Charles Reisner | The Hollywood Revue of 1929 / 1929

after the flood: airing dirty laundry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Al Boasberg, Robert E. Hopkins, and Joseph W. Farnham (screenplay), Charles Reisner (director) The Hollywood Revue of 1929 / 1929

 

At some point I had purchased a copy of Charles Reisner’s film The Hollywood Revue of 1929, obviously reading from some source that it may have contained gay or lesbian references. But as I began to watch this “revue” similar to what most pre-1940s musicals were on Broadway, I immediately wondered whether or not I had somehow made a mistake. The film was not mentioned in the bible of celluloid queer cinema, Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet nor in Richard Barrios indispensable study of gay Hollywood, Screened Out. Surely it had never shown up on the several Mubi related queer film lists. It was not even on the extensive Wikipedia list of LGBTQ+ movies or, as far as I could determine, on one of the several on-line Letterboxd list of films of LGBTQ interest. How had it ever reached my personal list of films to be viewed?

      This was a rather painful-to-watch nearly 2-hour affair with an intermission that except for a few full chorus numbers slipped in-between the tired and dated comedic acts, mostly mediocre musical numbers and poorly choreographed balletic scenes and dance numbers—Joan Crawford and Marion Davies trying to sing and dance might almost bring tears to your eyes in empathy for their obvious pain in having to prove themselves able of something at which neither was truly capable—might remind you of the worst of the 1950s The Ed Sullivan Show, with Jack Benny hosting along with Conrad Nagel (apart from his dozens of films from 1918 to 1959 who remembers Nagel today?) who present themselves as interlocuters to a supposed Minstrel Show— which thank heaven never materializes with the exception of a few strains of “Sewanee” and “Old Black Joe.”

       The movie—which supposedly featured the best of MGM actors, but actually trotted out some of the untried and ready to be retired figures from the studio—made millions from audiences who in 1929 were encountering some of the first of musical talkies. I doubt, however, if today’s film-going audiences would even recognize names such as Charles King, Bessie Love, Cliff Edwards, Polly Moran, William Haines, The Brox Sisters, George K. Arthur, Karl Dane, and Anita Page, primarily actors who to most viewers of our time are utterly forgotten, some with good reason.

       Even those names which might still conjure up cinematic memories, like Crawford and Davies, Buster Keaton, Marie Dressler, Stan Laurel, Olivier Hardy, John Gilbert, and Norma Shearer performed in skits so unsuited to their talents that one might wonder whether MGM were purposely putting them to a secret test to see if they might survive this god-awful venture into the new medium.

      Many of them didn’t, which is where this otherwise tedious exercise in popular entertainment truly becomes interesting. One might actually see this film as the template for the great 1952 Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly extravaganza Singing in the Rain—produced by Arthur Freed at the same MGM Studio. Here MGM gathered several of their actors who couldn’t quite make the transition into talkies.

      Karl Dane—once a rising actor who played in The Big Parade with John Gilbert, The Son of the Sheik with Rudolph Valentino, The Scarlet Letter with Lillian Gish and Alias Jimmy Valentine with William Haines—had such an impossible Danish accent that he was paired up as a comedy duo with George K. Arthur, performing in several successful silent comedies, but when the talkies came around both were given few and fewer roles; the year after this film MGM basically cut their ties with Dane, Paramount offering the duo a vaudeville tour after which they broke up as well. By 1933 Dane was working as a waiter at a small café near the MGM studios, eventually buying a stake in the place but unable to make it successful. In 1934, after being pickpocketed of his last $18 on his way to see a movie with a friend, Dane returned home, put a shotgun to his head and killed himself.

      Polly Moran, also a vaudeville and stage performer, made films mostly with Marie Dressler, a Broadway star. She and Dressler worked in eight films together, including a year after this movie acting in Chasing Rainbows also directed by Reisner, in which they played a lesbian couple; they made another couple of other movies after, but Moran could not find roles after Dressler’s death in 1934. Her athletic and boisterous mannerisms rendered her unfit for even the most comic roles of the talkies. She appeared much later in George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib (1949) as Mrs. McGrath, a female foreman whose husband worked under her, one of Katherine Hepburn’s examples of strong and forceful females who had found success in a patriarchal world.

