heterosexual drag
by Douglas Messerli
Joseph Farnham and F. McGrew Willis
(screenplay, based on the stage play by Brandon Thomas), Scott Sidney
(director) Charley's Aunt / 1925
This work, which over the years
became almost a warhorse of both stage and cinema, in its first movie
appearance is perhaps the very best. In most respects it is very like the 1930
sound version, as well it should be given that the producer of this version, Al
Christie, was the director of the talkie.
Despite very similar staging, however, this production’s auntie, Sir
Fancourt Babberley, better known as “Babbs” (played by Charlie Chaplin’s
brother, Syd Chaplin) is simply a more convincing aunt than is the later
Charles Ruggles. And since the story is primarily a work of events, the various
comings and goings of its cast, it truly works better in the silent version
without all its often-cumbersome dialogue that attempts to explain the
impossible relationships between characters present and past.
Like all farces it is plot heavy, so
instead of recounting the story scene by scene, I will just quickly summarize
the basic elements of this 1925 rendition.
University roommates Charlie Wykeham (James Harrison) and Jack Chesney
(David James) are in love with Amy Spettigue (Mary Akin) and Kitty Verdun
(Priscilla Bonner) who are respectively the daughter and niece, wards of
Stephen Spettigue (James E. Page). Unfortunately, although they have reason to
believe the young women are attracted to them, the suitors have been unable to
get up the nerve to ask them to marry.
Meanwhile, Spettigue learns that once Miss Verdun is married he will no
longer be the recipient of a stipend for her support, and fearing that loss of
income, he refuses to allow either his own daughter or his ward see the young
men, planning instead to take them off to a summer vacation spot in Scotland
where there are no young men in sight.
Meanwhile, their busybody college chum from another room, “Babbs,”
trying to collect on a loan they’ve never paid back, attempts to rob them of
the bottles of champagne they’ve set out for the event. He’s about to prepare
for a new play in which performs in drag. Catching him in their room, they
suggest that he also join them at the luncheon to help keep Charley’s aunt busy
so that they might have time with the girls. But when, soon after, they get
word that the aunt has missed her connection and has been delayed in her visit,
and after seeing “Babbs” in his new female attire, they get the idea to have
him replace the aunt so that the girls will have no qualms about a lunch alone
with the two bachelor men.
As often happens in such farces, people regularly drop in to add to the
complexity of the situation. In this instance Jack’s father, Sir Francis
(Phillips Smalley, who plays the same role in the later 1930 version) suddenly
shows up to visit his son, reporting that having done a thorough audit of his
finances, he finds they are now debtors. Jack suggests he join them also at
lunch and woo Charley’s aunt who is notoriously wealthy and a widow. Obviously
when he discovers that she will be “replaced” by their friend, it is too late,
and he daren’t reveal the truth.
When the girls go missing from his home, the bothersome father and ward
Spettigue decides to butt into the celebrations as well.
For the rest of the movie we are treated to “Babb’s” ridiculous attempts
to imitate a Brazilian heiress, having utterly no knowledge about who she is
and only knowing that she comes from Brazil, the land of the nuts. And nutty is
the key word of his displeased attempts to keep in character, particularly when
beyond all rationality, and much to the shock of his son, both Jack’s father
and Spettigue fall head-over-heels in love with the aunt, dueling in their
attempts to win her over.
What the 1925 version makes far clearer with its beginning scene is
“Babbs’” previous experience with Ela Delahay and her father in France, when he
had attempted to help out the older man with his gambling obsession—the father
losing with his favorite number “13” time and again before finally going into
bankruptcy—by bribing the croupier to allow her father to win. When a group of
nasty American tourists foil that attempt, Babbs arranged that his beloved
Ela’s father to win a raffle, thus allowing her enough money so that she can
join Charley’s real aunt in her tour of England.
So too do the boys find the courage to ask their girls to marry them and
are quickly accepted. Babbs recognizes Ela, although she, like all the others,
cannot recognize him, and when he finally reveals himself, she accepts his love
only after a great deal of dismay and doubt. And surely she might well wonder
about a beau dressed up as a woman at the very edge of marrying an old man—a
situation that reminds one most particularly of Jack Lemmon’s character
Daphne’s last scenes with Joe E. Brown’s Osgood Fielding III in Some Like It
Hot.
The only one who winds up without a match is the foolish Spettigue,
whose loneliness and poverty, the writer suggests, is his reward for his
cross-gender licentiousness and greed.
Not only does the lack of dialogue speed up the pace of this otherwise
long and extracted series of mistaken identities and confused love, but the
tradition of silent films speeding up the character’s movements rids us of the
boring run-arounds that Babbs and Charley’s Aunt offers up to the old fool
Spettigue. The accelerated speed not only saves us the slo-mo races in and out
rooms but creates a true silliness for Babbs rooftop athletics which I found
distracting in the 1930 version.
Even in 1925 when drag was still extremely popular—evidenced in the
appearance of Julian Eltridge’s Madame Behave (also directed by Scott
Sidney), Stan Laurel in The Sleuth, Frederick Kovert in Chasing the
Chaser and Starvation Blues, and the various maskings and drag
appearances in Dick Turpin—there was something notably old-fashioned about
Charley’s Aunt’s “heterosexualized” vision of cross-dressing. While Eltridge,
Kovet, and even to a certain degree Laurel who absolutely convincing in their
female attire, Syd Chaplin never attempted to convince his audience that he
truly was a woman. More like the early drag appearances of John Bunny, Charlie
Chaplin, Wallace Beery, Oliver Hardy, Roscoe Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Harold
Langdon, and others, the point was not to disguise oneself but openly perform as
if one pretending to be a woman; the humor existed in the fact that while
the audience was totally aware the falsity of the situation, the film’s
characters mistook the male as a female. It was all in fun, not a true fetish
or interest in becoming the opposite sex as it was with figures such as
Eltridge, Kovert, and Bothwell Browne.
Already in that same year, moreover, works such as second part of
Manfred Noa’s Helena, Louis J. Gasnier’s Parisian Love, Adrian
Brunel’s Battling Bruisers: Some Boxing Buffonery, Terence Greenidge’s The
Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama, Alfred Hitchcock’s The
Pleasure Garden, Malcolm St. Clair’s A Woman of the World, Dallas M.
Fitzgerald’s My Lady of Whims, and Roland West’s The Monster were
beginning to explore the gay sensibility, early versions of camp, and even
homosexual love in both Helena and Parisian Love.
By the 1930 production, as I note, drag as a comic device had begun to
be passé of little deep directorial interest, even though it continues even
until today, a fact that perhaps explains the odd lack of mention of this work
in almost all of the major studies of gay cinema. Particulary in 1925 version,
with its preface about Babb’s early relationship with Ela, Charley’s Aunt is
more about willful trickery than it is about the relationship of gay men and
the interest by some of them in cross-dressing.
Los Angeles, November 22, 2022
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (November 2022).
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