Joe Rock and Harry Sweet | The Sleuth / 1925

sherlock as a vamp

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tay Garnett (screenplay), Joe Rock and Harry Sweet (directors) The Sleuth / 1925

 

It appears, at least superficially, that Frederick Kovert’s role as a detective in drag in The Reel Virginian (October 1924) was of interest to Stan Laurel and others involved with his productions, since in his June 1925 film The Sleuth Stan plays a detective who also crossdresses, twice in the same movie, and in July of that year directed Kovert in the same kind of role in Chasing the Chaser. Surely this wasn’t all coincidental.

     But on the other hand, The Sleuth has little relationship to either of the other two films except for Laurel’s drag appearances. Apparently this work has been perceived as one of Laurel’s weakest films simply because of his outrageously absurd gags and the absolute discontinuity of the movie’s narrative. But in fact, I would argue, this work is one of the most remarkable of US films of the day in its forward-looking leap into surrealist-like incidents and into an overall sense of absurdity that truly places it in the context of the 1950s and 1960s Theater of the Absurd.

      How could any film commentator working within the context of most of the films from the beginning of cinema until the end of the 1920s have expected a US short of 20 minutes to function more in the manner of Luis Buñuel’s Un chien Andalou (1929) or the 1930s films of the Marx Brothers. Certainly, we might look to the influences of Buster Keaton, but even his absurdist attitude toward life remains within the bounds of comedic possibility, larger-than-life events being created by hurricanes, war, and general distress.

      This little gem, directed by the team of Joe Rock and Harry Sweet, however, makes utterly no attempt to attend to the rational world. Given Joe Rock’s early teaming with comedian Earl Montgomery in the series of alliteratively titled shorts the duo made in late teens and early 1920s—Hash and Havoc (1916), Stowaways and Strategy (1917), Farms and Fumbles (1918), Harems and Hookum (1919), Zip and Zest (1919), Vamps and Variety (1919), Rubes and Robbers (1919), Cave and Coquettes (1919), Throbs and Thrills (1920), Loafers and Lovers (1920), and Sauce and Senoritas (1920)—we certainly might have expected the emphasis of his work with Laurel to be on the immediate comic moment rather than any narrative continuity. And the 6 films he made with Laurel before this one— Mandarin Mix-Up (1924), Detained (1924), Monsieur Don't Care (1924), West of Hot Dog (1924), Somewhere in Wrong (1925), Twins (1925), Pie-Eyed (1925), The Snow Hawk (1925), and Navy Blue Days (1925) could hardly be said to have focused on coherent plot.

       The Sleuth, however, is still something quite different. It begins not unlike Laurel’s Chasing the Chaser, with the detective, Walter Dingle (Laurel) sitting at his desk awaiting a client. But even here, before any possible narrative even begins, Laurel establishes his own incompetence for the job, with his sign reading, “solving puzzles” as he struggles to separate the parts of an interlocking ring, a task which his delivery boy easily solves. When someone enters the room he immediately pretends be busy on the phone, which quickly realize has been disconnected, probably for non-payment. Yet these scenes at least display some logic.

       The rest of the film transfers us into a maniacal land of meaningless actions, beginning with the visit of an actual client, the Wife (Alberta Vaughn) explaining to him through a brief cinematic scene why she is seeking out his services.

        The wife reveals, through the film’s cinematic representation, that just as they were about to sit down with guests to the dinner table, her husband took out his watch and explained that he had a meeting, immediately thereafter leaving the house. Meanwhile, her daughter entered, insisting that she accompany her into the next room. When then entered that room, the daughter gestured that she open yet another door. When the wife did so—revealing a room that was still evidently in their home, but not somehow directly connected with the other rooms—she discovered her husband standing with three other men and a woman at the head of a line.

      The wife appeared to have little curiosity about the event, nor even demanded an explanation. We only know that she has found it distressing because she has shown up in the detective’s office.

      The detective, meanwhile, seemingly dressed in casual wear, suddenly begs her to excuse him and reenters the room—in what I shall call “cartoon duration”—now dressed completely in his detective dugs while carrying an enormously outsized pipe in the style and manner of Sherlock Holmes.

       From there on the film gets even stranger, as Dingle, evidently assuring her that he is the man for the job—whatever that job may be—proves his worth by revealing, under his coat, a small detective badge.

  

     In the very next frame Dingle knocks on the door of the couple’s mansion, irritating the husband who is forced to get up and open it, but is delighted to see a new housekeeper, dressed a bit like Mary Poppins, whom he profusely greets and with whom he immediately begins to flirt.

       If previously, the wife had seemed a bit dowdy, she now sits in a pajama suit, smoking a cigarette from an enormously long holder. Dingle, appearing as Laurel generally does in drag as a not truly convincing female, feels it necessary several times to flash his badge to the wife to make it clear he is in “costume.”

