Ernst Lubitsch | Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess) / 1919

the spoiled brat’s stomp

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hanns Kräly and Ernst Lubitsch (writers), Ernst Lubitsch (director) Die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess) / 1919

 

 Ernst Lubitsch’s wonderful 1919 silent film comedy, The Oyster Princess, begins with the image of the comically overweight “Oyster King” (Victor Janson) puffing on a gargantuan cigar, attended by numerous costumed patsies who blow his nose, wipe his mouth, and whisk away the ashes of his smoking consumption while the “King” dictates to another army of secretaries and typists. Everything about this wealthy American, his “palace” of a home, his appetites, and most notably, his disdain is preposterously enormous.

     We soon learn that perhaps the most outrageous outsized product of this man’s estate is his daughter, Ossi (the noted German movie star Ossi Oswalda), who, Mister Quaker is quietly told, is throwing a fit in her room, whereupon the camera shifts to a room littered with broken pottery, furniture and other objects she has apparently been tossing into the air in anger. Ossi, clearly a spoiled problem child, has just read of the marriage of the Shoe Polish King’s daughter to a count, and is furious that she has been outdone. Why hasn’t her father found her a husband of the same rank?

     Quaker, who obviously has never denied his daughter anything, calls upon the matchmaker, Seligson (Max Kronert) who, after failing to provide an appropriate companion for a tall and plain woman client, suggests a Prince, Nucki (Harry Liedtke), as Ossi’s husband. Off he goes to the Prince’s abode, where we quickly perceive that Nucki, despite his royal heritage, is suffering hard financial times, as he and his valet, who whom he seems to be living in a kind of roommate/sexual partner life, Josef (Julius Falkenstein) wash and hang up their meager clothing to dry. Seligson’s knock on the door results in a scramble to convert their rundown flat into a place appropriate for a prince. In high comic mockery, the two quickly hoist a chair atop a table to create a ridiculous throne into which Nucki climbs as Seligson enters (after much delay) to suggest the match.

    Nucki, it is quickly revealed—although faced with poverty—is nearly as spoiled as Ossi, and will not deign it worthy of his attention to check out the Oyster King’s proposition, but instead dresses up his valet in his own suit and sends him off to check the girl out in his stead.              

     At the Quaker mansion, Josef is also left waiting, the master having retired for his afternoon nap, and his daughter, attended by a legion of maids, determines to bathe and be given a massage before dressing and attending to the visitor. So begins what one might describe as the first major event of this terpsichorean-dominated picture, as the impatient replacement-suitor, quite insanely begins connecting up the vast mosaic patterns of the floor in a series of movements that can only be described as a kind of formal dance. In fact, one might describe his situation as being the central problem facing nearly all the figures in this satire: faced with such vast emptiness of thought and activity, they seek out ways to engage with one another less with an intent to communicate than with patterned movement.

     Indeed, even before Josef can explain who he is and why he has come, Ossi—although clearly disappointed with his appearance and inability to express himself—has swept him up into her own hurry to get hitched. While her father continues in his self-induced coma, Ossi has trundled the Prince’s representative off to a minister who marries them, much like a Las Vegas marriage drive-in, before he can blink out a response.

    Instantaneously, Quaker arranges for a massive wedding wherein armies of servants prepare a banquet that might have been the envy of Petronius’ Trimalchio. At the dinner, the delighted Josef eats and drinks himself, perhaps for the first time in his life, into a sated drunkenness, while everyone else suddenly is infected with, what the title boards describe as “a fox-trot epidemic.”

     In this beautifully conceived scene all guests, kitchen workers, servants, and even the orchestra conductor (Kurt Bois, who often played shady gay characters such as the pickpocket in Casablanca)—who busy with his hands with his directing baton, dances by jutting out his behind—are all suddenly caught up in a frenzy of the music. This obviously anal-focused scene alone is worth watching Lubitsch’s film, for it realizes yet another series of images that we encounter in the post-war German art of the Weimar period in the works of George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix—along with a dash of Josephine Baker! Nothing like it occurs in Hollywood movies.

