Paul Sloane | The Clinging Vine / 1926

from boy to beauty queen

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jack Jevne and Rex Taylor (screenplay, titles by John W. Krafft, adapted from the play by Zelda Sears), Paul Sloane (director) The Clinging Vine / 1926

 

Paul Sloane’s The Clinging Vine of 1926, produced by Cecil B. DeMille, is a hard movie for today’s audiences to like, no matter what your vision of feminism or lesbian and transgender behavior.

     The film begins, in fact, with a perfectly wonderful lesbian or transgender figure referred to just by her/his initials A. B. (Leatrice Joy, formerly married to John Gilbert), who is the force behind the large paint company in which she works under T. M. Bancroft (Robert Edeson), the golf-loving CEO who can’t make a decision without her, and his equally incompetent board, headed by Dr. A. ‘Tut’ Tutweiler (Snitz Edwards). She signs all receipts and checks, approves all sales, and hires and fires the company personnel, having just fired the absolutely idiotic grandson of Bancroft, Jimmie (Tom Moore).      

     If she looks more like a man than a woman—as I mention elsewhere, the well-known actress Joy cut her locks just for this role, much over the protests of DeMille who was afraid that he now could no longer cast her in other female roles—she is certainly the most handsome, and I’d argue the most “beautiful” male in the movie.

     The first order of business in the film concerns Tut’s insistence that the company should immediately buy up Massachusetts farm where they have discovered a large source of Emeraldite, used in paint coloring. Without their knowing, A. B. has already made an option to buy and arranged for the purchase, as they haggle with Bancroft who refuses to be interrupted in his golf game being played on his office miniature 1-hole course.

        As a last resort, Tut calls in A. B. who assures Bancroft that it is a necessary purchase, which he then proclaims has been his idea all along, the usual agreement between the gifted employer and boss.

        Both President and board members, in fact, are so fearful of losing her that they insist that Tut, the only single man on the board, should marry her to keep her aboard their metaphorical “ship”; but Tut, seeing her as distastefully mannish and impossibly ruled by order, cannot imagine the possibility.

        Unfortunately, A. B. overhears the conversation since they have kept the switchboard line open. She is clearly hurt, but also not interested in the ugly Tut, and when he finally gets ready to pop the question, shouts out “No” before the words can strike his tongue.

        So has the plot been set up so that as Bancroft, suffering from gout, and his board members are gathered in his country estate, the rest of the film is devoted to Bancroft’s clever wife “Grandma” Bancroft’s (Toby Claude) attempts to remake the mannish A. B. over into an eye-fluttering, simpering, clinging vine of a woman, who dressed in fluffy and frilly attire gets her man by agreeing with nearly everything he says except when her moral conscience strikes her to shake her head in a polite “no.”

        Evidently, we’re to believe that this highly successful business woman can’t wait to pick out a man—even a truly empty-minded lug like Jimmie Bancroft—fall in love and get married, despite the fact that Jimmie, without even seeing A. B., has described her as a “flat-headed Amazon.”

      As the rather perceptive commentator (code name is “wetcircuit”) writing in Retrocinema Magazine describes the situation:

 

“Corporate matriarch Toby Claude is a jazz-age Granny who transforms A.B. into Abigale, a ‘clinging vine’ who is decorative and flirtatious and clings to a man’s shoulder. Sensing Abigale has no experience with love, Grandma maneuvers her towards her own grandson Jimmie. Ironically A.B. has recently fired Jimmie from the company, but Abigale’s pygmalion transformation is so complete that no one recognizes her. Most of the comedy derives from Abigale’s clumsy attempts at femininization, in exaggerated puffy gowns and over-sized bonnets. Joy presents a polemic image of dualities, first a studied and serious young man, then a fluttering and ridiculous child-woman. All the men eat it up.”

      Critics of the day were appalled by the film which varied greatly from the stage version of the work, arguing as did a Variety critic: “An impression lingers as one views the picture that cannot be fought off, that a female impersonator is playing the girl. It persists in the mind as the picture unreels….”

      In short, many viewers of 1926 were put off my Joy’s portrayal of the character as lesbian or transgender figure, which they could not get out of their minds even after she had transformed into the heterosexual beauty.

 

    But today for many of us it is quite the opposite, finding the character quite appealing as the efficient company employee—whatever his or her sexual identity—yet finding her to be a simpering nincompoop for trying to court a man whose major contribution to life is a giant contraption that serves the same purpose as an ordinary eggbeater, and whose ego is dependent upon A. B.’s backroom negotiations to have Tut buy the eggbeater only to have him invest the money in prankster B. Harvey Doolittle’s (Dell Henderson) false claim that he controls the Emeraldite rights the paper have described as being owned by a mysteriously unknown party.

     Pretending to have discovered Emeraldite on Jimmie’s unsaleable estate, she gets Doolittle in a bidding war with Tut to buy the farm, and gets back far more than Jimmie lost as well as reconfiguring the eggbeating machine as an Emeraldite mixer. After all, she is a business genius.

       This is a satire, of course, which proves that women throughout the world always know more than their husbands, working behind their backs to support them and correct their ways. Grandma Bancroft is just as bright as A. B. in her own way, but simply knows how to hide her talents behind her charm and beauty, the things heterosexual men, we are told, most want in a woman.

        But given A. B.’s remarkable talents and her success in office life, is it truly worth it, we can only wonder, to tie herself to a man as stupid as Jimmie, no matter that he can’t even begin to match the manly beauty that she herself possesses, now hidden behind silk, lace, outrageously shaped hats, and makeup? And if men are truly as ignorant as this film proclaims, why would any halfway intelligent woman want to be married to one of them?

       Where are all the beautiful gay boys when we most need them, particularly to tell A.B. to leave well enough alone. Leave the heterosexuals to their tricks and bizarre rituals, particularly given the fact that she herself is such striking beauty. Unfortunately, A. B. gets her man, but we can only ask, “at what price glory? or, more specifically, “heterosexual bliss.”

        If this is what heterosexual life is truly all about, I feel even more fortunate that I was born gay.

 

Los Angeles, May 5, 2022

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (May 2022).