Lambert Hillyer | Miss Nobody / 1926 [Lost film]

the shebo

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Marion, Jr. (intertitles, based on a story on a story by Tiffany Wells) Lambert Hillyer (director) Miss Nobody 1926 [Lost film]

 

Lambert Hillyer’s Miss Nobody, starring Anna Q. Nilsson as a young heiress whose father dies penniless leaving her without an inheritance, is apparently a lost film.

     Evidently Nilsson’s character Barbara Brown is forced to become a hobo (which the film describes as a “shebo”), dressing as a boy and traveling across the country via freight cars and other modes of transportation.

      I could not find a full plot outline of the story, so we have no knowledge of what her adventures consisted of, although several sources do mention its similarities to William A. Wellman’s important Beggars of Life of 1928.

     Particularly given the fact that it stars Nilsson, who portrayed independent and cross-dressing women as well as portraying Hamlet in her films, it would be fascinating to know how her cross-dressing in this film was portrayed and how it affected her relationships with others.

      In one of the stills for the movie it portrays her in male dress between a man who seems attracted to her and woman who also seems interested or perhaps is dependent upon her/him. And one of the film’s posters certainly does suggest a female attraction to Nilsson in drag. Another photo from the film shows her athletically clinging to the rail of a freight car. All of these suggest, accordingly, some sort of sexual confusion perhaps between her male and female counterparts.

      The film also featured Walter Pidgeon in an early role, Louise Fazenda, and Clyde Cook both of the latter of whom appeared in other LGBTQ works I’ve written about in these pages.

      Lambert Hillyer wrote screenplays and directed dozens of early and later Hollywood films, including The Invisible Ray, the cult favorite Dracula’s Daughter—a film I write about from the 1930s—the first cinematic depiction of Batman in 1943, and several in the series of The Cisco Kid.

 

Los Angeles, August 28, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).