Anette Sidor and Jerry Carlsson | Längs vägen (Along the Road) / 2011

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R. E. Williamson and Joseph E. Zivelli | A Wanderer of the West / 1927 [Lost film]

out with the boys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Hoerl, W. Ray Johnston, and Victor Rosseau (screenplay), R. E. Williamson and Joseph E. Zivelli (directors) A Wanderer of the West / 1927 [Lost film]

 

After a couple of years of trying to track down this film, mentioned by Vito Russo in his The Celluloid Closet, I determined to treat it more like a lost film, writing about it from others’ commentary. Even as this book goes to press, I am still seeking a copy, although some now list it as “lost.”

     Nonetheless, one can get a good idea about this film, which is perhaps not so very interesting except for its one major “gay” scene.

     Overall, this movie apparently is not at all interested in LGBTQ themes. The central story involves the attempt of a local rancher to take control of the nearby Lazy Y Ranch, which, as in the Australian film Rangle River (1936), controls the water rights for the local area. In order to take over that ranch, that rancher kidnaps the daughter of the Lazy Y, but the ranch foreman (Kermit “Tex” Maynard) manages to foil the plot and win the girl.

     The reason this film is of interest to Russo and other LGBTQ commentators such as me is one scene in which he meets Clarence (Al Rogers) in a bar. Clarence—a name often assigned to gay figures*—is described in an intertitle card as “One of Nature’s mistakes in a country where Men were Men,” assuring that the audience will be quickly able to interpret his reactions to the lanky ranch foreman. Clarence amply ogles the cowboy, prissily brushes some lint from his shirt, and, leaning on the cowboy’s shoulder asks, according to the title card, “I wonder if you’re going out with the boys tonight?”

     The foreman, after a quick double-take, irritatedly pushes the annoying sissy away.

    Without seeing the entire film one, obviously, cannot know whether this is simply a normative put-down, or whether it represents a more exuberant acceptance of “nature’s mistakes.” But the very fact that the authors and directors chose to include such a figure, presenting him through a series of frames, demonstrates, if nothing else, their interest in the “other.”

     The available pictures say more than words can express.

 

*According to the blogger of the British website “Streetlaugher: A Gay Cavalcade Comic Stereotypes,” Clarence and Leonard were names that signified gay characters in early film history. You might recall that in North by Northwest the villain’s devoted male secretary in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest was named Leonard (the character played by Martin Landau, clearly in love with his employer Phillip Vandamm [James Mason]).

 

Los Angeles, July 24, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).

Alfred Schirokauer | Der Himmel auf Erden (Heaven on Earth) / 1927

in heaven

by Douglas Messerli

 

Reinhold Schünzel and Alfred Schirokauer (screenplay, based on the play Der Doppelmensch by Wilhelm Jacoby and Arthur Lippschitz), Alfred Schirokauer (director) Der Himmel auf Erden (Heaven on Earth) / 1927 [Difficult to obtain]

 

Although Alfred Schirokauer’s Heaven on Earth is apparently still available, and was recently restored and shown for competition in the Berlin Film Festival Teddy Awards, this 97-minute silent film has not quickly made its way to the US; at least I was unable to find a copy to view.

     The story however is fairly transparent. Petty politician Traugott Bellmann (played by the co-writer Schünzel) is a strong critic of the moral decline of society in general, and, in particular, the local notorious nightclub “Heaven on Earth.” On the day in which the film takes place, which happens also to be his wedding day, he is appointed the president of the Moral Decency League.

    The same day he receives an inheritance from his deceased stepbrother, along with the very nightclub which he has taken on as the representation of societal evil. Not only does he now own the club but is promised a sizeable sum of money if he spends every night from 10:00 to 3:00 a.m. in the morning in his newly acquired “den of iniquity.”

            Suddenly his is forced to escape his seemingly endless wedding reception, deposit his new bride in their bedroom without so much as a kiss, and rush off to “Heaven” to keep the required deadline. Over the next few days, he must sustain his new “shame” in secret, keeping any evidence of involvement from both his bride and his reformer friends who keep calling at his flat in between visits from the club’s hot Negro jazz band, a bevy of Ziegfeld-like showgirls, and a performing monkey.

       Despite the film’s representation of the art deco designed club filled with the kind of faces that populate the art of the Weimar painters such as George Groz and Max Beckmann, the members of the club are apparently mostly heterosexual and the club’s activities are relatively innocent compared with the legendary general Weimar Berlin goings-on. 

        The film’s LGBTQ credentials are centered primarily around Bellmann’s attempt to escape being seen in the club. To succeed he is forced—somewhat like the politician in Édouard Molinaro’s La Cage aux Folles (1978)—to dress in drag, during which he is continually propositioned by his lascivious father-in-law who is also the head of a major liquor distillery. One commentator describes Schünzel as “a chic female impersonator” in a film that functions as “a jazz age gender bend.”

        The film’s actors, other than Schünzel, include Charlotte Ander, Adele Sandrock, and Otto Wallburg.

 

Los Angeles, September 9, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).