     After the party, Ossi sends the drunken Josef to bed in room separate from her own.

     Meanwhile, friends of Prince Nucki’s have arrived at his flat, and insist he join them in a night a revelry. And while Ossi sleeps, Nucki celebrates, arriving in a park in the early morning where, in another dance-like cinematic structure, each of his friends fall, one by one, into exhausted friezes on empty park benches. Only Nucki moves on in a drunken shuffle, arriving, by accident, near the Quaker mansion at the very moment when Ossi is engaged with her friends in a meeting of the Multi-Millionaires’ Daughters Association Against Dipsomania. 

    At that very moment Nucki is picked up and thrown into their midst as a would-be candidate for their organization’s activities, which quickly appears to have little to do with curing the sufferers but involves the discovery of attractive young drunks.

     The charming Nucki immediately attracts all these desperate women, who rush forward to claim him. But Ossi will have none of that, insisting, despite the fact that she has another husband stored away in a nearby room to settle their differences in another kind of formal ritual, very close to dance, a boxing match, something that again challenges the standard notions of gender.

     One by one, Ossi knocks out her opponents and wins Nucki as her lover, at the very same moment when Josef has awakened and, peeking through her keyhole, discovers her in bed with another man. Rushing off to find his father-in-law, he soon returns and enters the room to confront the stranger; but when he discovers her would-be lover is Nucki, proclaims the two already married, since Josef has married Ossi in the Prince’s name! 

    The wedding party that follows is, for the first time in this film, a sensibly-sized affair, with only Ossi, Nucki, and Quaker pontificating at a small dinner table. In the middle of a conversation the lovers sneak off, and when Quaker discovers their disappearance, he follows, also peering into the keyhole while declaring, for the first time in this comic romp, that he is finally “impressed.”

     Love has found a way to bring an end, finally, to the infectiously queer romps of these clearly mad light-trippers.

     A satire about wealth and power mixed with a large dash of what would later be described as a screwball comedy, Lubitsch’s work very much looks forward to films such as It Happened One Night and My Man Godfrey, but at a much more openly multi-sexual level.

 

Los Angeles, May 3, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2105).

Spencer Williams | The Blood of Jesus / 1941

testing the waters

by Douglas Messerli

 

Spencer Williams (screenwriter and director) The Blood of Jesus / 1941

 

Although it is a nationally recognized treasure, and selected for inclusion in The National Film Registry, Spencer Williams’ 1941 religious pic, The Blood of Jesus remains a pretty amateur affair, with some cast members missing their lines, others being slow on the pick-up, and even the singers, both Reverend R. L. Robinson’s Heavenly Choir and the supposedly professional jazz singer hitting some definitely sour notes with, in some cases, faces to match. In fact, it’s not much fun at all in this small rural religious community in which the definite “saved” Sister Jenkins (Juanita Riley) and sister Ellerby (Reather Hardeman) gossip with greedy delight and most of the community is not very imaginatively prayed over. The church in which this film’s action begins is a far cry from the theatrically-inspired Alleluia choruses of Black Gospel singing or the rhythms of antiphonal declarations and responses as presented in Faulkner’s works or even in a more recent film of rural Southern church-going depicted in The Apostle.

      Made of a budget of just $5,000, its writer-director Spencer Williams—later known for playing Andrew Hogg Brown on the Amos‘n’Andy radio show—didn’t have enough even to shoot new scenes for his vision of the heavenly gates—borrowing instead from images of an Italian filming of L’Inferno—let alone the skill or possibility of properly setting and lighting his picture. In short, the film is often crude and rudimentary.

     Nonetheless, the simple tale about the damned and the saved, displays a simple charm that often appears in outsider art. Moreover, in its gentle mix of the deadly serious and the joyfully comic, it documents a way of life that was perhaps already over by the time the film was made. And particularly in its numerous renditions of standard religious songs such as “All God’s Children Got Shoes,” “Amazing Grace,” “Go Down, Moses,” “Good News!” “I’ve Heard of a City Called Heaven,” and “Run, Child, Run,” Williams’ work can almost be seen as testament to Southern black music and culture.

