milking the bull
by Douglas Messerli
Director Fred Niblo’s 1930 film, 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 sideshow,
forcing him to work in the manner of a slave to master relationship on an
Arizona ranch.
Although the arc of the film’s plot is rather predictable—the indentured
city slicker suffers the slings and arrows of the angry cowboys, but eventually
toughens up enough to catch the eye of the ranch boss, blonde beauty Molly
Rankin (Leila Hyams) who, by film’s end, he promises to marry—the real pleasure
of this film, such as it is, derives from Haines' and his cowboy captors’
one-liners, most of them stuffed with campy gay references.
As
I’ve noted previously, Haines was openly gay at the time, living with his
life-time partner James Shields. It almost appears, accordingly, that by 1930
his writers, in this case Alfred Block, Byron Morgan, and Joseph Farnham felt
that Haines’ sexuality was well enough known that they could satirize it in the
Way Out West story. Like other gay and lesbian figures such as Cary
Grant and Rock Hudson whom I mention later in these pages, the screenwriters
intentionally planted sexual double entendres, some of them right out of
vaudeville and burlesque skits, which along with the basic set-up of the subtle
S&M structure of the plot seemed almost a perfect fit, with most of the
campy scenes flitting by the chuckling general audience while serving as a kind
of gentle wit to those in the know.
The
first of these has received, perhaps, the most attention. Playing opposite
comedian Polly Moran, the ranch cook named, quite intentionally, “Pansy,”
Haines’ character Windy pretends to flirt with her the moment she drops her
name, which would be quickly recognized in 1930 as a reference to the “Pansy
Craze” that had recently arisen in nightclubs in Greenwich Village and Harlem,
in which effeminate gay men performed openly on stage, and which the Hays Code
outlawed in 1933 with the fall of prohibition.
Asked to serve the meal Pansy has prepared for the boss of the ranch,
Windy enters her cabin with tray in hand, the female boss Molly calling out
“Pansy?” before, discovering Windy, explaining, “I thought you were Pansy,” to
which the Haines character quips “I’m the wildest pansy you ever picked.”
Almost immediately, as he attempts to hover over her, Molly queries him
“Why you acting that way?” Windy’s answer reiterates all the fairy jokes ever
associated with James Barrie’s most well-known character: “It’s the Peter Pan
in me.”
When he finally comes to recognize that the “boss” is in fact Molly, the
sister of one of the cowboys who has enslaved him, Windy immediately makes a
come-back, “The boss don’t have no pants on.”
Upon Molly’s suggestion, the cowboys order he make the daily deliveries,
which consists of loading up a small cart with cow manure mixed into the straw
and moving it into a nearby field. Egging him on, the ranchers insist that he
must dress in his very best clothes.
Windy’s untoward response is an outright admission of his sculpted male
torso: “I not only have the clothes to wear, but I have the figure.” When, a
few moments later, he appears in a dapper suit with hat upon his head, even a
cowboy sarcastically admits “You’re beautiful.”
You
get the idea. The writers must have thoroughly enjoyed their writing sessions,
quaveringly attempting to keep a tight line between their openly queer-based
risqué comments and the cowboy’s more mean-spirited taunts.
To
tamp down what might almost be perceived as homophobic comments, most of the
sexual interchanges are between Windy and the cowboy comic dunce of the group.
Having just purchased a handsome pair of horse pants the straight-man shows
them off to Windy, who attracted to this somewhat bizarre item of apparel, from
time-to-time takes out a pocket watch from his vest before returning it.
Noticing the shiny object, the not-too-bright cowpoke predictably asks if it’s
for sale.
“Oh no, I couldn’t sell it,” sighs the con-man. “It was given to me by
my pater, my father.” After establishing that his father is now dead and the
treasure is his last memory of him, Windy again lures in his victim, who blurts
out “I’d like to see your pater,” his clumsy pronunciation making the word
sound as close to “peter” as possible.
There is one scene, however, that makes it clearly apparent that the
cowboys recognize Windy as representing a being quite different from them. As
they plan for a dance in celebration of the roundup which will take the cowboys
away for the ranch for a few days, Molly’s brother Buck (Charles Middleton)
takes the neophyte aside to warn him from attending the celebration: “The folks
that come around here don’t herd with your kind.”
And
we immediately recognize at the moment that the campy patter has come to a
stop. The plot—in which Molly is snake-bitten and saved by Windy who drives her
to a nearby Indian encampment where the medicine man saves her (Windy’s reply:
“Thanks chief, you’re a sweetheart.”); attempts to drive her home through a
blinding sand storm; is chased by the cowmen, guns blazing, through a small
pueblo village; and, upon their discovery that he was not intending to abscond
with their boss, but was heroically trying to save her, celebrates him by
accepting Windy into their communal “herd”—slowly winds down to tick away this
film’s more traditional conventions.
The
astounding fact that this picture was one of Hollywood’s more successful
offerings of 1930 hints that perhaps the audience of the day better understood
the campy one-liners than they let on.
Los Angeles, September 11, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September
2020) and My Queer Cinema blog (September 2020).
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