Roland West | The Monster / 1925

a queer entertainment

by Douglas Messerli

 

Willard Mack and Albert Kenyon (screenplay, based on the story by Crane Wilbur), Roland West (director) The Monster / 1925

 

As early as 1925 Arthur had arguably created a kind of pansy figure in Roland West’s film The Monster, which also was perhaps one of the first horror films.

    But even here Arthur’s character Johnny Goodlittle might simply be better described as a Milquetoast, like Harold Lloyd’s Grandma’s Boy afraid of the world around him which generally bullies or ignores him. If he shares a mutual love of the small-town beauty Betty Watson (Gertrude Olmstead), she will surely choose the local grocer’s son Amos Rugg (Hallam Cooley) for whose father Johnny works. Although Betty is a friendly and kind soul, even she perceives him as off territory, the writer’s having her arrive at the store for a packet of pansy seeds, a request she makes three times. Barrios insists that it may even be the origin of the word associated with gay effeminate men. At her request, he suggests, he is flustered, which perhaps “has less to do with her request than her presence….but the message to the audience is unmistakable. This, in fact, is one of the earliest examples of one of the most popular gay-oriented code words; the word pansy was at the time not necessarily pejorative, but from this time until its use was banned from movies in 1934 it had one meaning only.”

      And even if we wanted to forget this one scene, the movie keeps reminding its character, through the others’ treatment of him, that he is not a figure who fits into their normative male-dominated society.

      Having joined up with a correspondence course of the Art of Detection, Johnny is about to earn his badge, gun, and handcuffs, along with the Kankakee-based certificate. He regularly reads the book on How to Be a Detective. Yet when a local farmer, John Bowman goes missing, the wreckage of his car discovered nearby the now closed Dr. Edwards’ Sanitarium, the constable Russ Mason (Charles Sellon) and Amos who with the Insurance Detective and Johnny make up the search squad, find anything Johnny has to say about the case as laughable, at best something to simply be ignored, Johnny sent away with the disdain of his “in-genuity.”

       When later Johnny attends a local dance, he is equally treated by all the guests as an outsider. He leaves the party, wandering over once again to the site where Jack Bowman was last seen, having left, he discovers, a mirror-image message saying “HELP”—the existence of which the others believe Johnny has made up.

        There he meets a strange man—who we latter find out is Daffy Dan (Knute Erickson). Dan asks him for a match, pretending to light up a cigarette with it. Wandering about the place, Johnny accidentally falls through a chute into the old sanitorium in which Dan was obviously once a patient.

        No sooner does Johnny arrive in the asylum but the partygoers. Amos and Betty are lured off the highway on their way home by a mirror, just as was Bowman was before them, and find themselves also trapped in the old sanitarium.

        Using the later typical tropes of “the old dark house” stories, a genre which in 1932 James Whale would make very famous with his film of the same name, the trio meet up with the mad Dr. Gustave Ziska (Lon Chaney) who along with his slave, Caliban (Walter James), and evil Rigo (George Austin) pull levers to scroll down panels that block all windows and lock the doors before attempting to drug, poison, and hypnotize particularly Betty and Amos, while Johnny goes exploring into a dark stairwell that leads to subterranean operating rooms, gets drunk on the wine the other two have refused to drink, and generally begins to put his detecting studies into operation.

       Between the alcohol, his timidity, and his naivete Johnny doesn’t accomplish much at first, although he does discover a secret room wherein the evil trio have locked away Dr. Edwards, Bowman, and another man.

       But eventually finding a way out of the building he battles with Rigo, returning dressed as him to save Amos and Betty just as Ziska is about to, most oddly, transfer Amos’ soul, thus killing him, into Betty’s body. Without any commentary by the filmmaker or the film’s critics, it sounds to me as if he were attempting some version of a non-surgical transsexual operation.

       Perhaps excited by the alcohol and certainly by the opportunity to show is abilities to use logical thought, Johnny frees Amos and Betty, straps Ziska into his own death chair, and watches as Caliban activates the transducer by command of his master, removing the man into thin air. As Caliban becomes distracted over his mistake, Johnny hooks him to a winch and sends him flying upside down over their heads as the town policeman, the insurance detective, and others who finally turn to praise their local hero, the insurance company man offering him a job and Betty offering him a kiss and her sexual interest.

      Precisely what the LGBTQ audience might most like about this film, its focus on the pansy outsider Johnny, because the basis of criticism for many critics, including the critics for The New York Times, who chose wording that perhaps did not intentionally mean what today we might it really means.

 

"The starch seems to have been taken out of the pictorial conception of The Monster by the inclusion of too much light comedy. The result is that, although this film possesses a degree of queer entertainment, it is neither fish, fowl nor good red herring. The thrills that might have chilled one's feet and finger tips end in causing chuckles and giggles...Mr. Chaney does not have very much to do, but his various appearances are effective...Chaney looks as if he could have enjoyed a more serious portrayal of the theme."

 

     Queer entertainment indeed!

 

Los Angeles, July 10, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).