Clarence Brown | Kiki / 1926

the feral cat

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hanns Kräly (screenplay, based on the original play by André Picard as adapted into English by David Belasco), Clarence Brown (director) Kiki / 1926

 

Starring an appealing Norma Talmadge as Kiki and the dapper Ronald Colman as stage producer Victor Renal, with whom the Paris street-gamin Kiki is desperately in love, the movie version of based on the original French play by André Picard as adapted into English by David Belasco in 1921 was a great success. Even today the silent film by Clarence Brown in which Kiki determines to become a dancer and singer in the chorus line and when she finds it convenient to shift her goals, to act out the role of mistress to Renal’s household provides a great many wonderful comic moments, particularly given the confusions that arise since he sees that role as a literal one while she dreams it may be a temporary invasion that might open up to the position of wife—although oddly enough the world marriage never appears in the film, not even in relationship with Renal’s supposed fiancée  Paulette Mascar (Gertrude Astor) with whom Kiki must do battle in order to win over the man she loves.

     In this film version, as opposed to the later 1931 film starring Mary Pickford, the play is performed more as a boulevard farce than marital comedy, particularly given Kiki’s double-studded desires to become a theater star and a proper French matron, about neither of which she has a clue of how to behave or achieve her goals. She begins by ruining singing star Paulette’s performance with Fanny Brice-like vaudeville chaos, dancing in the automaton style of chlorines of the day right out of synchronized line and into the lonely space in front where only the star is allowed to perform her number. Literally pushed off the stage by Paulette into an orchestra-pit harp, Kiki scrambles her way back to the stage to take her bows with the star, leading as one might have expected—given the high tempered nature of both women involved—into a knock-'em-out brawl interspersed with composed curtain calls and another of the apparently recurring breakups between Renal and his fiancée.

      Of course, Kiki, despite being immediately fired, pushes her way into the void of Renal’s empty arms. Her first formal restaurant dinner ends with quickly becoming drunk from champagne—and who wouldn’t forgive her that faux pas after Paulette pushes her way with her replacement date, Renal’s theater backer Baron Rapp (Marc McDermott) into a place at Kiki and Renal’s dinner table. Renal has no choice but to hurry Kiki off to a taxi to speed her back home.

      What he doesn’t know is that Kiki has spent her last rent sou on a new dress to get her the chorus-line job and has now no place to call home. Gentleman that he is—a motif repeated throughout the film—Renal has no choice but to take the waif home with him.

       What he doesn’t realize is that this confused and lost kitten will quickly be perceived to be a feral street cat when let loose in his sheik, well-oiled man-cave, particularly by his loving, loyal, fussy, and punctilious—call him for what he is, hilariously sissified—valet Adolphe, played by one of the major models of the soon-to-be “panze” movies of the early 1930s, George K. Arthur.

       Given that Arthur had performed an even more queer sissy as the clothes designer Irene in the film released less than two months earlier, it is strange (or perhaps explains) why none of the discussions of LGBTQ cinema such as Richard Barrios’ Screened Out mentions him in this delicious role in which the good servant is chased about the apartment, wrestled to the floor on several occasions, and generally tortured by this new female cat who has somehow gotten into his clockwork-structured male dominated environment.* It’s not that he might not expect from time to time a woman sharing his master’s bed, but he has never before witnessed his master sleeping on a circular pouffe (the piece of furniture not a nance) in the library while a woman quickly gobbles down his breakfast after staggering out from the master’s bedroom.

      Indeed, Kiki shows him a great deal he doesn’t want to see or know, as he watches her gradually take over the apartment, steal any letter from Paulette he carefully tucks in beside the master’s coffee cup, and insistently threatens one day to discharge him. Over the course of her stay, Adolphe is so terrorized that as he enters the main living room, he cowers in terror, his eyes skirting over the lay of the land to see if the wild cat is anywhere in site. Together, he and Kiki seek approval and pats from Renal like constantly squabbling teenagers desperately in need of his love as they vie for his attention. Whoever cast Arthur in the role—and given Clarence Brown’s excellent work later that same year with the remarkable ménage-à-trois of John Gilbert, Greta Garbo, and Lars Hanson in Flesh and the Devil he certainly knew how to choose and work with larger-than-life actors—was brilliant, Arthur often stealing scenes from Talmadge. When after everyone, including Renal, has tired of her tricks, Kiki pretends to have been struck down by catalepsy and the doctor claims that the only way to prove that she has no feelings left is to either put hot irons to the soles of her feet or poke a large needle into her arm or foot, Adolphe quickly steps forward, his eyes dilated with absolute delight at the idea of stabbing the tool into her.

      Renal finally steps forward to end that deserved moment of revenge, obviously coming to realize that he truly loves the zany woman who on lays on the couch with one arm and foot in the air. Soon after he leaves Paulette in the lurch once more, worried for Kiki’s well-being far more that attending another of his now former fiancée’s performances, which he realizes, have consisted of nothing but well-studied acting techniques. Kiki, so it appears, may indeed someday get her opportunity to discharge poor Adolphe, this time as the true mistress of the Renal household.

      Both this film and Alfred E. Green’s Irene—as well as Howard Hawks’ Fig Leaves, Sam Taylor’s Exit Smiling, and Brown’s Flesh and the Devil of the same year, directors gave their obviously gay figures far larger and more complex roles than the “panze” films that became the craze beginning only 4 years later, which looked to these films, in part, as their models.

 

*Surely the most important reason that this film was ignored and has been written about so little is that it was thought to have been lost, no full film available until it was restored from three incomplete copies in English, French, and Czech in 2006. Barrios’ study appeared in 2003.

     

Los Angeles, January 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).