Scott Sidney | Madame Behave / 1925

polyamorous porpoises

by Douglas Messerli

 

F. McGrew Willis (scenario, based on Madame Lucy by Jean Arlette), Scott Sidney (director) Madame Behave / 1925

 

Julian Eltinge had become a huge success a decade earlier on Broadway for his performances in The Fascinating Window (Liberty Theater, 1911), which ran only 56 performances in New York but toured the US to great success; The Crinoline Girl (Knickerbocker Theatre, 1914); and Cousin Lucy (George M. Cohan’s Theatre, 1915), all which were made into the shorter films reviewed in my earlier volume of My Queer Cinema.

        In 1918, after appearing in those films, Eltinge returned to Broadway touring with the vaudeville group, “The Julian Eltinge Players,” appearing at New York City’s Palace Theatre, where he was paid one of the highest salaries in show business at $3,500 a week.

      In most of these works Eltinge did not perform as a male imitating a woman, but simply in female attire, often surprising his audiences at performance’s end by pulling of his wig, in the style of the various versions of Victor/Victoria, to reveal his true gender. So successful were his female impersonations that he was invited to perform before the British King Edward VII.

      In 1914, he performed on film in a version of his stage role in The Crinoline Girl, apparently a lost film. But Eltinge’s film career truly began in 1915 when he played a cameo role in How Molly Malone Made Good. In 1917 he had a double success in Donald Crisp’s two films of that year, The Clever Mrs. Carfax and The Countess Charming, the latter in which he played as both a male and female.

      By 1920, the impersonator was living as a wealthy man in the lavish southern California mansion Villa Capistrano. He appeared in 1920 in the film An Adventuress (The Isle of Love in the US), co-starring Rudolph Valentino, reviewed above. And in 1925, just a few years before the US national crackdown on public crossdressing performances—purportedly to deter homosexuality, although the vaudeville, stage, and film performances of crossdressing stars were not attended exclusively by homosexuals nor did they advocate homosexual behavior.

       As I have observed previously, offstage Eltinge, even if he may have been a gay man, purportedly created a super-masculine facade in order to deflect rumors of homosexuality, leading the Chicago Tribune drama critic of the day, Percy Hammond to describe him as “ambisextrous.” Milton Berle, who briefly worked with Eltinge, believed he was a gay man.

       Perhaps his best films were his last, Madame Behave, directed by Scott Sidney in 1925, and, in the same year, The Fascinating Woman, evidently a lost film, whose director we do not know.

        Like so many show business figures, Eltinge lost most of his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, and by the 1930s with the closure of live drag theater and a significant change in film interests, his career quickly declined. In February 1941, while performing at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe nightclub in New York City, he became ill, dying of a cerebral hemorrhage 10 days later.

      Sidney’s film Madame Behave fortunately leaves behind a marvelous testament to Eltinge’s comedic and crossdressing talents. This film, moreover, retains most of its humor even today.

      If the plot, like almost all such comedic drag performances, represents basic farce, a mad confusion of who desires who and which one is hiding from which other, all made even more dizzying since even the gender of the various lovers is uncertain, the performances, in this case by Eltinge as Jack Mitchell and Madame Brown, his roommate Dick Corwin (David James), his elderly male pursuers, Seth Corwin (Lionel Belmore) and Henry Jasper (Jack Duffy), and Jack and Dick’s girlfriends, who suddenly find themselves both attracted to the Madame Brown, Ann Pennington (Gwen Townley) and Laura Barnes (Evelyn Francisco), as well as the boy’s hilarious black servant, Creosote (Tom Wilson).

      Any attempt to actually describe the plot would simply confuse the reader who has not witnessed the hilarious goings on, so I shall just outline the basic situation by explaining that Jack and Dick, the later who has already wasted an inheritance and the former who works as an architect who has sold a design but not yet been paid, find themselves at the mercy of their landlord Jasper, who plans to throw them and their servant friend out of their comfortable apartment by the end of the day.

 

      Dick can surely ask his rich uncle for a loan, but it so happens that his uncle Seth is also appearing in court that day for having crashed into their landlord’s Mercedes some time earlier. The two men, Seth Corwin and Henry Jasper have long been enemies who habitually describe one another in terms of a mix of alliterative animal and human behavior (“babbling beaver,” “menacing monkey,” “bloated baboon,” and the like) before challenging one another to fisticuffs.

