Lewis Milestone | Two Arabian Knights / 1927

ritual baths

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wallace Smith and Cyril Gardner (screenplay, based on a story by Donald McGibney; George Marion, Jr., titles), Lewis Milestone (director) Two Arabian Knights / 1927

 

Lewis Milestone’s 1927 film, Two Arabian Knights was long thought to be lost, even though it had won the Academy Award for best Comedy Direction in 1929 (before that category was deleted). But upon Howard Hughes’ death in 1976 a copy was discovered in his collection, he having been one of its producers along with John W. Considine Jr.  The film was preserved by the Academy Film Archive working with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2016.

     Fortunately the film was saved, primarily because it is an excellent comic work with particularly good acting by his heroes, William Boyd*—best known for his late 1930s and 1940s role as Hopalong Cassidy—playing W. Dangerfield Phelps II and Louis Wolheim—who later performed in Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, but was perhaps best known for his earlier Broadway roles in The Hairy Ape and What Price Glory?—as Sergeant Peter O’Gaffney. Mary Astor plays the Saudi Arabian princess Mirza, but she serves only as a female interest for the two men, in part to establish their heterosexual credentials. Boris Karloff, in one of his first roles, plays the minor character of a ship’s purser, and you might miss him if you blink.

      Moreover, this work, like Raoul Walsh’s What Price Glory? of the year before, is a “buddy movie” par excellence, a genre that has remained extremely popular over the years, more recently growing into the bromance movies of the 1990s to the more recent bromances such as Phil Lord’s and Christopher Miller’s 22 Jump Street (2014), works centered upon the deep camaraderie and love between two heterosexual men.

      But it also an extremely important film for LGBTQ film history, since such relationships often actually revealed the stirrings of the queer heart.

       The genre perhaps goes back to the 17th century—Alexandre Dumas’ 19th-century fiction about the 17th-century The Three Musketeers immediately comes to mind—or even earlier since we might define Homer’s description of the warriors Achilles and Patroclus as representing such a genre in literature. Such relationships are generally described as developing from the close relationships established in male military confinement and later in the locker rooms of sports events. In the case of Homer, the two were merely “tender” friends, but in other literature and legends they were lovers, a situation paralleled in Hebrew literature in the story of David and Jonathan. In the film history leading up to Milestone’s movie, we have already witnessed such instances of male bonding that veers over into possible queer sexuality in John G. Blystone’s Dick Turpin (1925), Clarence Brown’s Flesh and the Devil (1926), and in that same year as Milestone’s film in William A. Wellman’s Wings. In the first instance, the two “friends” were both highway bandits, but in the latter pair it was the military that brought the men together. And the following year, in William Dieterle’s Sex in Chains the location would be extended the all-male institution of prison. Hitchcock, in the 1927 film Downhill hinted that it such friendships might also be established for adolescents in all-male schools. 

        But Milestone’s version does not suggest anything more than deep male bonding; the few sexual teases come only in the form of a prison de-lousing process which, as in Wellman’s film, openly features male dorsal nudity, and in a later scene where their stolen Arabian thobes, after being exposed to the cold snow and icy water, curl up as if they were wearing dresses or the kind of entari and tennure worn by Turkish Dervish dancers.

     At one point Phelps wears O’Gaffney’s military pants under his own, but before you imagine that this is similar to sheepherder’s Ennis Del Mar’s shirt worn under his fellow sheepherder Jack Twist’s own blouse in Brokeback Mountain, I need explain that in Phelps’ case it is only a ploy to keep his friend away from the Arabic girl, Mirza, whom they have just saved from drowning and both of whom on intent upon romancing.

       There is one final strange moment with possible sexual resonations, but I shall speak of that later.

    Throughout most of the film, Milestone goes out of his way to make it clear that Phelps and O’Gaffney become friends only in the heterosexual sense and even that mostly out of necessity. Indeed, they begin the movie by hating one another, both trapped in a World War I trench hole in German territory. Assured that there is no way that they can survive, Phelps throws over his rifle in order to beat up the Sergeant who has made his life hell until that moment. 

