Bert Glennon | Syncopation / 1929

letting the genie out of the bottle 

by Douglas Messerli

Frances Agnew (screenplay, based on the novel Stepping High by Gene Markey), Bert Glennon (director), Syncopation / 1929

Little remembered today, Bert Glennon’s musical Syncopation was the talk of the town upon its March 24, 1929 release. Based on the novel Stepping High by Gene Markey, RKO’s first sound musical which they previously presented over the radio, was a grand success breaking all records of the New York Hippodrome in its two-week run. Print ads of the day proclaimed it as “A spectacle your eyes and ears will marvel at!” (Brooklyn Daily Eagle), “The sensational jazz jamboree of night club love brought to life by a marvelous cast of Broadway artists, including Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians play in their own inimitable way” (the Philadelphia Inquirer), and “A whole musical show in film form served up with the snap and sash of a Broadway night club” (Lubbock Morning Avalanche).

      Today the plot, after numerous such films beginning with the break-up of a successful dance or singing team—Holiday Inn (1942) and Easter Parade (1948) are just two examples—seems to have written itself, as the dancing team of Benny (Bobby Watson) and Flo (Barbara Bennett) after years of “on the road” productions, finally make it big when the show they’re in is taken to Broadway. The show flops, but the duo get an offer from a nightclub and become famous.

      Predictably, Flo gets swept up by a wealthy millionaire suitor who wants to take her act to Europe, and she divorces Benny. But when she realizes that her new playboy suitor Winston (Ian Hunter) wants all the privileges of playing and none of paying with a marriage proposal, she repents and returns to Benny who welcomes her back, the couple returning to their original road act.

     Most of the characters other than the central trio in this film are nearly forgettable—except the constant friend Sylvester Cunningham (Mackenzie Ward) of the female interior decorator Rita Elliot. Richard Barrios describes Sylvester “as thin and affected as the cigarette holder he grandly lofts, as unnecessary as the French phrases that glaze his conversation.” But he obviously intrigues Barrios who goes on to brilliantly summarize all that needs be said about this truly “pansy” figure:

 

“He serves one plot function only: to demonstrate what happens when Flo…loses touch with her roots and tries to go highbrow with her earthy husband Benny…. All it takes is a limp-wristed handshake and one utterance of ‘tout ensemble!’ for Benny to get Sylvester’s number: ‘Better not open the window,’ he cracks, ‘he’s liable to fly away!’ And later sends him off with the blessing: ‘Good luck with you next batch of fudge!’

    As Barrios points out, these are strange lines coming from Bobby Watson, the actor who played Benny, given that Watson would soon after playing the “manly” hoofer in this film spends most of the rest of his career as the premiere and most visible of gay sissy characters in pre-1934 films, the year Breen banned even “pansy” portrayals from US cinema. 

    Moreover, Watson's character of a truly loving heterosexual husband is so utterly boring in this film that you almost understand Flo wanting to lose him and his even less-talented friends such as the high tenor Lew (Morton Downey) and his girl Peggy, who has the unfortunate task of singing like Betty Boop and playing a mindless ditz in the manner of Gracie Allen—without her funny lines. 

    So amateurish are most of the musical's acts, including the dance numbers—particularly when Flo (now Florette) joins up with her partner Artino—that we can’t wait for another appearance of the outrageous pansy Sylvester. And oddly, as obvious as his stereotypical character is, Sylvester gets more time on screen in this 1929 film than almost any pansy in the next four to five years until they completely disappeared. You might even argue such an openly homosexual figure was not offered more screentime since Ralph Cedar's The Soilers (1923) and more lines than any gay character except Johnny Arthur in Desert Song (also in 1929) and Ray Hedge as Clarence in Myrt and Myrtle (1933). 

      In fact, he almost gets the film's last lines, or at least the last lines that really matter except for Flo and Benny's final reunion. After Flo realizes that Winston wants to take her to Europe without marrying her—and, in fact, never had any intention of marrying her—she makes a grand scene of their breakup in front of Rita and Sylvester. When Winston leaves the room the decorator and friend turn to one another in startlement, Sylvester almost unable to contain himself as he trills out: "Well, for goodness sake I’m all atwitter. I just can’t wait to tell everyone that Alex’s been given the air," and off he trots.

     By the time that Bobby Watson begin playing such roles the sissies had been cut down to brief spots allotted in the otherwise utterly heterosexual landscapes which they haunted.

    Barrios sees the coincidence of this figure and that of Drew Demarest’s Del Turpe character in The Broadway Melody of the same year, a film whose production schedule intertwined with Syncopation’s, as a harbinger for what was to come. Certainly it aroused enough attention that Variety praised Ward’s acting as “a nance interior decorator.”

 

Los Angeles, July 31, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).