river of poison
by
Douglas Messerli
Allan
Dwan (screenwriter and director), The Poisoned Flume / 1911 [Status
unknown]
This
early short of Allan Dwan’s is not at all a gay film with regards to its story,
which, since the film now seems to be unavailable, I will briefly describe,
based on the Moving Picture World synopsis.
A neighboring ranchman, John Morgan (Jack Richardson) who has long been desirous of gaining control over the Kendall cattle, offers to help manage her affairs, but the widow distrusts him and refuses his offer.
She finally finds the right man in Jim
Stevenson (J. Warren Kerrigan), described as “a manly young cowboy,” introducing
him to the other ranch hands, who agree to take him on the range so that he can
become acquainted with his new territory. On route they meet up with John
Morgan, who is ordered off the range by the new foreman.
Morgan, in retaliation decides to force
his attentions on Hazel and hurries off to the ranch house, where he finds the
young girl alone. He attempts to kiss her, but at that very moment Jim returns,
witnesses struggle and rescues her from the “distasteful caress.”
When Jim discovers some of the dead
cattle and fearful that an epidemic has broken out, calls for a veterinarian,
who finds the cattle to have been poisoned, suspecting the water in the flume
to be the problem spot. Testing the water, he finds his suspicions confirmed.
Jim is nonplused in imagining who might have
committed such a dastardly deed and hurries up the flume to seek out the
source. He finds a sack floating in the water and has just removed it when
Morgan rides up fires, wounding Jim in the shoulder, but sending him back into
the poisoned water. The sound of the shot startles the other ranch hands still
with the veterinarian and they hurry off to find their manager severely wounded
and a horseman just disappearing over the top of the hill. The veterinarian
picks up the sack of poison, showing it to the cowboys. They go in pursuit of
the fiend, leaving one of their younger hands to carry Jim back to the ranch
house.
They soon come within sight of Morgan,
and the race is on, as they close off all means of escape, forcing the
desperate man to return to the flume. Dismounting from his horse, he climbs to
the waterway in an attempt to escape along a high trestle, firing at the
cowboys below as he runs.
Finally struck by a bullet, he falls,
with a shriek of terror, falls into the poisoned water, the victim of his own
plot.
Meanwhile, through the careful nursing
of Hazel, Jim recovers, leaving the viewer to suspect that a romance is in the
offing.
As
I suggested, there doesn’t seem to be much of interest of the LGBTQ community
in this heteronormative film. But in this case the hero is played by J. Warren
Kerrigan, in a role among the dozens of Westerns and feature films he made,
soon after this film becoming one of the first true Hollywood stars, the
heartthrob of thousands of movie-going females and perhaps some homosexual
males as well; in fact, he was not only voted the most popular actor in the
1913 Photoplay magazine and 1914 Motion Picture pool but was
named the most popular the same year by what film critic William J. Mann
describes as the “curiously named” Pansy Motion Picture Correspondence Club of
Buffalo, New York.
This despite his rather stocky frame and
the fact that Kerrigan was a quite effeminate homosexual, living at home with
his mother and his lover, actor James Carroll Vincent. In his important study Behind
the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910-1969, Mann writes:
“What
made Kerrigan more appealing than other cowboys, allowing him to transcend the
genre, was an elusive appeal that some historians have called ‘boyish’ and
others ‘light and breezy.’ His cowboys were gentler than most, sensitive,
refined. Sure, he could still look pretty mean gazing down the barrel of a gun,
but he smiled more than William S. Hart, and Broncho Bill Anderson never had
that twinkle in his eyes.”
The Poisoned Flume is important, not
because of its gay content, but for the fact that it represents one of the
first examples on record of directors and crew bullying gay actors. The director
of the film, Allan Dwan would admit years later that he purposely prolonged the
scene where Kerrigan’s head was submerged under the poisoned water “for as long
as possible,” with the hope of giving the company and crew a good laugh at the effete
actor’s expense. As Mann summarizes: “It’s a tale as old as time and as
familiar as any childhood playground: the bullies taunting the queer.” In this
case, what we actually witness on screen is evidence, without our even knowing
it, of just such bullying.
Mann does report that by only a year
later, 1912, Kerrigan had gained enough notoriety to get his revenge,
suggesting to producers that if Dwan wasn’t replaced, he might leave the
company. Talking to Peter Bogdanovich seventy years later, Dwan was still stung
by the incident, reporting “Kerrigan put a knock into the company [Flying A] saying
I was getting out of hand. Unless I was replaced, he was going to leave the company.”
Moreover, since Jack was so popular he
had already been able to get his twin brother Wallace made the business manager
of the company, so his threat was serious, and Dwan was forced out. As Mann quips:
“Rack this [victory] up for the sissies.”
Dwan, of course, when on to a
distinguished direction career, while by World War I, for several reasons,
Kerrigan’s career had begun a nose-dive. One possible explanation is that after
the War there a change in the moral tone of Hollywood, which didn’t so easily reckon
with his being so obviously unmarried and living another male in his “Kumfy
Kerrigan Kottage,” with his dear mamma managing his career—although Kerrigan’s
own comments about his refusal to sign up as a soldier for the War certainly
didn’t help:
“I
am not going to war. I will go, of course, if my country needs me, but I think
that first they should take the great mass of men who aren't good for anything
else, or are only good for the lower grades of work. Actors, musicians, great
writers, artists of every kind—isn't it a pity when people are sacrificed who
are capable of such things—of adding to the beauty of the world.”
Even the most diehard of fans quickly
turned against him. He quickly after attempted to play it straighter, in
October 1919 adopting a six- or nine-year-old Polish war orphan who made the
trip alone under the guidance of the French Reconstruction Bureau, which the
press readily reported, but the child evidently never showed up in the Kerrigan
Kottage, and in the 1920 Census was not listed as living with Kerrigan and his
family.
Kerrigan did find favor again in playing
in The Covered Wagon (1923) and Captain Blood (1924), but soon
found himself offered smaller and smaller roles. In late 1924 he was in an
automobile accident in Illinois, which scarred his face so deeply that it was
clear he could no longer make movies.
Los
Angeles, March 12, 2024
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2024).
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