     Phelps, we soon discover is an intelligent fellow with apparently a quite proper upbringing—his father’s name, he later tells O’Gaffney will get them into the American Consul’s Office in the Saudi city in which they are trapped—while the Sergeant is a foul-mouthed ex-con arrested so his rap sheet suggests for molesting women. Moreover, Phelps is an attractive fellow, with a sly smile, while O’Gaffney is a heavy-set thuggish figure, even if from time to time his face breaks into puggish look of a teddy-bear.

        Before the two can settle their grudges, however, the Germans have surrounded them and marched them off to a northern German prison camp embedded in deep snow. Because of his service record, O’Gaffney is once more put in charge to Phelp’s despair. But when the Sergeant gets caught holding a caricature of one of the German soldiers sketched by Phelps, the always chivalrous Phelps admits that he was the artist, saving his enemy from punishment. And at that very moment the two lower their ruff, becoming such fast-friends that you can almost see, even in black and white, O’Gaffney blush, shyly admitting to a real liking for Phelps almost in the way a young girl might express her appreciation for the attention of an older boy—perhaps another of the film’s sexually teasing moments.

         But their friendship remains a competitive heterosexual romance, the kind we’ll see soon see in the films of Laurel and Hardy (who also often cross the sexual line), Abbott and Costello, and ultimately Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in their many On the Road movies from the 1940s and 50s. Indeed, Two Arabian Knights might be described a far more sophisticated model of the Hope-Crosby tours of exotic locations, since the boys in this case chose to escape their German camp in white thobes they steal off the bodies of two latrine-going Arabs in order to better blend in with the snow.

       From a cold pond where they hide from a German calvary troupe, they escape back into the hands of German soldiers leading a group of Arabs to a train whose destination is Constantinople, from where they jump near the Turkish capitol to hide in a haycart whose contents, in turn, are dumped into the hole of a ship sailing off to Arabia. 

       On deck they manage to escape the chains of the surly Skipper (Michael Visaroff), save an Arabian woman from a small, capsized boat headed to deliver her to the ship, and once their clothes have dried off, attempt to woo Mirza as she hides behind her requisite veil.

       Obviously, only Phelps is pretty enough to get her to momentary reveal her beautiful face and get himself and his friend in trouble when the Skipper and Mirza’s male companion observe that she has broken with all decorum.

        Having used the little money he’s hidden in his shoe to pay for their own voyage, Phelps and O’Gaffney have no money when the Skipper demands the same for Mirza. Beating up and robbing the ship’s Purser (Karloff) they manage to free the girl, but once again must dive into the ocean and swim off to save their own hides.

       When they finally attempt to visit Mirza and her father, the Emir’s (Michael Vavitch) palace, they are arrested and taken off the be killed for having dared to look into the face of beauty. Upon reading the note Mirza has tossed down to them as they entered, they suddenly realize they are facing a sentence of death. Once more they make a miraculous escape, with Phelps leading with his intelligence and O’Gaffney cleaning up with his brawn.

      Worn out and starved from their numerous exploits, the ex-Sergeant is ready to take a well-deserved rest, but Phelps calls upon his deep friendship yet one more time: they must go back to the palace, he insists, to help Mirza escape from her unwanted wedding. For the first time, O’Gaffney momentarily resists, but his sentimentality for his “deep friendship” finally wins him over, and he’s off for yet another adventure, even berating his pal for his “cracks about splitting up.”

         This one as well promises to be a disaster, as Phelps is caught in Mirza’s quarters by Ben Ali and challenged to a duel. He offers a choice to two pistols, one without bullets the other one filled with rounds. Phelps chooses and when Mirza strikes the gong three times shoots first. His gun was apparently the empty one, and Mirza, unable to bear the inevitable, leaves the room, with Ben Ali finally pulling his trigger.

