emptying the rocking chairs
by
Douglas Messerli
Pierre
Collings (screenplay, with intertitles by Morris Ryskind, based on The
Tattooed Countess by Carl Van Vechten), Malcolm St. Clair (director) A
Woman of the World / 1925
Malcolm
St. Clair’s 1925 film, A Woman of the World is not an LGBTQ film by any
standard definition. Based as it is on the novel The Tattooed Countess
by queer author Carl Van Vechten, however, it does breach issues that come
close to LGBTQ themes and has one character who in the hands of other writers,
and perhaps even in the original fiction, might be described as a gay figure;
certainly the role he plays in this film shares many later gay tropes.
In its essence, however, this work, using Van Vechten’s novel of a year
earlier, as its source might be described as a precursor of Meredith Willson’s
later successful Broadway musical and film The Music Man. Like River
City (a substitute for Mason City, Iowa) in Willson’s 1957 libretto Maple
Valley (a stand-in for Van Vechten’s hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa) is
suddenly visited by a stranger, an outsider who provides plenty of gossip for
the small-minded citizens of the outwardly up-right and morally pure small
town. Only instead of Harold Hill, the visitor in this instance is a woman, the
Countess Eleanor Natatorini (Pola Negri), who has been living now several years
on the Riviera and, having just discovered her lover in arms of another woman,
determines that despite her open-mindedness that if she is indeed a “woman of
the world,” she is not about to be the “world’s woman.”
Her arrival into this gentle whirlwind of rocking chair gossips (Dot Farley and May Foster), a newly elected district attorney about to create a new public water works, and a crusading reformer determined to close down the local dancing hall and deprive all women of cigarettes, results immediately in a face-off with the exotic beauty with revealing cleavage, deep-red lipstick, eyeliner, and a tattoo on her forearm of her former lover’s crest. He discovers her late on the night of her arrival in a taxi with a cigarette smoldering at the end of her long cigarette holder, which results in a thorough scolding by attorney Richard Granger (Holmes Herbert) and love at first sight.
We all know that inevitably the highest
of meaningless moral values suffer the turpitude of a jaded lady for the pangs
of love. The only question is just how long it will take for the man just
struck by cupid—in this case, the purest man in town—to come round to realizing
his own hypocrisy and for the town folk to share his revelation.
Eleanora pushes against his youthful
kisses, but not before Granger has driven by and seen the couple together,
mistaking it for being the real thing. As the town gossips later scold Granger,
how could he possibly become so jealous over the actions of a boy?
But by this point, the Countess has
further annoyed the head of the water works project by drawing a larger
audience who pay just to claim they have “talked” with a Countess—a situation
that has sorely troubled Eleanora and which she has resisted but as the head of
the Committee to raise funds for water project is unable to outrightly
refuse—and over his discovery, already part of the town gossip, that her body
sports a tattoo, both matters that trigger the worst of Granger’s moral outrage
as he insists upon a meeting with the town council to order her run out of
town!
The Countess leaves the event in total
anger and public disgrace, while Gareth finally gets the nerve to speak out
against his hypocritical employer and is himself threatened with expulsion.
By the time of the town meeting,
Granger has regained some sense of proportion, but it is already too late, for
the small-minded and stubborn town officials want him and her to share a
face-to-face inquiry by the council.
The Countess, much to the frustration
of her sister-in-law and brother, has determined to return to Europe. Her
brother, who has been the primary gossiper who has spread the news of her
tattoo, now attempts to comfort her by revealing that he has a much more
complex tattoo than she, a train that chugs up one arm, across his chest, and
down the other arm. Small towns always hide such personal marvels despite their
surface normalcy.
Gareth, hoping to keep her near, rushes
to her room insisting that she cannot leave since she is the only friend he has
in town and he is now in danger of being run out of Maple Valley as well.
Suddenly, the film reveals what it has
basically glossed over previously, having suggested that Gareth has a high
school girlfriend and is simply afraid to attend dances with her because of his
employer’s viewpoints.
The boy, we now realize, is himself an
outsider in his own world, as queer of an individual as the Countess is to his
fellow citizens. Love, we comprehend, has been mistaken for a friendship that
has allowed him to imagine her as someone who might understand his value
despite his differences. Instead of kissing her, he lays his head upon her neck
as she hugs him close realizing, it is clear, his situation and his loneliness,
suggesting that when he remembers her he should think back on her as having been
half lover/half mother, a phrase that might almost have been uttered by Laura
Reynolds to Tom Robinson Lee in Vincente Minelli’s 1956 film Tea and
Sympathy. And suddenly we realize, despite the film’s inability to fully
express it, that instead of being this film’s Tommy Djilas (the boy Harold Hill
befriends and becomes a father figure for in The Music Man) Gareth is
closer to the young man of Robert Anderson’s play who is terrified of being
homosexual.
When Granger comes storming in, the
Countess must hide the boy for propriety’s sake, as momentarily the two
adversaries realize they are truly in love. But when, finally trusting
Granger’s love, she reveals Gareth’s presence, the creator of the future water
works immediately floods the town with further declarations of outrage; but
this time, thanks to Lou Poore’s suggestion, the Countess catches up with him
to brand some sense into his flesh, a horse whip in hand.
I gather the brief glimpse of a boy on a
bicycle with a girl is supposed to suggest that Gareth has made up with his
girlfriend, something that doesn’t happen at all in Van Vechten’s fiction. But
now we know what the score really is, and that the time has come for Gareth to
get on a train bound east, west, or anywhere where he can discover who he truly
is, no longer constricted by hometown mores and patterns of normative behavior.
Notably, by cycling through a nearby mud puddle, he splashes Sam Poore—who has
been standing by the curb to see the wedding couple off—in the face; so Gareth
incurs even gentle Sam’s wrath. Perhaps it a time for him to get out of town,
the threat coming from a man, if you recall, who certainly knows all about
trains.
Yet, the very fact that Maple Valley has
been able to assimilate the Countess, just as River City has Harold Hill, gives
one hope for the next generation. In one of the very last frames of this movie,
we note the rocking chairs sit on the porches empty for the first time in the
film. There appears to be nothing important remaining to gossip about.
Los
Angeles, June 14, 2022
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (June 2022).
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