Adrian Brunel | Battling Bruisers: Some Boxing Buffonery / 1925

cutie and petite

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adrian Brunel, Edwin Greenwood, and J.O.C. Orton (scenario), Adrian Brunel (director) Battling Bruisers: Some Boxing Buffonery / 1925       

 

Boxed in between what is described as a “heavy handed humour about boxing styles” and “a fascinating [boxing] pastiche of all things Russian, with Brighton Pavilion standing in for Moscow,” is what might be the very first true example on celluloid of openly gay camp humor. By 1925, the date of Adrian Brunel’s strange little film Battling Bruisers: Some Boxing Buffoonery some serious bows had already been made to the LGBTQ community, particularly in films which featured recognizable gay figures such as Mauritz Stiller’s Vingarne (The Wings) (1916), Richard Oswald’s Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) (1919), Ralph Ceder’s The Soilers (1923), and Carl Theodore Dreyer Mikaël (Michael) (1924). Bernard Natan’s Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly (1920)—long before the much touted first gay porn film, Surprise of a Knight (1929 or 1930)—had already represented explicit gay sex on film, three times, with both male and female couples and a masturbating male servant. 

     In Roscoe Arbuckle’s Coney Island of 1917, “Fatty,” about to dress as a woman bather, addressed the camera in a manner that surreptitiously winked to the audience the self-conscious cross-dressing action he was about to take. But in most of these films there was a quiet—and I am not just observing that these were silent films—assertion of a reality that was still not openly spoken.

       But with the sudden appearance of Cutie Cannaro, “the nicest man in boxing,” and his adversary, we have a full-blown gay man bowing to and throwing kisses at his seconds, his opponent, and evidently his royal lover in the audience, Lord Pifford (the director playing the role). And suddenly we perceive that are witnessing for the first time a gay figure who truly expects us not only to recognize him as a homosexual but through his display of satirical gay stereotypical actions that he is a queer boxer mocking his own identity.

      When he and his boxing partner, Le Petit Beurre, go for the opening handshake, it becomes a hug which the referee (Miles Malleson) must quickly attempt to break up, time and again, as the two gentlemanly sluggers seemingly seek to prove that they prefer clinches to punches. At several points the two men wrap their arms around each other’s heads and move into more of a traditional waltz instead of the dance of a boxer’s deflection.

 

    Cutie’s lovely ringside attendees show their horror whenever a punch is pulled, and hover over their man like chorus boys over a resting tenor when the round is finished. Cutie takes tea.

 

   To everyone’s shock, particularly to Petite, when they return to “fight,” Cutie actually dares to hit his friend several times, resulting in his opponent’s settling on the floor in a half-sitting position and refusing to get up despite the referee countdown. Clearly, he is not playing fair, although, of course, Cutie is declared the winner. But who cares. This little match is about a much longer affair.

        The British Film Institute has posted this portion of Brunel’s film online separately, with good reason. But I wish that they had included the entire short film, if for no other reason than to spotlight its oddity in the annuals of gay filmmaking. For Brunel is not truly mocking his homosexual boxers as much as they mock themselves for the very fact that they are performing on screen in the most savage of heterosexual sport challenges. Their representation of that defines gay “camp” decades before Susan Sontag stumbled upon the concept. And this film gives new context to later gay boxing films such as Dudley Murphy’s The Sport Parade (1932) and Marcel Carné’s L’Air de Paris (1954).

       Upon discovering this little-known gem, I felt a rush of feeling that this changes everything!

 

Los Angeles, January 29, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2021).