         Phelps, however, still stands, Ben Ali admitting that he wouldn’t have chanced his own life with such a “dog,” but also knowing that Phelps and his friend will be taken care of by the palace guards and that Mirza, having heard the second shot, will suppose the American dead.

         So he’s off the claim his prize, having ordered up a coach to take her off to wedding somewhat like an Arabian Cinderella out of A Thousand and One Nights. True to form, O’Gaffney appears at the window with guns he’s stolen from the guards who tried to arrest him below at the very moment Phelps is about to be led away, accordingly allowing for their inevitable escape.

         In the penultimate scene Ben Ali and Mirza are about to enter the carriage only to discover a gun-toting Phelps already inside, Ben Ali commenting in his own chivalrous manner that he should at least be thanked for escorting the woman to the American.

         Mirza steps inside as O’Gaffney as the driver sets the horses off on a trot. Finally, we realize, his last actions on behalf of his love for Phelps result in the closure of their friendship. In a more conventional story, he might even get all teary-eyed. But here something strange happens as he spots and for a few second focuses on something just out of camera range, the camera finally following the line of his vision to reveal a man in an Arabian robe standing alone in a dark alleyway, papers in his hand, staring back at O’Gaffney’s gaze.

          Surely this is one of the strangest images with which a movie has ever closed: a question mark seemingly without a possible answer. Is O’Gaffney, now having lost his best friend and companion to another person’s love, seeking for a replacement? Does he find this stranger somehow attractive, having become so used to male companionship that he can no longer imagine having success with the female gender? Is the incident related to his suspicions at a man staring at him in the café—in reality Ben Ali playfully observing the two for whom he has just sent his soldiers? In that instant, when he asked Phelps why the man staring at him, his friend suggested, off handedly, that it was probably Mirza’s eunuch, a word which was definitely not in O’Gaffney’s vocabulary; when Phelps whispers the definition in his ear—clearly words that cannot be spoken aloud to the film’s audience—his friend’s mouth drops open with amazement. Has he suddenly found his own eunuch, someone with whom he might sexually engage without requiring reciprocation?

           Looking into that face, with its startled large-lips, a bulbous nose plastered into its center, I wondered, just in passing and with no surety of recognition, whether it might be Victor McLagen, who played the equivalent of Wolheim’s character in the hit film What Price Glory? the year before. Critics have long compared the two movies, Philip Kemp, for example writing about Milestone’s movie in the World Film Directors, Volume 1: “The film’s cheerfully coarse tone and bickering buddies were clearly inspired by What Price Glory?, Raoul Walsh’s recent smash hit.”

And Wolheim played the very same role on Broadway years earlier. Just perhaps the writers and director decided that having just lost his beloved buddy, they needed to offer O’Gaffney a new best friend. If McLagen performed this cameo I think it might have been one of those marvelously self-mocking, post-modern moments that happen with great regularity in the On the Road series. And it would be yet another example of how “buddy” films often take off in totally unexpected directions, the most notable example, perhaps, being Thelma and Louise’s automotive leap off the lip of the Grand Canyon in Ridley Scott’s 1991 film. 

Photo of Victor McLagen

        Amateur commentators and professional critics alike keep referring to pre-1934 movies as being “pre-code,” but I’d argue that is a serious misnomer. Hollywood films had always had unspoken codes, and open expression of homosexual behavior was just not possible in US films. By 1927 the studio heads had already issued a list of “Does” and “Don’t,” and although homosexuality was not specifically talked about, it was clearly presumed to be included under the provision on “sexual perversions.” In 1930, as I write elsewhere in these pages, Irving Thalberg met with Martin Quigley, editor of the film trade newspaper Motion Picture Herald, and Jesuit priest Father Daniel A. Lord, who together had already submitted a code of standards to the studios, to establish what was described as the Hays Code; and studios did, in fact, attempt to keep relatively close to those guidelines, which partially explains the sudden appearance beginning in the 1930s of “pansy” figures, featuring brief appearances of stereotypical gay types for the purposes of humor and to remind us, perhaps, that such poor fragile creatures did indeed exist outside of the confines of movieland reality.