     She, however, not only seems hardly to care, but immediately leaves the room, allowing her husband, as Dingle, again in cartoon duration, suddenly appears in a maid’s outfit, rolling out a cart of tea and sandwiches. Almost immediately the husband begins to sexually paw her, putting his arm around her shoulder, an act which she punishes by breaking a dish across his crown and soon after, when he attempts it again, pouring tea on his lap. But nothing stops him, as he invites her to sit next to him to share a sandwich and tea, she encouraging his flirting, then punishing him, before acting coy all over again.

       Finally, he begins to chase her about the room, the two running into another room as well, past the still seeming disinterested wife.

       Without any explanation, Dingle is now dressed in his detective attire, with a Sherlock Holmes-like cap and a magnifying glass, his feet planted in white power which he tracks across the room implanting his prints on the carpet. He disappears for a second, reentering from another door, and observing the prints follows them, making even deeper imprints upon the carpet. He repeats this a number of times until the wife enters to observe him, as he speeds up the process of exciting and entering from another door, repeating the pattern again and again the way Harpo and Chico Marx often repeat their actions until they become almost boringly banal, but taking it even further until the action once again seems so absurd that that forces us to laugh. By the time he finishes the trek between exiting on the left and returning from the right, the frame has sped up almost to the animated blur of Roadrunner in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons.

       To attempt logical discussion beyond this point is ridiculous. The movie has become an absurdist dream. All one can explain is that at some point Dingle begins to wear various hats and beards, at moments appearing as a Hassidic Rabbi, and at another a mustachioed villain, and yet another instance seemingly costumed as a young Talmudic student.

        At one point, the husband sits him down, offering him a glass of brandy, which Dingle observes out of the corner of his eye that the host has poisoned. When the husband isn’t looking, Dingle exchanges the glasses; the husband, noticing the exchange pretends to change them; and Dingle, observing the fact, changes them again. They seem to change places yet another time, but finally the men are forced to toast, and Dingle drinks his down, pretending to die. In self-congratulation, the husband drinks his glass and falls to the floor. Dingle rises and escapes, but when the husband’s gang enter, a little seltzer spritzed into the husband’s face immediately revives him. In short, despite the poison in at least one of their glasses, neither of them dies.

        On another occasion Dingle also encounters the “other woman” (Anita Garvin) and the three men, along with them the client’s husband, evidently up to something since they are at one point appear to write out a document and at another moment are rushing about house with the message in hand. However, the door soon closes, with Dingle again responding by appearing in various and hats and beards which are quickly snatched from his head and face as a small panel in the door opens, something inside evidently pulling them away as fast as he can replace them.

        Many of these activities take place with the couple’s bedroom with the Wife looking diffidently on, but at other moments the action shifts to other rooms in a home that seems to have an endless number of ornately decorated and paneled suites more like a hotel. Time and place are constantly being disrupted just as identity is always in total flux.

       No sense in the film is to be made by the characters’ motives or actions. At one point they simply start breaking vases over each other’s heads. At some moments the three men and one woman gather in a seemingly sinister manner, only to a few seconds later scatter.

     Finally, the “other woman” seems to disappear while the three men and the husband move menacingly into a room at the back of which is a collapsible screen. When they pull it away Dingle sits on a rug now dressed as like a modern vamp in a black gown with back cut- away to reveal the wearer’s flesh. One by one the four men approach this beauty with lust in their eyes, the whole bodies almost heaving with the intensity of their promised pleasure.

      A rose in her mouth, she throws it at the men who wrestle for it, diving in upon one another before her, she taking up a vase and hitting over the head one by one, knocking them out.

      The wife suddenly appears, perhaps startled by seeing the woman crouched before the several male bodies. Dingle stands, pulling off his wig, as if expecting applause. But the wife merely takes up another vase and hits him over the head, he falling to the floor with the others. The End.

      The Sleuth is less a cinematic narrative about the activities of a detective than it is a kind of satiric cinema tone-poem mocking all the works about sleuthing previously filmed. Here there is no true villain, no real crime, nor apparent victim; the clues are only what the detective introduces into the case, and motives are simply the clumsy male attempts to touch and stroke female flesh.

      In hindsight, it now seems rather remarkable that of all the early film comedians who explored crossdressing as a way to get laughs, Roscoe Arbuckle, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Oliver Hardy, and so many others, Stan Laurel probably appeared in drag more often, but without even shrugging over the necessary transformations demanded of him for his character’s survival and simply as part of his various modes of employment. If for the others it required female imitation, an affectation of gender differences, or a contortion of the body away from their male identities, for Laurel it seemed quite natural, something not even to get excited about. Stan remained himself even as a vamp.

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2022 / Reprinted by World Cinema Review (July 2022).