Paul Sloane | Eve's Leaves / 1926

the boy in search of a single, healthy, sober, honest, industrious, sane man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Elmer Harris (screenplay, adapted from the play by Harry Chapman Ford, by Jack Jevne), John W. Krafft (intertitles), Paul Sloane (director) Eve’s Leaves / 1926

 

Early in 1926 actor Leatrice Joy, in an impulsive moment, cut her hair short. She looked great in what her fans described as the “Leatrice Joy bob,” but Cecil B. DeMille, whom Joy had joined is his move from Paramount Studios in 1924 to establish his own Producers Distributing Corporation, was furious with her since she could no longer play the traditional feminine roles for which she had grown famous; for the next five films it took her to regrow her hair, she was assigned characters suitable for what I like to describe as her new identity: “Leatrice Joy Bob.”

     In several of them she was first identified as a male,* and two of these, under the direction of Paul Sloane, were a blessing in disguise for LGBTQ audiences since it forced the writers to create “pants” roles for her, in which, particularly in The Clinging Vine she played a “manly” character who could easily be read as lesbian and clearly did not behave according to gender.

     The latter was also true for at least the early scenes of her second “Bob” movie, Eve’s Leaves of 1926, in which she begins the flick as the daughter of the Captain (Robert Edeson) of a ship cruising the China coast and rivers. In order to protect her from the crew and Chinese natives, the Captain dresses her as a boy, pretending she is his son. Accordingly, Eve begins the film identifying with her shipmates and displaying very few normative female characteristics. “His” antics, which combine a sort of Huck Finn-like adventurousness and charm, with the high-spirited tricksterism of Peck’s Bad Boy, gives Joy an opportunity to display her diverse and quite athletic talents.

      Focusing on her as a quite beautiful young boy, the director’s early scenes are arguably the most fun, particularly since the “boy” is of the age that he is beginning to wonder about sex and love. Since most of the crew simply perceive him as a younger male who gets in their way and who spends his free time playing tricks on them, the boy has few friends aboard, and no one except the ship’s cook (Eddie Harris) to talk to.

     Cookie, as he is nicknamed, is a fan of romantic novels which one might suggest they served as a kind of soft porn for lonely sailors without a woman in sight. He’s also a fan of “self-help” and “how-to” publications such as Love’s Almanac, which he offers up as just the book needed to answer the boy’s questions about “How do you know if you’re in love?”

     One of the first lessons the book teaches him/her is that if someone is in love you feel their vibrations. “No two people should marry,” argues the Almanac, “unless their vibrations harmonize.” It advises him to stand beside someone to see if his heart flutters.

      To check it out, Eve choses a seaman painting part of the boat. The ‘boy” stands up on the freshly painted section to get a close look at to him as he checks out is own reactions in anticipation. The sailor’s “vibration” is one of fury once he spots the boy atop his fresh paint job, and sends him flying. Eve gets back at him with a boat wheel aimed at his butt; but Captain Corbin intercedes only to discover that his “son” has yet again gotten into trouble.

      If vibrations don’t work, Cookie suggests love results in a kind of warm feeling, and the checklist with which Cookie’s book advises an interested to lover to query his future mate seems like a sure bet:

 

1. Are you single?
2. Are you healthy?
3. Are you sober?
4. Are you honest?
5. Are you industrious?
6. Is there any insanity in your family?

   To look after his “son” more carefully, the Captain determines to take his son into the Chinese village so that he can settle accounts with the local restaurateur. The noted Thomas Britton leaves his son Bob (William Boyd, later famed for his role as Hopalong Cassidy) in the same restaurant as he goes about his business. And through the abacus accounting of the Chinese restaurant owner, Eve spots a man he determines to investigate concerning if he shares any feelings regarding to love.

     Eve checks her own pulse and sneaks off to check the man out. Bob greets the “boy,” “Howdy, son,” and offers “him” a cigarette, tossing a match by accident onto a newspaper on a nearby chair, the paper catching fire and providing Eve with a deep sense of warmth and enough cause to now sit down and pose the serious questions to Bob. The odd questions from a boy posed to a young adult man result in a nice comic skit which brings up all sorts of possibilities for gender confusion and gay innuendos, Bob losing control of himself when asked about insanity in his family and scaring the “boy” off.

     Sloane is a wonderful director when it comes to knowing how to use his cinematographer Arthur C. Miller in order to create memorable images throughout. But this director apparently had absolutely no concept about narrative or story, leaving everything to the hack writers such as Elmer Harris, who belched up dozens of unmemorable silent film scripts before his 1928 work for Frank Capra The Matinee Idol and his very final film from 1948, Johnny Belinda— and even those have significant problems. He wrote the screenplay for Eve’s Leaves, adapted by Jack Jevne from Harry Chapman Ford’s play of the same name.

      Ford, was the son of Henry Clay Ford, owner of the famous Washington, D.C. theater, Ford’s, where President Abraham Lincoln was shot by actor John Wilkes Booth. A bachelor up until his 1938 death, Ford was most famous for that great masterwork, The Garden of Allah.

      Even worse, Sloane gave the job of writing intertitles to the clearly racist Indiana journalist and later scriptwriter George W. Krafft. Today, because of intertitle observations such as his description of the restaurant: “The Golden Dragon Cafe—the only place in Sub Gum where a Chinaman can get real chop suey, Chicago style,” and far worse titles filled with racist epithets and rants, it is difficult, at moments, to attend to the real story. Along with Krafft’s attempt to keep the Eve/leaf/snake/temptation associations throughout the film and Ford’s hackneyed plot wherein the evil Green Dragon enters with his band of thieves, ransacks the town, and forces Captain Corbin as his crew to carry them and their loot downriver, this film today almost unbearable to watch. Plot and titles, moreover, take away any of the possible charm the film might have proffered as a love story between pretty boy Eve and the cute and brave young Bob.

     As with so very many US screenwriters and directors, unlike such European stylists as Ernst Lubitsch and Paul Czinner, Sloane and his gang immediately release any tension about the audience’s suspension of belief about Beatrice Joy being a boy, letting everyone know, Bob and the Green Dragon equally, that she’s really a girl in search of love. Both men want her, and she wants Bob. The only point of interest that remains is how to get the couple out of the clutches of the evil Chinaman and into to each other’s arms.

     Arguably, the film presents some good moments, such as when Eve attempts to seduce Bob by dressing in as a sort of 1890s flapper as drawn by someone like Audrey Beardsley at the same time feeding her hungry boyfriend a whole barrel of apples. This Salome stuffs her man’s head with apples. And, at another moment she hides out in a decoratively carved wooden box which the Green Dragon and his men have looted, eventually popping out to save Bob from S&M torture, afterwards taking the two them on a mad Keystone Kops-like chase. Eve and Bob are certainly a photogenic couple, and Sloane makes the best of their handsome faces.

      But the movie has long ago lost its audience in its convoluted silliness and forgotten to even explore any possible gay or lesbian temptations. Just as in The Clinging Vine, where Sloane determines to make over an interesting and brilliant business woman into an empty-headed clothes horse suddenly become determined to become the perfect heteronormative wife, so the wily wild  boy of Eve’s Leaves is transformed, bit by bit, into a doting school-girl who is so eager to marry that she, Bob, and the preacher perform the ceremony in three barrels, popping up between the minister’s questions to answer the standard marriage inquiries—actually a quite brilliant moment in filmmaking in its innovatory prediction of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. But, alas, by this film’s end, the results are all too predictable: the girl gets her boy and the officers mow down those terrible "Chineee" devils.

 

*In For Alimony Only, she is first recognized as a boy by the man she soon after marries.