Malcolm St. Clair | A Woman of the World / 1925

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.” 

      To get away from it all, and reminded, in the novel, by her youthful past shared with her spinster sister Lou, the Countess decides in the film to return home to her brother, Sam Poore (Chester Conklin) and his wife Lou (Lucille Ward) in Maple Valley where time has evidently not changed. 

       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.

      The community of Maple Valley’s xenophobic values are not easily divested, and the lady in this case doesn’t make it easy given her intentional flaunting all local conventions. Granger’s young assistant, Gareth Johns (Charles Emmett Mack), clearly Van Vechten as a young man, suggests that his boss present the Countess with a floral tribute, but when he delivers it to the lady she is so pleased and the boy so overwhelmed by her presence that he fails to even mention it as being a gift from Granger. And by the time he gets around to telling her, he already is deeply in love, or least feeling what he imagines love with the awe-inspiring woman.

     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.

       Accordingly, if this work is somewhat misogynistic so too is it fairly feminist. For the very next scene reveals the battling couple have just been married. And nicely ensconced in their honeymoon car, Granger opens a box to offer his new wife a cigarette.

 

     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).