Ella Shields | I'm Not All There / 1937

pretending madness

by Douglas Messerli

 

I’m Not All There / 1937

 

The best of these films is the last from 1937, when Shields performs a narrative monologue “I’m Not All Here.” Finally, the performer suggests a strategy for her male persona, pretending a kind of madness for those around her that gives her all sorts of permissions that culture would otherwise not allow her/him. Here finally, the male impersonator escapes the female in drag, suggesting a much more covert position behind her/his impersonations. The lyrics are telling, and given they are all spoken instead of sung, hint less at the patter of the lyrics than a dialogic encounter that puts Shields squarely in the position of the great English diseuses and monologuists such as Anna Russell, Joyce Grenfell, and Ruth Draper. 

 

Chorus: I'm not all there

There's something missing

I'm not all there

So the folks declare

They call me Loo by Loo by

Nothing but a great big booby

Point and say, 'That's where you want it,

And that's just where I've got it'

I know they think I'm slow

But let them think, let them think - I don't care.

 

Sometimes I run errands for the folks up at the Grange

With a five-pound note they trust me, perhaps you think that strange

But they never fetch a policeman when I say I've lost the change

Cos I'm not supposed to be all there.

 

Courting couples in the Park on any night you'll find

If you stare they break away, for love's not always blind

But they let me stand and watch them and they never seem to mind

Cos I'm not supposed to be all there.

 

Fellows kissing other fellows girls are in for it

Ten to one they'll be a fight and someone will get hit

But when I kiss other fellow's girls, they never mind a bit

Cos I'm not supposed to be all there.

     What these four shorts reveal is the remarkable talent of a now forgotten male impersonator who clearly got away it simply because of her charm and refusal to back down from her role-playing. As the London Times wrote, upon her death in 1952:

“With wavy auburn hair and dressed as a young man in evening dress, nervously fingering his white tie, she made a very charming and gay figure ... and though she adopted the tattered clothes and worn top hat of the traditional "broken down swell" act she did so with a difference, making of what might have been ordinary broad comedy something delicate and, in its way, almost moving.”

 

Los Angeles, November 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).