       John Gilbert, known as “The Great Lover,” was one of the most popular male leads of the silent movies, rivaling even the stature of Rudolph Valentino. Starring in films such as The Merry Widow, The Big Parade, La Bohème, and Flesh and the Devil (1926), the latter in which he and Greta Garbo were not only in love on screen but off screen as well, an affair that almost ended in their being married. The Hollywood Revue of 1929, however, was the beginning of his quick decline. Playing Romeo opposite Norma Shearer in one scene (in technicolor), the slightly less than baritone tenor of his voice and his British accent turned the role of the young adolescent lover into a kind of mincing, slightly affected version of the famous love scene. Rumor had it that the tacked on “updated version” of the play—which amazingly foretells later cinematic adaptations including West Side Story—was an attempt to make light of his performance, but neither Shearer nor Gilbert comes off well in that rendition either. And soon after Louis B. Mayer would begin to claim that Gilbert possessed a “squeaky voice” and argued against his continued, well-paid employment. The 1933 film Queen Christina, again with Garbo, was his penultimate movie. In truth, Gilbert’s voice was no higher pitched than many another leading man of the talkies, but perhaps the fact that Flesh and the Devil and Queen Christina signified slightly coded gay and lesbian themes to those in the know, along with Gilbert’s “refined” British accent, brought him a little too close in range to someone like Dane’s on-screen partner, another British-born actor, George K. Arthur, who I shall talk about in a moment. In any event, Gilbert’s career symbolically ended with this film.

      Charles King had just come off of MGM’s even greater successful film of the year, The Broadway Melody, which was the first all-talkie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and he would appear again the next year in Reisner’s Chasing Rainbows along with Bessie Love. In all three of those films, The Broadway Melody, The Hollywood Revue and Chasing Rainbows King sang his most popular songs, “You Were Meant for Me,” “Orange Blossom Time,” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.” But his pleasingly bland Irish tenor-like voice would soon be rejected for the more sophisticated and knowing tenor intonations of singers such as Fred Astaire, crooners such as Russ Columbo and Rudy Vallee, and soon after the more jazz-influenced coolness of performers such as Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, and Doris Day. Moreover, with the collapse of the world economies, musicals temporarily lost their appeal to the less than “happy day” public. King’s signature song, “Happy Days Are Here Again” needed a more ironic or even sardonic singer than someone like King. Soon after, he left films to return to Broadway.

      Clifton Avon "Cliff" Edwards, also known as “Ukulele Ike” was a bit like the Tiny Tim of his day, performing his popular songs in a range of differently voiced characters including “Little Chrissy”—whose songs were sung evidently in falsetto—who makes a brief appearance in this film. Despite his short stature, balding hairline, and his less than movie star bearing, MGM had just signed him (this was his first on-screen appearance) after a long career of introducing some of the most popular songs of the time, including "California, Here I Come," "Hard Hearted Hannah," "Yes Sir, That's My Baby," "Fascinating Rhythm," “Toot, Toot, Tootsie! (Goo'bye)," “I Can’t Give Anything But Love,” and "I'll See You in My Dreams,” as well as bawdier novelty songs such as “I’m a Bear in a Lady’s Boudoir,” “Take Out That Thing,” and “Give It to Mary with Love” sold under the counter.

       At the time of his signing Edwards had just made a hit out of Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed’s “Singin’ in the Rain,” which was used as the feature song for The Hollywood Revue which even more closely relates it to the 1952 movie.

       Despite having just signed a contract, however, after giving him minor parts in a series of films, several of them with his friend Buster Keaton, the early 1930s audiences’ disinterest in movie musicals temporarily ended Edwards’ career as well, and it was only later as the voice of Jiminy Cricket singing “When You Wish Upon a Star” that he would garner any major attention. The 1950s rise to fame of fellow ukuleleist Arthur Godfrey briefly rejuvenated Ukulele Ike’s career, but even that late-life event did not last long.

       Certainly Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles must have seen The Hollywood Revue of 1929. If there was ever a logical reason to transform Citizen Kane’s (William Randolph Hearst) lover and later wife Susan Alexander Kane into a would-be opera singer who without an operatic voice could never be taught to sing no matter how much money was spent on her lessons, the idea might sure have arisen watching MGM’s attempt to transform Marion Davies into a singing-dancing star; it just wasn’t possible. No matter how light and tentative Crawford’s voice was and her ‘klumpsy” dance movements, Davies’ holler outs and lumbering swings into action were far worse. It’s a wonder that Hearst didn’t send a hit man on a visit to Louis B. Mayer.

        It wouldn’t have mattered. Davies had already had a long successful career as a comedian and dramatic actor in silent films, demonstrating real talent, and the couple could afford to promote her career throughout the 1930s, even though Davies herself knew that her thespian gifts did not translate well into the talking pictures and was forever hindered by her lover/later husband’s constant promotion of her and his refusal to allow her to ever kiss another male on screen—which perhaps explains why she so often performed in drag.