       The shift that everyone describes as “The Code” took place only because the members of the Hays committee were relatively fair and open-minded until 1934 when the insatiable sex reformer Joseph Breen took over. In short, we can recognize that if there had been no code whatsoever and directors and writers had been open-minded about homosexual behavior, far more of the buddy movies might have gone over the cliff of sexual transgression. While a German director like Dieterle could tell his gay buddy story rather straight forwardly—although it still ended sadly—Blystone and Wellman coded their tales, filling it in with potential and actual heterosexual relationships for its central figures which deflected their audiences’ attention away from the gay relationships which were at the heart of their films. When Laurel and Hardy got so chummy with one another that their relationship became suspect, the directors could always point to the tradition of comic cross-dressing, which had never inevitably had anything to do with sex.

        Milestone clearly didn’t intend to even consider the idea of positing the notion that these deep friends were anything other than heterosexual guys who bonded because of their need to survive. Yet even his work moves naturally into some strange territories other than what I have described as the film’s “sexual teases.” The film’s major structural motif consists of a series of seeming ritual baths which begins with our friends being forced to shower before their prison camp delousing, which is followed by their jump into a freezing pond to hide from the German calvary, a dive into the ocean waters to save Mirza, and a final leap into the ocean waters to escape the confines of the ship on which they have been sailing to Arabia.

         These bathing ceremonies have absolutely no religious connotations, but do require, each time, their stripping off their clothes and standing around together almost naked as they wait for them to dry. At one point when O’Gaffney would like to scurry off to flirt without Mirza without the presence of his buddy, he pulls down Phelps’ drying clothes, runs a bathtub of water, and soaks his military duds in it before hanging them up again to dry, purposedly forcing his “friend” to remain in his long johns for a while longer, representing an earlier version of Phelps’ later robbery of O’Gaffney’s outer pants.

         A baptism, derived from Greek concept noun βάπτισμα ("washing, dipping"), also carries with it the connotations of complete immersion or “going under” which hints at what the two men have done in pledging their eternal friendship, a kind of private initiation or symbolic “marriage.” By reenacting this “pledge” time and again throughout the film’s narrative, they reestablish their commitment to one another, a tie which is broken only at film’s end when we recognize that Phelps will soon be making a new commitment to Mirza as his wife, hence leaving the film’s loveable dumbbell with the problem of having no friend with whom he “carry on” into the future the film has promised.

        The director, realizing his dilemma, chose to hint of at least one possibility with the film’s comical last scene, jumping off the cliff of cinematic logic to make, if my theory is correct, a pop-culture reference. The form simply demanded it.

        Milestone’s wonderful “dramedy,” accordingly, is the perfect example of why the “buddy genre” is so important for queer film lovers. It allows even straight men to enter the room of same sex relationships without necessarily having its characters pull off their clothes (although they certainly do that often in this film) and lie down in bed together.

 

*I should add that although Boyd married 5 times, he was also long rumored to have replaced Gary Cooper as Howard Hughes’ (the producer of Two Arabian Knights) male lover. The “Gay Influence” blogspot, for example, reports what was recounted in a couple of Hughes biographies: “Bisexual actor Richard Arlen was hosting an all male nude beach party at a secluded cove on Catalina Island, and Hughes asked William Boyd to tag along with him. Somehow a photographer got close enough to snap nude photos of Hughes and Boyd, which became the talk of Hollywood. RKO, Boyd’s studio, was having apoplexy (an interesting aside is that later, in 1948, Hughes took over the reins at RKO and ran it into the ground; they were out of business ten years later).”

 

Los Angeles, February 8-9, 2022

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (February 2022).