      Williams, playing Razz, the no-good, Sunday-poacher husband of the beautiful and spiritually blessed Martha (Cathryn Caviness) are convincing as a loving couple moving in opposite directions, she, quite obviously to heaven, and he…well we know his destination by his absence from the film’s church-going and baptising events. The good-natured Razz almost sends his wife to heaven when his gun accidentally goes off. And the rest of the film centers on Martha—or least her attractive spirit—as she his beckoned off by an angel (Rogenia Golthwaite) and targeted by Satan (James B. Jones) through the handsome, salesman-like tempter Judas Green (Frank H. McClennan).

     At the crossroads between Hell and Zion Martha fortunately strays from her destined path by visiting the nearby city, filled with nightclubs and bordellos, where we get to see, much to our delight, an acrobatic dancer, a jazz singer, along with the close-dancing couples of the bordello. Mostly the misled Martha simply sits back and smiles; the city is clearly more entertaining than the preachifying country life. But when she’s hired as a bordello dancer (whose jobs appear to be more in the line of robbing the customer’s wallets than in providing them with sex), she hangs back, inexplicably staring for a long while out of the upstairs window. Ordered to enter into action, she quickly dons a new dress and attempts to escape, followed by the road house denizens who believe her to be a fleeing robber.

       At the crossroads, Satan has set up a jazz band upon a pickup truck, but has no power over Martha since she has fallen along the wayside of the road to Zion. There the blood of Christ drips across her face and she is truly saved, brought back to life within her own bedroom where Razz, now completely regretful of his sinful ways, sits in despair. The angel returns to bless their new reunion and their clearly religiously committed future lives.

       The fact that this was one of the few all-Black films in a time Hollywood used Black actors primarily as maids, butlers, and drivers, of course, gives this work a great deal of significance, despite its often clumsy story-telling. But what is truly amazing is just how similar this straight-forward fable is to the far more sophisticated all-black film directed by a young Vincente Minnelli just three two years later, Cabin in the Sky. Indeed, one might almost suggest that Williams’ film tested the waters, so to speak, for the lure of black and white audiences to both the religious subject and the racial makeup of its actors, which ultimately broke down the color barriers for artists such as Lena Horne, Ethel Waters, Eddie Anderson, and soon after, Eartha Kit and Sidney Poitier.

 

Los Angeles, June 8, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2015).

 

 

Catherine Breillat | Barbe bleue (Bluebeard) / 2009

a lonely salome

by Douglas Messerli

 

Catherine Breillat (screenwriter and director) Barbe bleue (Bluebeard) / 2009

 

In the 1950s, two young sisters sneak into an abandoned attic to check out the space, play games, and read their favorite storytales, including the gruesome Charles Perreault fable, Bluebeard. Marie-Anne (Lola Giiovanetti), the eldest, is a highly sensitive and frightened child, who, although having been charged to care for her sister, Catherine (Marilou Lopes-Benite), is very much controlled by the precocious younger girl, who reads the tale to the elder.

    The girls’ storytelling alternates with the tale of two other sisters, Marie-Catherine (Lola Créton) and Anne (Daphné Baiwir), living in 1697. The fairy-tale sisters are attending a private school fun by nuns when they are called to the office of the Mother Superior, who tells them their father has just been killed and, since the family will no longer be able to pay for their educations, sends them immediately home. On the voyage home, we gradually discover that the younger of these two is, like the sister of the 1950s, is strongly independent of mind and acutely aware of the economic and social future with which the children will now be faced. It is an unjust world, where monsters like the infamous Bluebeard, rumored to have murdered his previous wives, live in enormous castles, while these poor girls, with dowries and now deeply in debt, must either submit to becoming nuns or join a court as ladies-in-waiting, neither of which perceive as viable futures. Here too, the elder is obedient and religious much like her mother, a pious girl, who, despite her great beauty, is conventional in her thoughts and emotions; the younger sister, Marie-Catherine, on the other hand, is determined to live in a castle just like Bluebeard’s, and chides her mother for forcing them into black clothing and penitent behavior—particularly as many of the family’s possessions are being taken away as payment.   

