Jack Conway | Brown of Harvard / 1926

true love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Melvin Ellis, Donald Ogden Stewart, and A.P. Younger (screenplay based on the play Brown of Harvard by Rida Johnson Young), Jack Conway (director) Brown of Harvard / 1926

 

Brown of Harvard (1926) is one of the best of the “Going to College” films of the 20th century. The usual plot involved, in one way or another, a young self-sure or shy boy or occasionally girl going off to college and encountering a series of new adventures having to do with roommates, falling in love with a professor or college president’s daughter or son, and participation in sports or some other group activity which makes him or her popular among his or her classmates. Many of these were also “buddy” movies, the central character developing a close relationship with his roommate and others in his or her dorm or fraternity or sorority. Particularly in later variations, the individual often gets into trouble just for being involved with the others.

      Most of these works are heterosexual fantasies aimed younger audiences. But with the “buddy” bromance, some of these movies border on queer or at least homoerotic relationships of enough importance to include them in these volumes. Among the examples I’ve written about in the years from 1887 to 1939 are Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye’s Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) (1913); Sven Gade and Heinz Schall’s Hamlet (1921) (much of this version of Hamlet involves his studies at Wittenberg University); Norman Taurog’s Sunny Skies (1930); Dudley Murphy The Sport Parade (1932) (this film begins in the university before it moves elsewhere); William Wyler’s Tom of Culver (1932) (a military academy here serves as a college-like experience); Elliott Nugent’s She Loves Me Not (1934); and Arthur J. Goulding’s A Chump at Oxford (1939).

      Of these Sunny Skies and a second in the “Tom Brown” series, Tom of Culver, share many affinities to Brown of Harvard. It might be said that Tom Brown (William Haines) serves as a model for the equally complacently self-centered and assured Jim Grant of Sunny Skies who also bunks up with a loser of a roommate who quite literally falls in love with the campus rake, unable to see any of his flaws. Brown, like Grant in the later film, persistently pursues the campus beauty, in this case Mary Abbott (Mary Brian), loses a major competition (the boat race) for Harvard through heaving drinking, and finally makes a comeback as a football hero, spurred on by the heroine’s love. And like the hero of 1932 film, Tom still finds time to seriously care for and even protect his unpopular roommate, demanding that where he goes so too does Jim Doolittle (a role performed quite wonderfully by Mary Pickford’s younger brother, Jack).

       The majority of the film’s story is predictably taken up with Tom’s wooing of Mary—a exercise in self-destruction since in two instances he oversteps the boundaries of proper college courtship, grabbing and kissing her after she has rather emphatically said “no”—and his several sports mishaps, namely his getting drunk over Mary’s rejection of him and his having been scratched from the rowing team. When his rival Bob MacAndrews (Francis X. Bushman, Jr.) suffers a hand injury, Tom is asked to return to the rowing team, but because he has not kept in shape he is unable to stick it out the whole distance as a rower, falling into fatigue at the very moment when the team most needs him, like a Muybridge athlete who fell apart.

        Embarrassed by his major failures during his freshman year—academic achievement seems to be of little importance in this silent picture—Tom is ready to drop out until his father insists that he must return if only the win the hand of the woman he is now certain he loves.

        And much of the second half of the film, accordingly is taken up with Tom’s attempts to prove his worth through playing football—another team from which his is seemingly scratched—and continuing to offend Mary, who clearly loves him despite her moral scruples and her superficial connection to MacAndrews.

       Yet one would have to be truly blind to miss the fact, as even the sales pitch from the Zeus DVD catalogue notes, that “the real love story, and the one that truly moves the film's plot, is the one between the handsome, athletic Brown and his weakling sidekick Jim Doolittle (Jack Pickford) (in fact, the physical contrast between the two men is echoed in another important buddy film which came out some 40 years later—Midnight Cowboy).” Putting aside the comparison with John Schlesinger’s 1969 film—a more apt example of the physical attraction might be a comparison with Tom Brown’s relationship with his buddy Robert Randolph III in Tom of Culver or between Baker and Brown in The Sport Parade—their relationship is clearly deeper and less fraught than Tom’s with Mary and the rest of his colleagues, despite the fact that at film’s end he wins the girl and the adulation of his classmates who invite him to become a member of The Dickey Club, the Harvard honor’s organization, seemingly again with academic consideration.

