Richard Wallace | Starvation Blues / 1925

cold art

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stan Laurel, Sherbourne Shields, Frank Terry, H.M. Walker, and Richard Wallace (screenplay), Richard Wallace (director) Starvation Blues / 1925

 

From 1918 to 1963, Australian born comedian Clyde Cook performed in at least 110 feature and short films playing mostly comic roles or, in the later talkies, a cockney figure. His famed mustache and rubbery facial expressions along with his frail stature brought him great popularity. His further acrobatic skills meant that he was perfect for the second banana or the fall guy, or in the LGBTQ films in which appeared, the “much put-upon queer boy” as in The Dude Wrangler (1930, playing “Pinkey Fripp) or feminized husband as in What’s the World Coming Two? (1926, in which he acted as “the Blushing Groom”).

      British comedian Syd Crossley played in an equal number of films, sometimes with the same directors and actors with whom Cook worked. Because of his height he often played the first comic or in authoritative roles such as constables and ungainly butlers.

      In Richard Wallace’s 1925 comic short (he replaced director James W. Horne, for reasons unknown) the two work together in a string of skits with them performing as a pair of hoboes caught in the severely cold weather of Chicago, the two attempting to survive as street musicians, Cook playing a gigantic tuba and Crossley a portable organ. The moment the two try to set up for a performance they are chased away by an unsympathetic cop, and much of the film is devoted to a cat and mouse game between the two and the policeman who is determined to closed down their only source of income.

      Throughout all of this we are made aware of just how impossible it is to survive in the freezing weather of the huge city located on the edge of the cold waters of Lake Michigan. Starvation is always near, yet the two manage endlessly to make us laugh. At one point Crossley, observing a wealthy man with a stuffed wallet of bills, has grown so hungry that he decides to follow and pickpocket the gent. But as he stands behind the gentleman on a streetcorner, signaling back to Cook of his intentions, the man moves on, a policeman replacing him. According when Crossley carefully slides his hand into a pocket, it is the into the policeman’s pants. No matter how Cook attempts to signal him of his horrible mistake, he does not catch on until it is predictably too late, and the two are once again set of the run from the law. One might almost imagine that the only way these hoboes resist being frozen—although at one point Cook actually does turn into a human icicle—is in their constant calisthenics caused by the cops. The image in one frame of the frozen Cook, the confused policeman, and the tuba which the impossible tall Crossley is supposedly hiding underneath them both creates a quite surreal vision.

      At another point they come upon the café coat check girl who has just been stood up outside the church by a café dandy who has promised to marry her. The boys take on this nearly frozen body in an attempt to cheer her up.

      In between their predictably failing efforts to survive, the movie takes us inside the popular café, also patrolled by a policeman determined to ferret out any dining “wets,” those patrons hiding a bottle of booze under the table.

      The film, in fact, begins with a view of the busy café filled with customers, the owner pushing his hands up in despair as the enforcement agent enters his establishment. A dancer spinning round almost like a Turkish dervish is just finishing her act, and if you look quickly you can spot the famous female impersonator of the day, Frederick Kovert (in this film performing as he sometimes does under the name Frederick Ko Vert).

       The café, which evidently welcomed local musical talents such as Cook and Crossley is immediately closed down, which is why the musicians have been forced back into the street. But later, when the café finally reopens, they return as the band.

        Scheduled to perform his famous “The Dance of the Seven Casabas”—perhaps one of the numbers Kovert danced on his long traveling tours in Mexico—he suddenly has a temper fit, pulling off his dress and wig as he moves away to dramatically pout in a tizzy. Cook goes on for him in the same dress, performing with one large ball which he moves about his body but gradually gets attached under the dress to his behind, the image creating the sexual pun that “he has a ball in his butt.”

 

      The owners, however, are delighted with the performance, noting that he has the same legs as “Pavlova—a right one and a left one”—putting Kovert into further melodramatic despair, and causing him instead of returning one of the helium-filled balls, to toss back a lamp globe, hitting Cook in the head, which results in a series of dizzying falls throughout the rest of his maniacal dance.

       Once more the cop lurks about trying to spot any “wets,” which ends, of course, in him discovering Cook in the midst of a dance; meanwhile the dandy, returned to the café, slugs the cop, all of which ends once more in the closure of the warm café.

       Cook and Crossley are forced into the local mission for the night, just to warm up even if it means setting on fire both their feet and heads.

        Why Kovert played such a frustrated artist in this work is not explained, but perhaps it gives us an insight into the great female impersonator himself as we witness him half in and out of his female persona.

 

Los Angeles, June 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).