James W. Horne | Red Noses / 1932

getting naked

by Douglas Messerli

 

H. M. Walker (screenplay), James W. Horne (director) Red Noses / 1932

 

Hal Roach Studios, known for their male comedy figures, duos, and other groupings such as Laurel and Hardy, the Our Gang series, Charley Chase, and a number of Harold Lloyd films, decided in 1931 to pair up female actors Zasu Pitts and Thelma Todd in what became the first of “The Girlfriends” series, 17 short films in all. When Pitts left the Studio, they paired Todd up with Patsy Kelly for another 21 more short films until Todd’s death in December 1935.

      While many filmgoers adore these series of female comedies, praising the comic timing particularly of Pitts and Todd, praising their comic timing and their abilities to play off of one another, I frankly find these works, as Jenni Olson has commented, not as funny as they could be; and in large part the slapstick athleticism of the works, performed mostly by Pitts in the first series and Kelly in the second 21 films, are often simply as corny as the Studio’s early pie-throwing reelers.

 

  Although the “girlfriends” live together presumably as working roommates, several of these films, particularly after lesbian actor Patsy Kelly teamed up with Todd, suggest far more than a simple feminine friendship. And their alternate shifts from affection to mutual bitchery hint at a kind of permanent relationship, backed up notably in works such as Red Noses by the fact that they share a bed and seldom resist a chance to put their hands on one another.

     Just as interestingly, several of the male cast extras, such as the office secretary played in Red Noses as a snippy gay man by Bobby Burns, have homosexual overtones as well.

     In this film, the girls are in bed together simply because have terrible colds, already having used up an entire pile of hankies on their now red noses. But their boss, business man Wilfred Lucas is furious about their absence. Evidently, he has planned a crucial meeting for that day at which the women were to have served as stenographers of perhaps just eye candy for a new client. “They have no right” to be sick he proclaims to the male secretary, demand that he call them back and order them to work even “if they have appendicitis and four broken legs.” 

     All the two can accomplish through the phone call however are a series of further sneezes and wheezes. Accordingly, the executive determines that he will play for a Turkish bath which promises to relieve them of their colds within one hour.

     The Nature Health Institute to where he sends them, home to “Pyramid Mud Baths and Face Packs,” has very little in common with a Turkish bath and is far more similar to female hair salon. Yet from the beginning they encounter a series of semi-tortures, witnessing first a woman who has just collapsed from treatment #37 before they are put into small rooms curtained off so that they might get undressed.

 

    Zasu is the most reticent, particularly when a young pretty girl, after telling her to get naked, proceeds to watch. Soon after the specialists, Dr. Payson (Blanche Payson) and a physical therapist (Betty Danko) show up, Amazon-like women who seem to enjoy pummeling, pulling, vibrating, and shaking up their bodies. Inexplicably Zasu is hefted up onto a bucking Branco-like contraption that appears to be trying to have sex with her instead developing her thighs or torso. Thelma is seated on a vibrating chair that goes out of whack, turning her already quite curvaceous body into what Zazu describes “just like a bunch of jelly.”

      Together they’re put on a tortuous treadmill that Payson keeps speeding up and slowing down with the results of the women grabbing each other and spilling in piles of bruised flesh. As Dave Lord Heath writes in his review of this short film:

 

“What a wild ride of innuendo for 1932! The amount of sexy slapstick in this film is off the charts.

…The sexual nature of this film is undeniable and has to be seen to be believed. Once in the Turkish bath, our heroines can't go a few scenes without being asked to shed off their clothes. The first explicit naughty bit of business in the film occurs during the first undressing scene when Zasu pats Thelma on the rear, asking coyly if that's her ("I saw it sticking out there [through the curtain]," says Zasu). This brief moment makes the seemingly innocent entrance of T&Z at the start of the film (not just sharing a bed, but laying down with their bottoms pressed against each other) a lot less innocent!”

 

   Soon after, Zasu and Thelma, trying to escape, can’t even find their clothing, which leads Thelma to drape herself in a blanket and Zasu to steal a man’s suit from a nearby tailor, going into male drag as she and her friend slide down a laundry chute to walk home, one as a kind of ethereal Greek goddess, the other as her male companion. Their colds, however, seem to have disappeared and they’ve been promised a vacation by their boss.

 

Los Angeles, July 2, 2024 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog.