sherlock as a vamp
by
Douglas Messerli
Tay
Garnett (screenplay), Joe Rock and Harry Sweet (directors) The Sleuth /
1925
It appears, at least superficially,
that Frederick Kovert’s role as a detective in drag in The Reel Virginian (October
1924) was of interest to Stan Laurel and others involved with his productions,
since in his June 1925 film The Sleuth Stan plays a detective who also
crossdresses, twice in the same movie, and in July of that year directed Kovert
in the same kind of role in Chasing the Chaser. Surely this wasn’t all
coincidental.
But on the other hand, The Sleuth has
little relationship to either of the other two films except for Laurel’s drag
appearances. Apparently this work has been perceived as one of Laurel’s weakest
films simply because of his outrageously absurd gags and the absolute
discontinuity of the movie’s narrative. But in fact, I would argue, this work
is one of the most remarkable of US films of the day in its forward-looking
leap into surrealist-like incidents and into an overall sense of absurdity that
truly places it in the context of the 1950s and 1960s Theater of the Absurd.
How could any film commentator working
within the context of most of the films from the beginning of cinema until the
end of the 1920s have expected a US short of 20 minutes to function more in the
manner of Luis Buñuel’s Un chien Andalou (1929) or the 1930s films of
the Marx Brothers. Certainly, we might look to the influences of Buster Keaton,
but even his absurdist attitude toward life remains within the bounds of
comedic possibility, larger-than-life events being created by hurricanes, war,
and general distress.
This little gem, directed by the team of
Joe Rock and Harry Sweet, however, makes utterly no attempt to attend to the
rational world. Given Joe Rock’s early teaming with comedian Earl Montgomery in
the series of alliteratively titled shorts the duo made in late teens and early
1920s—Hash and Havoc (1916), Stowaways and Strategy (1917), Farms
and Fumbles (1918), Harems and Hookum (1919), Zip and Zest
(1919), Vamps and Variety (1919), Rubes and Robbers (1919), Cave
and Coquettes (1919), Throbs and Thrills (1920), Loafers and
Lovers (1920), and Sauce and Senoritas (1920)—we certainly might
have expected the emphasis of his work with Laurel to be on the immediate comic
moment rather than any narrative continuity. And the 6 films he made with
Laurel before this one— Mandarin
Mix-Up (1924), Detained (1924), Monsieur
Don't Care (1924), West of Hot Dog (1924), Somewhere in Wrong
(1925), Twins (1925), Pie-Eyed (1925), The Snow Hawk
(1925), and Navy Blue Days (1925) could hardly be said to have focused
on coherent plot.
The Sleuth, however, is still
something quite different. It begins not unlike Laurel’s Chasing the Chaser,
with the detective, Walter Dingle (Laurel) sitting at his desk awaiting a
client. But even here, before any possible narrative even begins, Laurel
establishes his own incompetence for the job, with his sign reading, “solving
puzzles” as he struggles to separate the parts of an interlocking ring, a task
which his delivery boy easily solves. When someone enters the room he immediately
pretends be busy on the phone, which quickly realize has been disconnected,
probably for non-payment. Yet these scenes at least display some logic.
The rest of the film transfers us into a
maniacal land of meaningless actions, beginning with the visit of an actual
client, the Wife (Alberta Vaughn) explaining to him through a brief cinematic
scene why she is seeking out his services.
The wife reveals, through the film’s
cinematic representation, that just as they were about to sit down with guests
to the dinner table, her husband took out his watch and explained that he had a
meeting, immediately thereafter leaving the house. Meanwhile, her daughter entered,
insisting that she accompany her into the next room. When then entered that
room, the daughter gestured that she open yet another door. When the wife did
so—revealing a room that was still evidently in their home, but not somehow
directly connected with the other rooms—she discovered her husband standing
with three other men and a woman at the head of a line.
The wife appeared to have little
curiosity about the event, nor even demanded an explanation. We only know that
she has found it distressing because she has shown up in the detective’s
office.
The detective, meanwhile, seemingly dressed in casual wear, suddenly
begs her to excuse him and reenters the room—in what I shall call “cartoon
duration”—now dressed completely in his detective dugs while carrying an
enormously outsized pipe in the style and manner of Sherlock Holmes.
From there on the film gets even
stranger, as Dingle, evidently assuring her that he is the man for the
job—whatever that job may be—proves his worth by revealing, under his coat, a
small detective badge.
In the very next frame Dingle knocks on
the door of the couple’s mansion, irritating the husband who is forced to get
up and open it, but is delighted to see a new housekeeper, dressed a bit like
Mary Poppins, whom he profusely greets and with whom he immediately begins to
flirt.
If previously, the wife had seemed a bit
dowdy, she now sits in a pajama suit, smoking a cigarette from an enormously
long holder. Dingle, appearing as Laurel generally does in drag as a not truly
convincing female, feels it necessary several times to flash his badge to the wife
to make it clear he is in “costume.”