        For a long while at MGM, Davies had been involved with many aspects of her own films, and was considered a very smart businesswoman, perhaps of the kind that Lina Lamont was in Singing in the Rain. Yet Hearst keep insisting that she play historical costume roles, and when Irving Thalberg chose to cast his own wife, Norma Shearer for the role of Marie Antoinette, Hearst pulled his newspaper’s support from MGM and arranged for Davies to be transferred to Warner Brothers. Her first film for them was the 1935 production of Page Miss Glory, she acting in only a couple of more films before retiring in 1937.

       Her retirement was also due in part to personal family problems. Davies 25-year-old niece Pepi Lederer had long been her favorite, and lived as a permanent resident at the Hearst’s palatial San Simeon. Pepi, it appears, was a long-closeted lesbian who had had sexual relationships with actors Louise Brooks, Nina Mae McKinney, and others. When Davies became aware of Pepi’s affair with Brooks—so Brooks reveals in her memoirs Lulu in Hollywood—Hearst arranged for Pepi to be committed to a mental institution supposedly for drug addiction in order to forestall blackmail and public scandal. Within just a few days after her institutionalization, Davies’ niece jumped from an upper floor window of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles, successfully committing suicide. Hearst arranged for the story to be covered up, and Davies arranged for a private funeral. After a hiatus, Davies performed in three last films for Warners, Hearts Divided  and Cain and Mable (both 1936), and Ever Since Eve (1937).     

      Orson Welles, himself, later regretted that people presumed the film character of Susan Alexander Kane was based on Davies, arguing that, in fact, the character was based on Hearst’s second wife, Ganna Walska. Welles insisted that he recognized Davies comedic talent and her artistry as a grand social host at San Simeon and their other “castles.”

      In any event, many of the cast members of the The Hollywood Revue did not have careers that lasted long after this film, which is eerily foretold in the film itself, particularly in the songs composed by Gus Edwards* (who composed the entire score except for “Singing in the Rain”) late in the Second Act, "Charlie, Gus, and Ike,” performed by Charles King, Gus Edwards, and Cliff Edwards in two versions, the first a vaudevillians and the second as Italian immigrants, with Cliff Edwards playing an Italian woman in drag, and in "Marie, Polly, and Bess" with Marie Dressler, Polly Moran, and Bessie Love, a variation of the earlier duo of numbers. In the last lines of the male version, they sing “This is the last you may see of us” as they disappear from their puppet-like enclosures. Even the kind of topical song they are singing would soon see its last days as well as their style of vaudevillian and burlesque-based acting as the studios underwent a radical generational shift over the next several years.

      Most of the changes that talking motion pictures brought to filmmaking that I’ve mentioned above—heavy accents, loud voices, outsized emotive gestures, voices pitched at the wrong levels, and the inability of actors to sing, dance and emote in believable ways—doomed many of those who had dominated the silent screen. Even the screen giants such as Buster Keaton, who I would argue took the art to higher levels than even Chaplin had, were left dumb and mute. Keaton in this frightful film, asked to be Jupiter’s daughter, Pearl, is reduced to a mute girl in drag performing endless pratfalls as she seeks the attention of her newspaper-reading father, finally attempting to sit, unsuccessfully, upon his lap. I gasped to see the great Keaton reduced to this comic gay trope which he had explored in his very earliest days of film apprenticeship with Roscoe Arbuckle. 

       What the 1951 Singing in the Rain fails to mention is what happened to others of this cast. William Haines was one of the most popular of the younger matinee idols of his day, performing with good review attention in movies such as The Desert Outlaw (1923), The Midnight Express (1924), Little Annie Rooney (1925), Brown of Harvard (1926), and Show People (with Marion Davies) (1928).  Although his works were generally formulaic in nature, it is clear he was a talent who may have developed into far more complex roles when the talkies arrived. However, with the arrival of the talkies he was forced much like the central figures of Singing in the Rain to take elocution lessons. He comically punned on the arrival of sound in film as being like “the discovery of clap in a nunnery.”

       Haines had a good speaking voice, and might have indeed done well with his good looks and pleasing demeanor had it not been that he was also “openly” (to those in know) homosexual, living with his lover, James “Jimmie” Shields since 1926.