     In this case the only evidence of the crime exists in Jasper’s “garrulous gorilla-like” (my own words) garbles of the incident. Although an unknown woman has observed the crash, neither of the gentlemen know of her whereabouts, forcing the judge to postpone the hearing until they find the woman to testify.

   Corwin’s lawyer tells his client that he must seek out the woman’s whereabouts immediately and marry her, thus making sure that she cannot testify against him. In order to get the loan for his rent, Dick promises his uncle that we will deliver up the missing woman as soon as possible, handing over the money to his roommate to return back to the apartment and pay the “barking blister beetle” Jasper their late rent.

   When Jasper gets wind of Corwin’s intention to find and marry the missing witness, he vows to do the same, and the race is on.

   Coincidentally, Jack’s girlfriend Gwen is under the care of Corwin and living in his mansion along with her friend, Dick’s girlfriend Laura. Corwin, who doesn’t think much of his nephew’s penniless roommate Jack, has promised Gwen in marriage to the wealthy sissy-boy Percy Fairweather (Stanhope Wheatcroft), demanding that Gwen get engaged to him that very afternoon.

   Sizing up the situation, Jack feels his has no choice—particularly when Percy offers Gwen a pearl necklace—but to take the rent money and buy Gwen a ring so they might be married.

   In the meantime, Jasper has thrown the boys out of their rooms, leaving the packed bags and numerous unpackable possessions in the hall under the protection of Creosote. Fortunately, the woman who lives across the hall, who has been having her own marital problems and is determined to leave her apartment for a week or so, offers her abode to the boys until things get settled, leaving Creosote to drag all the bags and sundry possessions into her apartment.

 

       Having noted Jack’s attentions to his charge, Seth Corwin orders the boy to be banned from entering the mansion. When Jack returns with the ring, accordingly, he finds the Corwin butler blocking all the entrances. Forced to climb up the trellis in order to reach Gwen’s room, Jack is spotted by old man Corwin who quickly reports to the police that he is being robbed, the entire police brigade, believing it is a “second story man” who has plagued the neighborhood, chase him down as, on the run, Jack leads them back to his own apartment only to find that he and Dick have been locked out of their rooms.

        Fortunately, Creosote sees him as the police move in, pulling him into the neighbor’s rooms and demanding that Jack hide himself by donning the owner’s wig and one of her dresses. After a ridiculous series of Jack pulling off and putting on his drag costume, the police arrive and go in search of his whereabouts. Jack realizes that he’s now destined to remain dressed as a woman, particularly when, after having followed the cops both Corwin the younger and elder show up, Jack’s roommate introducing his new female friend as none other than the Madame Brown, the witness to the accident he has promised to produce.       

    Discovering what Jack has done with the rent money, Dick takes the ring and sells it to his uncle in order to pay the rent. But even before he can do that the landlord Jasper also shows up, and the entire gang returns to the Corwin mansion, Seth introducing the beautiful wild woman as his future wife, Madame Brown taking such a liking to his young female guests that she cannot help but profusely kiss them both—the girls, if momentarily being a bit taken aback, finally determining that they love the female attention. Just at that moment Jasper shows up, leading obviously to an endless chase of Madame Brown / Jack throughout the mansion and its lawns for the rest of movie, along with regular partying, dancing the Charleston to Creosote’s piano renditions, and generally flirting and making out with everyone in the house including Percy.

      The film ends with everybody in somebody else’s arms, including Jasper and Corwin, who  team up to do battle the neighbor’s returning husband who mistakenly believes that Madame Brown is his own wife. Jasper and Corwin become fast friends, hugging one another before returning to their alliterative name-calling.

       But the version that remains on file in the Library of Congress is evidently incomplete, and in the original, so the script declares, they speed off to be married—although, as in Mozart’s Così fan tutti, we are not quite sure who marries who, since this film along the way has hinted at male homosexuality, lesbian attraction, and made apparent that everyone except for Dick (Jack’s long- time roommate, which puts the two also in a strange relationship given their ages) who has fallen for the female incarnation of Madame Brown. Polyamorphism is evidently nearly everyone’s choice. Surely, with the exception of Bernard Natan’s Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly (1920), this is the wildest LGBTQ-themed work of cinema up until G. W. Pabst’s Lulu of 1929.

 

Los Angeles, January 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 19, 2022)