She, however, not only seems hardly to
care, but immediately leaves the room, allowing her husband, as Dingle, again
in cartoon duration, suddenly appears in a maid’s outfit, rolling out a cart of
tea and sandwiches. Almost immediately the husband begins to sexually paw her,
putting his arm around her shoulder, an act which she punishes by breaking a
dish across his crown and soon after, when he attempts it again, pouring tea on
his lap. But nothing stops him, as he invites her to sit next to him to share a
sandwich and tea, she encouraging his flirting, then punishing him, before
acting coy all over again.
Finally, he begins to chase her about
the room, the two running into another room as well, past the still seeming
disinterested wife.
.png)
Without any explanation, Dingle is now
dressed in his detective attire, with a Sherlock Holmes-like cap and a
magnifying glass, his feet planted in white power which he tracks across the
room implanting his prints on the carpet. He disappears for a second,
reentering from another door, and observing the prints follows them, making
even deeper imprints upon the carpet. He repeats this a number of times until
the wife enters to observe him, as he speeds up the process of exciting and
entering from another door, repeating the pattern again and again the way Harpo
and Chico Marx often repeat their actions until they become almost boringly
banal, but taking it even further until the action once again seems so absurd
that that forces us to laugh. By the time he finishes the trek between exiting
on the left and returning from the right, the frame has sped up almost to the animated
blur of Roadrunner in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons.
To attempt logical discussion beyond
this point is ridiculous. The movie has become an absurdist dream. All one can
explain is that at some point Dingle begins to wear various hats and beards, at
moments appearing as a Hassidic Rabbi, and at another a mustachioed villain,
and yet another instance seemingly costumed as a young Talmudic student.
At one point, the husband sits him
down, offering him a glass of brandy, which Dingle observes out of the corner
of his eye that the host has poisoned. When the husband isn’t looking, Dingle
exchanges the glasses; the husband, noticing the exchange pretends to change
them; and Dingle, observing the fact, changes them again. They seem to change
places yet another time, but finally the men are forced to toast, and Dingle
drinks his down, pretending to die. In self-congratulation, the husband drinks
his glass and falls to the floor. Dingle rises and escapes, but when the husband’s
gang enter, a little seltzer spritzed into the husband’s face immediately
revives him. In short, despite the poison in at least one of their glasses,
neither of them dies.
On another occasion Dingle also
encounters the “other woman” (Anita Garvin) and the three men, along with them
the client’s husband, evidently up to something since they are at one point
appear to write out a document and at another moment are rushing about house
with the message in hand. However, the door soon closes, with Dingle again
responding by appearing in various and hats and beards which are quickly
snatched from his head and face as a small panel in the door opens, something
inside evidently pulling them away as fast as he can replace them.
Many of these activities take place
with the couple’s bedroom with the Wife looking diffidently on, but at other
moments the action shifts to other rooms in a home that seems to have an
endless number of ornately decorated and paneled suites more like a hotel. Time
and place are constantly being disrupted just as identity is always in total
flux.
No sense in the film is to be made by the
characters’ motives or actions. At one point they simply start breaking vases
over each other’s heads. At some moments the three men and one woman gather in
a seemingly sinister manner, only to a few seconds later scatter.
Finally, the “other woman” seems to disappear while the three men and
the husband move menacingly into a room at the back of which is a collapsible
screen. When they pull it away Dingle sits on a rug now dressed as like a
modern vamp in a black gown with back cut- away to reveal the wearer’s flesh.
One by one the four men approach this beauty with lust in their eyes, the whole
bodies almost heaving with the intensity of their promised pleasure.
A rose in her mouth, she throws it at the
men who wrestle for it, diving in upon one another before her, she taking up a
vase and hitting over the head one by one, knocking them out.
The wife suddenly appears, perhaps
startled by seeing the woman crouched before the several male bodies. Dingle
stands, pulling off his wig, as if expecting applause. But the wife merely
takes up another vase and hits him over the head, he falling to the floor with
the others. The End.
The Sleuth is less a cinematic narrative about the activities of a detective
than it is a kind of satiric cinema tone-poem mocking all the works about
sleuthing previously filmed. Here there is no true villain, no real crime, nor
apparent victim; the clues are only what the detective introduces into the
case, and motives are simply the clumsy male attempts to touch and stroke
female flesh.
In hindsight, it now seems rather
remarkable that of all the early film comedians who explored crossdressing as a
way to get laughs, Roscoe Arbuckle, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold
Lloyd, Oliver Hardy, and so many others, Stan Laurel probably appeared in drag
more often, but without even shrugging over the necessary transformations
demanded of him for his character’s survival and simply as part of his various
modes of employment. If for the others it required female imitation, an
affectation of gender differences, or a contortion of the body away from their
male identities, for Laurel it seemed quite natural, something not even to get
excited about. Stan remained himself even as a vamp.
Los
Angeles, July 4, 2022 / Reprinted by World Cinema
Review (July 2022).
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
