slinging forbidden
love along with the pies
by Douglas Messerli
Charles Chaplin, Vincent Bryan, and Maverick
Terrell (screenplay), Charles Chaplin (director, with Edward Brewer as
technical director) Behind the Screen / 1916
To describe Charles Chaplin’s 1916 film Behind
the Screen of being a “gay film” would be to highly misrepresent it.
Rather, it is another of his on-screen love trysts with Edna Purviance—who
appeared in 33 Chaplin films and with whom Chaplin was long romantically
involved.
I
included it in my volumes of Queer Cinema simply because it reveals some
of the attitudes toward gays that existed even in pre-code Hollywood, at a time
when some sophisticated directors created far more complex subtexts around
LGBTQ behavior without having to apologize for it or risk having their films
censored.
This Chaplin film, distributed by the Mutual Film Corporation, foretells
much of what later would become the heart of the pre-talkie satire in the Gene
Kelly and Stanley Donen film of 1952, Singing in the Rain. As in that
later film, the studio Chaplin works for as a stagehand named David, shoots
various kinds of movies simultaneously, allowing Chaplin to mix a biblical
drama, with a western, and a pie-throwing comedy in the manner of Mack Sennett.
This
assistant stage-hand David works for Goliath (Eric Campell) who might easily
carry about the Byzantine-like columns, couches, chairs, and other props that,
while he dozes off, David must struggle with. (It’s fascinating to note is how
much the numerous chairs that David gathers up, all with their legs pointing
out, reminds one today of the coronavirus, attacking all it comes into contact
with including the tripod camera—whose cinematographer suffers his device’s
regular collapse from Chaplin’s back and forth shuffles from room to room.)
David is put to work so busily that when we discover that there is an
entire crew of stagehands, we are a more than a little surprised. They appear,
evidently, only at lunchtime, when the morbidly overweight Goliath pulls out 12
pies, consuming every last one, while the others chaw on chicken breasts so
large that one might imagine they were actually a portion of some dinosaur
relative, and such a quantity of onions that David, attempting to bite into his
three small slices of white bread, is forced to don a medieval headpiece in
order to escape the smell.
Immediately after the large quantities upon which the other stagehands
dine, they, like Goliath, fall asleep, and when awakened by the studio
director, go on strike for his intrusion upon their “sacred” time. Later, in
revenge, they succeed in dynamiting the place into ruins.
Their temporary departure leaves the door open, obviously, for the
appearance of Purviance, who previously attempted to get a job as an actress,
but now perceives that at least she might join those “behind the screen” by
donning one of the missing stagehand’s pants, shirt and hat.
Previously, we might have wondered a bit about David’s rather natty
attire—particularly since Goliath and the other workers are dressed like
Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—but then we
have gotten so used to the “tramp” that even before that character’s existence
we are not surprised to see his David in a tie, vest, coat, etc. as if, like
all Chaplin figures, he were aspiring for the role of a legitimate gentleman.
Yet Chaplin takes this a bit further when, as the intertitle tells us,
he applies “the finishing touches” in dressing a scene, in this case acting as
a kind of hairdresser as he meticulously massages and grooms the hair of a bear
rug.
Later, after Goliath has hired the new “stagehand,” David comes upon the
young boy playing a guitar somewhat flirtatiously before standing up to apply,
in a moment of forgetfulness, a powder puff to his cheeks. For a second the
assistant stagehand seems almost delighted by the new boy’s attentions, but
soon after mocks the character with a playing out of effeminate behavior,
fanning his face, winking he eyes, and flinging out loose wrists as he dances
by while raising his pant-legs, as if to suggest what Texans describe as
Purviance’s character being “loose in the loafers.”
When soon after, however, he accidently knocks off the boy’s hat,
allowing Purviance’s long blonde hair to spill out, he suddenly realizing that
he is really a she, he immediately attends to her more carefully,
assuring her he will keep her secret while allowing her to plant a couple of
appreciative kisses on his nose and lips.
Goliath, appearing at the very moment when David fully kisses her back
in response for her feminine attentions, simply presumes that his protégé
has—as Cary Grant would later proclaim in Bringing Up Baby, “just gone
gay”—preening and dancing off in his own hefty mockery of homosexual love.
Chaplin’s film takes these misunderstandings no further. The rest of the
work is filled with trapdoors being open and closed by David as he drops and
locks out actors, director, and Goliath alike.
The
film ends with the comedy director’s attempt to try out what he describes as an
“experimental” scene, “something never done before,” which consists of a long
pie-throwing contest between David and Goliath that ends with the pies flying
into the faces of the nearby biblical cast members. As expected, working behind
the scenes, David has finally slain his Goliath and probably gotten fired along
with his new-found lover, whether she be a man or a woman in drag no longer of
any matter.
Los Angeles, August 10, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August
2020).
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