   It is only a matter of time before an emissary of Bluebeard shows up to the house to invite the financially strapped daughters to a party at the castle. From the invitees, the overweight and ugly Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas) will choose a new wife and give financial support to her family. With no dowries and a life of poverty ahead, the mother and her children have little choice but to attend the affair, while secretly hoping, perhaps, that they may be spared from being the subject of his attentions.

  The forceful outsider, Marie-Catherine, however sees it as an opportunity to obtain all the things she has missed in life. Moving away the other celebrants, she attracts Bluebeard’s attention, and in conversations with him, in which she expresses no abhorrence for the man who recognizes that almost everyone sees him as an ogre. He determines to marry her. The young girl is simply delighted to have a new dress—her first—made for her alone and, after a quick ceremony in the cathedral, she enters the castle of her dreams.

    Although willful, the girl seems, as Bluebeard himself describes her, as innocent as a dove, but with the self-assuredness of a hawk. Having agreed not to sleep with her until she becomes of age, Bluebeard has prepared a small bed for her in front of his own. But she refuses to serve as his connubial lap-dog, and demands her room—a very small one, however—again something she has never had before. She forces the monster to never enter her room without her permission (a condition, incidentally, made also by Claudette Colbert character in Bluebeards Eighth Wife, as described elsewhere in these essays); yet in the middle of the night she sneaks into his room to observe the rotund man in his sleep.

    It first appears that she has taken the upper hand in the relationship. And the girl actually appears to be happy in the company of this elderly and educated being, who shares some of his immense knowledge with her just as he appears ready to do with everything he owns. When he travels away on a long business voyage, he happily hands over the keys to every room in the house and encourages her to invite her family and friends to the castle in his absence. Marie-Catherine does so, but is seemingly caught in the arms of a young knight when Bluebeard unexpectedly returns. In fact, the girl has been telling the young man just how comfortable she is alone with Bluebeard in the castle; and soon after, she convinces the ogre that she is overjoyed at his return and pleased that they can retire once more into their own private world.

   Bluebeard, however, soon after again sets out for another business trip, once more handing over all the keys, yet this time adding another golden key to an attic room that he forbids her to enter. She promises to obey his orders, but obviously cannot resist attempting to discover what lies behind that one door. No sooner has he left, than she enters the room to discover the bodies of Bluebeard’s ex-wives hung, like carcasses of meat, upon the wall, with pools of their blood welling upon the room’s floors. Shocked and terrified by what she has discovered, she drops the key into the blood; upon leaving the room she attempts to wash the blood away, but cannot rub out its stain. While she is still attempting the clean the key, Bluebeard unexpectedly returns to find her face in pallor. As they sit down for dinner, he demands back the keys. She quickly gives up the large keys, but claims to have lost the small golden one. Forcing her to produce it, Bluebeard discovers blood upon it and condemns her to immediate death.

     Marie-Catherine pleads, unsuccessfully, for mercy, but gets only permission to spend a short time in the highest tower in order to pray. There she attempts to call up troops and family members to come to her side; but Bluebeard soon appears, ready to cut off her head with a large saber. Once again, the girl coaxes from him one more concession, that he kill her instead by stabbing her with a jeweled dagger through the heart. As Bluebeard returns to the able to retrieve the knife, arriving musketeers take over the castle, evidently killing the monster before he can kill his latest wife.

   This beautifully filmed tale alternates with the storytelling by the two young 1950s siblings. Increasingly, as the younger girl tells the story—seeming to modulate it with her own embellishments—the elder grows more and more terrified, ultimately attempting to escape from hearing Catherine’s words, and, in so doing, falls through the attic trap-door to her death. At the same moment that Marie-Anne rises to see her sister lying below, their mother comes to call them home, apparently unable to see the cause of her daughter’s tears: the other dead daughter, dressed in blue-gingham, lays below on the concrete floor.

