments when Ford seems almost ready lean into a smooch, particularly when Pat gets out his harp to sing a song that shows up Miss du Puyster’s vocal pretensions. Much like director Paul Czimmer’s painter in The Fiddler of Florence of 3 years later, Delavan muses about his young companion’s traits that remind him more of girl instead of a man, but which nonetheless most confusedly attracts him. Yentl is hovering in the distance of film history.

      The major plot stimulus in this work, what Hitchcock described as his McGuffins, is the fact that Delavan has promised to help fund Robert Fulton’s new invention, the paddle-boat Clermont, for the amount of $10,000, and having lost an inheritance that he can no longer invest in, the one thing that we know, with history at our backs, would solve his financial problems. Early in the work, the wealthy John Jacob Astor (Andrew Dillon) has turned down the offer to help fund such a “folly”; but in his attempts to help Delavan and Fulton, Pat gets a loan on her monthly payments from Astor, who serves also as his executor, which she hands over in the form of a bank note at the very last moment as the Clermont successfully steams down the Hudson, allowing another week for Delavan to raise the money.

    As smart as Pat has been in his investment, Delavan is an idiot with regard to his sudden determination to support the local drunken firefighter Bully Boy Brewster (Harry Watson) in a boxing bout against “The Hoboken Terror” (Louis Wolheim), putting up his only asset, his house, to match the bet.

      In terror of the outcome, Pat sneaks into the fire station to watch the match—young boys definitely being banned from in the rabble of the crowd. “The Hoboken” is so stupid that at first it appears Bully Boy might win simply by dipping his head away from the slugs and coming back with a few punches. But “The Hoboken” evidently invented the term “dirty fighting” and soon has turned Bully Boy into punching bag, Pat having no choice but to ring the fire bell which sends everyone in the place on the run.

     Found out, however, he is dragged to the local whipping post, his head locked in place, while Hoboken begins his punishment of the lash. Obviously, the plot and Pat have no choice if they are to be even a little believable but to admit that “he” is a “mere woman,” relieving Pat from the torture that would likely destroy a grown man. The rest of the film, alas, seems to me to resonate with the themes of another movie made 3 years after, The Clinging Vine, as the good-looking boy played by Davies is turned into a tearfully blubbering over-costumed Irish maiden, who in telling her sad tale how she came to defraud the US authorities, turns a fast-moving and feisty film into a maudlin affair wherein the New York City fathers are moved to forgive the erring Eve if she leaves immediately to spend a while in the country from which their Pilgrim fathers have escaped.

     Delavan, now the rightful heir, realizing that his eyes had not been truly deceived and his heart can admit its affection, decides to join her on the voyage. We can only hope that once they are married that every so often Patricia transforms herself now-and-then back into the practical fast-thinking Pat. Delavan definitely needs a pretty boy to help keep him straight.

      This silent film was remade in 1940 with Alice Faye as Pat O’Day, an Irish bartender whose female identity is never in question, who supports her beau played by Fred McMurray (an actor who surely never knew that identity might ever be followed by a question mark) by investing in Robert Fulton’s Clermont, the entire story being focused on Fulton and Faye’s attempt to get the local’s support, a long ways from the Finian’s Rainbow fantasy, “Glocca Morra” indeed.

 

Los Angeles, May 16, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).