Victor Schertzinger | Boy of Flanders / 1924 [Difficult to obtain]

overlooked talent

by Douglas Messerli

 

Walter Anthony and Marion Jackson (screenplay, based on the story by Ouida), Victor Schertzinger (director) Boy of Flanders / 1924 [Difficult to obtain]

 

Victor Schertzinger’s 1924 film Boy of Flanders is based on the Ouida classic story A Dog of Flanders, the title changed presumably to put more emphasis on the young actor Jackie Coogan who plays the boy, Nello. Coogan had already become a known talent from his appearance in Charles Chaplin’s The Kid in 1921. The dog of the story, Petrasche, is played the famed Mac Sennett canine, Teddy.

      Although a copy of this film still exists at the Gosfilmofond in Russia, the difficulty in viewing it requires that I rely on the few plot summaries of the film that exist.

      The basic story is simple. Nello’s mother and grandfather die, leaving him alone on the streets in the small Dutch village of St. Agneten. No one is willing to befriend him except the young girl Alois (Jean Carpenter), the daughter of Bass Cogez (Lionel Belmore), the richest man in the village. Cognez, however, is upset by his daughter’s involvement with a pauper and drives him off his property.

      When soon after Cogez’s barn burns to the ground, Nello is blamed, and is about to be sent off to an orphanage. A famed artist, Jan Van Dullen (Josef Swickard) arrives in town, however, offering a prize for the best sketch made by a child. Nello, who has artistic talents, eagerly enters the competition, but his drawing his overlooked, and another child wins the prize.

     At about the same time, a huge snowstorm covers the village and it is discovered that Nello has been lost in the storm. Finding Nello’s wonderful drawing as an overlooked entry, Van Dullen himself goes on the search for the boy along with Nello’s beloved Petrasche, who helps him find the boy, now near death.

     As the boy recovers, even Cogez comes to credit the boy for his talent, and Van Dullen adopts him.

      At one point in the story Nello, perhaps just out of hunger, dresses up as Dutch girl in white lace cap, ruffled white blouse, full skirted peasant's dress, and apron so that he might attend an all-girl’s party. But after stuffing himself with desserts, he becomes sick and is perceived as the boy he truly is. Surely this is one of the few instances in the 1920s of a child dressing up in drag, although there were a few films such as The Hoodlum in which young indigent girls dressed as boys.

     Coogan’s talent allowed this film to be marketed worldwide, but already at the age of 10 he had developed melodramatic gestures and expressions of silent film acting. As a critic of day wrote: "Jackie does just what you might expect a small-time vaudevillian to do under given circumstances. There are many points of wistful appeal in the tale of the little Dutch orphan, persecuted by the narrow village as a tiny vagabond, who wins a prize and recognition with his drawing just as the snow mounts higher and higher around his ragged clothes. He shows his amazingly facile versatility by running through all emotions, by doing a clog dance and even by doing a Julian Eltinge in girl's clothes. But his inimitable naturalness and naivete are being crowded out by stereotyped gestures and muggings, such as no small boy does except at an amateur entertainment."

     In the original Ouida story, the ending, it should be noted, is far bleaker. Nello and Patrasche on Christmas Eve go to Antwerp to find the door to the Cathedral left open. The next morning they are found frozen to death in front of the Ruben's triptych.

 

Los Angeles, May 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).