     The film ends with Bluebeard’s wife, Marie-Catherine, stroking the head of her former husband, laid out on a platter like the pate of John the Baptist over which Salome rejoices. Suddenly these two stories seem to shift, almost as if we have discovered a new pattern in a kaleidoscope: Bluebeard’s death, which will now allow his wife to live out her life in the manner of which she has dreamed, has required the death of her timider and more pious other, the sister who has admittedly used her time and again as a scapegoat. The stronger, feminist woman of the future has won out over the meek and mild maiden of domesticity and despair. But at what cost, director Breillat seems to asks, has she achieved her victory? Might it even lead to the madness of Salome? The viewer alone must determine whether to celebrate or despair over the young girl’s lack of moral vision—or wonder whether she ever had a choice.

      If nothing else, we realize that this film is not really about the Bluebeard myth as it is about how women themselves push other women, including sisters and close friends, out of the way to get their feminist rewards. The monster, in this case, is not simply Bluebeard, but the forcible younger sister the patriarchal system has demanded she become, killing off the timid and fearful of her own gender. The focus here, accordingly, is on the women rather than the already heteronormative male-assumed world in which they are forced to live. And the monsters of this film are of their own kind, women of power but outsiders of the formerly loving society in which they were raised. Despite their power, one senses the total loneliness of both Marie-Catherine and the young Catherine of the 1950s and their angst for having had to abandon the sheltered and closed off worlds in which they were formerly entombed.

 

Los Angeles, December 22, 2009

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2009).

 

Wilfrid North | Hearts and the Highway / 1915 [Lost film]

the son who saved her father

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jasper Ewing Brady (screenplay, based on his novel), Wilfrid North (director) Hearts and the Highway / 1915 | lost film

 

Wilfrid North’s lost film of 1915, Hearts and the Highway was an historical drama produced by the Vitagraph Company in 5 reels.

      Against his will, the Earl of Clanranald (Charles Kent) has been called to a meeting of conspirators against King James II of England (Donald Hall), and is arrested as being a traitor and is condemned to death by James. The warrant, being dispatched to Edinburgh, is carried by Sir Harry Richmond (Darwin Karr), one of the King’s most trusted bodyguards.

        Distressed by her father’s mistaken arrest and condemnation, his daughter Lady Katherine (Lillian Walker) feels that she has no choice but to dress up the male attire of a highwayman in order to hold up the King’s messenger, relieving him of his message to execute her father.

       In the process, she is wounded in her shoulder by a sword, but nonetheless succeeds in securing the warrant and burning it.

       Upon hearing her story, Sir Harry promises he will do everything in his power to gain the release of Lady Katherine’s father.

        This is one of the many historical tales filmed by Vitagraph along with works in several other genres as they paved the way and defined the film industry for rest of the century.

         The noted actor/director Ned Finley, who later committed suicide when his career began to fail, played a character in this film named General Feversham.

          Clearly, the major interest in this film for LGBTQ individuals exists in the fact that it represents yet another of the several cross-dressing tales for both males and females of the early silent movies. And the film obviously bears some relationship with John G. Blystone’s 1925 work, Dick Turpin, also about highwaymen and their adventures which also contains incidents of female cross-dressing.

 

Los Angeles, January 25, 2022

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (January 2022).

Larry Semon | The Wizard of Oz / 1925

the princess vamp from kansas usa

by Douglas Messerli

 

Larry Semon and L. Frank Baum, Jr. (screenplay, based on Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), Larry Semon (director) The Wizard of Oz / 1925

 

At least by this 1925 film, Baum and Semon has restored Dorothy (Dorothy Dwan) to her original Kansas location, living with Aunt Em (Mary Carr), Uncle Henry (Frank Alexander), and the farmhands we all know from the 1939 version. However, her Aunt and Uncle do not quite have the same open family relationship with her as they do in Fleming’s film, and the farmhands, particularly the two played by Oliver N. Hardy and Larry Semon are not simply friends—as are Hunk, Zeke, and Hickory—of a prepubescent girl, but are actually competitively engaged in trying to woo the young woman just about to turn 18 as the story opens. The third farmhand, Snowball, played by black actor Spencer Bell (who, to give Semon some credit, worked with him on several movies), obviously does not attempt to court Dorothy given US racist attitudes of the day, and his very existence alas occasions several other racist jokes and tropes. Instead of riding with the whites in the hunt in which they are caught up in the funnel of the cyclone, Snowball is jolted by electric lightning bolts directed to his rectum up to Oz.