      Jim falls for Tom from the first time when Tom, invited to join his fellow dormers at a party, insists that Jim accompanies him. And throughout the film, he serves as Tom’s most ardent supporter when he almost gets trounced in a fight early in the film with Bob MacAndrews and even after Tom is ridiculed for his loss in the rowing competition.

      But by the time Tom returns for his second year to Harvard, again bunking up with Jim, the one-sided friendship has blossomed into mutual caring, and when Jack repeats his general statement about his feelings for Tom, “Gosh, you’re great fellow,” his idol even initiates physical contact, gently pushing Jack away in awkward embarrassment for his admiration, which is repeated by Jack’s pushing and pulling back, leading to further rowdy play.

      Earlier, when Jack, carefully watching Tom dress, queries him on the notches on his belt—cut evidently in celebration for every woman he conquers—Tom, for the first time, comments on his friend’s costume, suggesting he get rid of the galoshes and heavy raincoat, a foretelling of later events. And in the freshman year, when Jack returns home drunk the night before the boat race, it is Jack who attempts to sober him up and hide him from school authorities, even at one point knocking him out—an act which he immediately regrets, fearing he may have seriously hurt him and delighted when Tom again begins to mutter drunken nonsense.

      During the sophomore year, Jack becomes sick, suffering evidently from the colds he suffers, as he has warned earlier, from rain and cold. As he lays in bed, Tom takes up his friend’s rubbing ointment and gently applies it slowly for several long frames over his Jack’s chest as he mulls the Crimson’s news report that his name his scratched from the football team lineup.

      This scene has to be one of the most physically sensuous scenes between two males, aside from Richard Arlen and Charles Buddy Rogers’ deep kiss on the lips in William A. Wellman’s Wings, and the two prison lovers’ holding of hands and faces in William Dieterle’s Sex in Chains, in the first half century of cinema. And we recognize in it the vast chasm between Tom’s eager attempts to put his lips to Mary, an act for which he is punished by both Mary and MacAndrews, and the deep love expressed in the hand rub of Jack’s chest and nipples.

 

    Tom leaves Jack to pick up his parents in Boston, having to explain to them that he will not be playing in the game they have traveled to Cambridge to witness. But almost the moment he leaves, the football coach calls, demanding to know where Tom is. He has not benched Tom even if the Harvard newspaper has, and insists that if Tom doesn’t show up in a half-hour, he will be dropped.

     Sick as he is, Jack barely gives it a second thought and he enters the monsoon-like rainstorm to track down his friend, missing the trolley by a few seconds as he clings on to its side. When the conductor discovers his presence and stops the car, Jack falls to the street deathly ill, while yet able to mumble the news to Tom, as his lover—how else now should we describe Tom at this moment who realizes his friend has chanced his life in order to help him—picks him and carries him to bed, demanding he is immediately hospitalized.

      As I suggested above, Tom soon after wins the game for Harvard over Yale, even allowing MacAndrews to get credit for the winning touchdown, while the film pretends he is spurred on by his love for Mary, who sits in the audience along with Tom’s parents. But we know it is his love for Jack, who he tries to telephone even during the intermission, that truly motivates his actions.

 

    Instead of basking in the glory of the win, Tom rushes to the hospital only to discover that Jack has just died. The tears and utter grief that gay act William Haines evinces upon the screen were surely motivated by his ability to imagine the death of another male whom he deeply loved such as his real-life lover Jimmie Shields. Certainly, cinema had never before seen a man more openly express grief than in this remarkable scene. Even Mary becomes just a shoulder to cry upon, no longer holding the power of her feminine mystique.

      The film’s ending wherein Tom is paraded on to the Dickey club seems like something tacked on to a picture which, in this case, is truly emotionally “moving” as opposed to consisting of a simple flickering series of images of the light.

       Five months later would see the release of Jack Pickford’s penultimate film, Exit Laughing, which I review elsewhere in this volume of My Queer Cinema.

*Pickford was known as a notorious “ladies’ man” who married three Ziegfield girls, the first of whom, Olive Thomas, died of unintentional poisoning after they both attended a wild party in Paris. But there also rumors, none of them confirmed, of Pickford, at least early in his Hollywood days, being involved in gay sexual liaisons. Darwin Porter’s grand, gossipy fiction, Hollywood’s Silent Closet portrays him as actively gay. D. W. Griffith’s wife, Linda Arvidson claimed in her memoir that silent film actor Dell Henderson often “would often cop little Jack Pickford as his bedfellow.” (see William J. Mann’s Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910-1969)

Los Angeles, June 8, 2022 

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).