       A year after The Hollywood Revue Haines appeared in a comic movie, Way Out West, a work that might almost be described as a kind of “coming out” film for the knowing in in his audiences. As I write at the beginning of my essay on that film:

 

“Director Fred Niblo’s 1930 work Way Out West, returns us to the tropes of the 1912 film Algie the Miner, only in this case, instead of the father sending his son “way out west” to become more masculine, the hero of this comic tale, Windy (William Haines), short for Windermere as in Oscar Wilde’s character, is kidnapped by local cowboys who he swindled out of their monthly salaries in a carney side-show, forcing him to work in the manner of a slave to master relationship on an Arizona ranch.”

 

      Windy, in this case is not only an inexperienced city slicker, totally unaware of Western ways, but is portrayed as a young man with queer propensities, made clear not only by his attraction to the cowhands who have kidnapped him and their fancy dress, in this case a pair of fleece-covered chaps, but through his playful flirtation with the tough camp cook—played by Polly Moran—simply because her name is Pansy.

      The Hollywood Revue almost appears to taunt Haines, by hinting at his sexual desires by requiring him to slowly pull and rip away much of Jack Benny’s tux off his torso, even chewing on the coat buttons in apparent delight as the two attempt to make everyday conversation. In every scene thereafter Benny is forced to wear different formal attire, a bit like the love-crazed “Hopsie” (Henry Fonda) in The Lady Eve (1941), who constantly destroys each of his formal dinner suits over the space of a single evening, mostly by taking pratfalls as he stares in wonderment at Barbara Stanwyck.

      Haines was forced out of a Hollywood career not because of his incompetence at speaking or appearance, but because of the increasing national hysteria against LGBTQ behavior that I describe above concerning Marion Davies’ niece. The first Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America Code of Standards was established in 1930 by MGM’s Irving Thalberg and others, and after four years of looking the other way regarding some of the Code’s tenants, while studios still self-censored, it would be put in strict enforcement by the Hays Committee and their leader Joseph Breen.

      In 1933 the handsome actor Haines was arrested in a Los Angeles YMCA room with a sailor he had picked up on Pershing Square.

     MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer insisted that in order to quell tabloid rumors Haines enter into a “lavender” marriage to keep the truth from the public. Such a sham heterosexual relationship would mean having to abandon his lover James Shields, which Haines refused to do, resulting in Mayer firing the rising star who soon took up interior design with Shields, doing over the homes of numerous stars and celebrity figures including those of Joan Crawford, Gloria Swanson, Carole Lombard, Marion Davies, George Cukor, and later Betsy Bloomingdale, Ronald and Nancy Regan when he was still governor of California, Walter and Leonore Annenberg, and Jack L. Warner.

     At the time of Haines’ death in 1973, he and Shields had been together for 47 years; in despair Shields soon after committed suicide.

     Haines’ final movies were both in 1934, Young and Beautiful and The Marines Are Coming, titles that may sound as if they might be gay, but are completely heterosexual in their plots.

     In later years Haines was asked several times to return to acting, the last time to appear with Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, and H. B. Warner as one of Norma Desmond’s ghoulish silent film friends in Sunset Boulevard (1950), but he turned down the part. He would never again allow the film industry to demean him.

     Given the growing film hysteria, it appears a bit odd that two other members of the cast, Karl Dane’s comic partner, George K. Arthur and Marie Dressler were generally known for their connections with LGBTQ concerns. In Dressler’s case, most film historians doubt that she was actively engaged in sexual activity at the time, but most of her close friends were lesbian women.

     Arthur, who married several times, had already performed as the fussy queer clothes designer in film version of Irene (performed on stage by the notable sissy Bobby Watson) and would soon after this film play a sissy choreographer in Reiner’s Chasing Rainbows. He continued to get minor roles in films until 1934, when the Hayes committee came down upon all such “sissy” portrayals in film, even retroactively cutting away previously offensive puns and obvious gay behavior.

     After his last film in 1935, Arthur opened a short-lived Grand Guignol theatre in Hollywood, followed by a much more ambitious venture in partnership with E.E. Clive, but after a final film appearance in Vanessa, Her Love Story (1935), he wound up working as a film salesman in Michigan, and then as a theatrical reviewer on Station WQXR. He also published an unsuccessful magazine guide to New York theatre and night life.

      He spent the war years organizing shows for the troops. On his return to the US, Arthur once again reinvented himself, this time as a producer and distributor of short films for television, which provided him with a comfortable living into the 1960s.

      In the end, accordingly, not only did this film actually relate to LGBTQ issues, but seemingly served as a partial guide for one of Hollywood’s most successful depictions of its own transformations, which weren’t at all as positive as Singing in the Rain pretends. It’s almost as if The Hollywood Revue of 1929, under Reisner’s direction, chose to air some of its dirty laundry.

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).