      Moreover, Uncle Henry is not at all the dear ineffective farmer that Charley Grapewin portrayed, but an overweight surly hard-working hog-slopping bull of a man who actively shows his dislike of his “niece,” whom we soon discover is not truly family but a foundling left on their doorstep eighteen years earlier. Along with the baby, a letter was placed inside the basket to be opened up only on the girl’s 18th birthday, eventually revealing that she is actually Princess Dorothea, heir to the throne of Emerald City in Oz.  This was the same vampish version of Dorothy with whom director Richard Thorpe began his short tenure as a director for the 1939 version.

       Here too we witness the tornado which, in this case not only transports Dorothy to Oz, but her uncle, and three farmhands, one of whom (the Oliver Hardy character) has already betrayed her by the time they arrive, and for the rest film is represented as a villain. Instead of new characters discovered in a world that clearly is no longer Kansas, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion are simply costumed personas the three farmhands adopt in order to evade the evil dictator of Oz, Prime Minister Kruel (Josef Swickard) and his associates, Lady Vishuss (Virginia Pearson) and Ambassador Wikked (Otto Lederer). Caught by the soldiers devoted to this evil trio, the Scarecrow (Semon) and Snowball (dressed occasionally as the Lion) are sent to the dungeon, while Hardy’s character is made “The Knight of the Garter” and the Uncle is awarded the title of “the Prince of Whales.”

 

       However, even before the tornado brings Dorothy and her troupe to them, the citizens of Oz are “aroused,” as the intertitles describe them, by the fact that the Princess is missing, and Prince Kynd (Bryant Washburn) and the crowd demand that she take the throne. Interestingly, and completely unpredictably, the Wizard is called upon to distract the citizens, and does so by presenting what might almost be described as a vaudeville act. Placing an empty basket in front of

them, he waves a wand and out comes a marvelous female impersonator (played by the noted male impersonator of the day, almost as well known as Julian Etheridge, Frederick Kovert (credited here as Frederic Ko Vert) who, dressed in feathers and whose head is topped with a gigantic display of open peacock tails performs his famous Peacock Dance (which apparently was last seen in the now lost film directed by J. Gordon Edwards, The Queen of Sheba in 1921). So we now know at least that the Emerald City, in nothing else, can be said to attract some of the very best of gay performers. Ko Vert evidently also designed the movie’s costumes.

 

       With the sudden visitation of their Princess, Prince Kynd insists that she take on her formal role; but without removing Kruel, Vishuss, and Wikked the naive Kansas girl has difficulties ruling the kingdom, Kruel attempting to a find a way to marry her so that he might remain in power.

        This time ‘round there is no road trip for the central characters, and indeed little action as Semon turns almost all of the rest of the film to a series of vaudeville comic sketches, mostly involving the farmhands engaged in a long comic scene of hiding under wooden boxes in a kind

of exaggerated and jumboized shell game, and an equally long sequence that might have come right out of the later Abbott and Costello films where Semon and Snowball are locked up in a cage with real lions. Some of these skits involve what today we might describe as scenes out of reality TV show, particularly as Semon climbs a pair of towering parapets, swinging via rope to the other just as a cannon ball hits and destroys the one upon which he has just stood. He escapes the second parapet via a small rope ladder attached to a passing airplane piloted evidently by Snowball. The rope snaps at the very moment the Scarecrow is about to step into the plane, the film quickly slipping back into the frame of the story tale told by an old dollmaker to his granddaughter. We never actually need witness the sad ending, or even the happier one when Kruel is arrested and Prince Kynd and Princess Dorothea are about to be married.

 

       Obviously there will be no visits back to Kansas for this Dorothy, who has found the end of her utterly heterosexual rainbow. Maybe the Wizard, from time to time, can book some interesting LGBTQ entertainers like Ko Vert, but otherwise life ever after in this Oz looks to be utterly boring.

 

Los Angeles, June 18, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).