Sam Taylor | Exit Smiling / 1926

without a clue

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam Taylor (screenplay and with Tim Whelan scenario, based on a story by Marc Connelly), Sam Taylor (director) Exit Smiling / 1926

 

Sam Taylor’s 1926 comedy Exit Smiling (not be confused with Carl Reiner’s autobiographical work Exit Laughing) is basically a vehicle for the wonderful Beatrice Lillie, who as Violet plays a  theater company gofer who serves as cook, shoe shiner, dresser, ironing lady, and occasional bit player for the ham-acting theater troupe named the Orlando Wainwright Repertory Company whose members travel by railroad car through small towns throughout the US performing forgotten melodramatic classics such as Flaming Women (which might have been the inspiration for Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures).

      More than anything else, Violet would love to get the opportunity to perform the leading lady Olga (Doris Lloyd) who, as a flapper “vampire,” woos the villain acted by Jimmy Marsh (Jack Pickford) with words of love and a tango in order to save the play’s hero Cecil Lovelace (Franklin Pangborn), whom she truly loves. Alas, poor Violet only gets the chance to play that role offstage, saving the real small-town Jimmy’s reputation by solving a crime attributed to him; but still she does have the misfortune to fall in love with Jimmy, to comically perform his role in drag on stage, and to have her heart broken when, having been saved from criminal charges by Violet’s action, Jimmy rejoins his small town girlfriend at movie’s end. As film commentator J. B. Kaufman summarizes Lillie’s performance:

 

“...The story is constructed along lines of Chaplinesque pathos. It also allows for a series of comic set-pieces, designed to show off Lillie’s comic talents: absent-mindedly ironing (and destroying) laundry while pouring out her heart in a love song; rehearsing the new juvenile in his audition scene in a rural yard, surrounded by pigs and goats; romping through the company’s current stage melodrama in male attire when she is allowed to substitute for the missing villain; and—in the film’s climactic comedy highlight—waylaying the small-town crook by hilariously attempting to replay a seduction scene from the same play. Lillie’s comic skills run the gamut from subtle pantomime to vigorous slapstick: if she can’t detain the small-town miscreant with her seductive wiles, she can always resort to a flying tackle instead.”

 

      The entire cast, moreover, particularly Pickford as the naive East Farnham boy (the town name being an in-joke reference to Joe Farnham, who wrote the titles for this and many other silents) and DeWitt Jennings as the cigar chomping curmudgeon of a boss, Orlando Wainwright are excellent.

      Playing the role of the bland hero, Pangborn got his first major film role, in which he already displays his longstanding cinematic effeminate annoyances and nervousness. In the very first scene, in fact, when he discovers that the Olga is a no-show moments before the curtain is about to rise, he gets to express his theatrical representation of the title card: “The nervous tension will positively slay me!” And later, when Violet accidently falls into his train berth, he gesturally and facially responds to the words: “How dare you! I’ve never given you any encouragement!”

      Today, knowing the pansy character and slightly exasperated sissy voice of Pangborn we can justifiably laugh at his stereotypical character and even enjoy his repeating hissy-fits. But seeing him in a silent film, for the first time, we might well understand why the audiences of the day saw him instead of a kind of mean figure as opposed to someone who now appears to us as being closer to Jim Parsons of the TV series The Bang Theory, a bit odd for his hysterical overstatements of reality just as Parsons (also a gay man) is odd, and truly funny, for his expressions of nerdy insensitivity.

      Yet many audience members of the day perhaps had not yet encountered someone quite like Pangborn, whose oral delivery was essential in order to comprehend that his statement of possibly dying from the nervousness for having to wait for his co-player to show up was not to be taken literally but as part of a worldview in which even the smallest of difficulties were perceived as being of earth-shattering significance. That a woman might even momentarily take an interest in him becomes a shocking event in his totally gay consciousness. Clearly, the work’s 1926 US viewers hadn’t yet encountered anything so close to what we now describe as “camp” humor. And the movie was a failure despite the pleasures most critics, including me, take in it today.

      One wonders what audiences made of another possibly gay reference in the film when Violet, dressed as the 20s vamp, begins to lose the beads of her broken necklace, as they pass from her neck down the recline of her breasts through the rest of her body to drop upon the floor, quite literally expressing the idea of “dropping beads,” which in gay parlance means to either intentionally or unintentionally give aways one’s sexuality through the use of highly charged or coded words (see my essay “Dropping Beads” in relation to the films of Cary Grant below). In this case it would simply refer to Violet accidentally revealing her true identity, a concept almost underlined by the sudden vision of a cat playing beneath her feet with the dropping beads, as if to suggest another such metaphorical expression “Cat got your tongue?” If these visual clues were intended to mean what I have suggested, it is another early example of film coding, a revelation of meaning not available to the majority of the audience, but only to the informed and sympathetic few.

      And indeed, Violet’s secrets are now out in the open, as she is forced, as J. B. Kaufman mentioned above, to resort to a flying tackle to keep her man from leaving the room. I don’t know the history of the first gay term, but the second phrase was in use already in the middle of the 19th century and has become archaic since the 1960s.

     With such a large number of LGBTQ references, however, it is still the heterosexual pathos of the last scenes, where having saved her Jimmy’s life, Violet returns to their railroad car home to find him packing to return to his job at the East Farnham bank and his hometown girlfriend without a clue of the grand theatrical scene she has just performed in order to return him to the normalcy of his everyday life. In this tender scene the cat truly “does have her tongue,” with only our eyes tearing up over the event in sympathy for her estate.

 

Los Angeles, April 3, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).