Jacques Feyder | Knight Without Armour / 1937

dying for love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lajos Bíró and Frances Marion (screenplay, based on the fiction by James Hilton), Arthur Wimperis (additional dialogue), Jacques Feyder (director) Knight Without Armour / 1937

 

As argument to those who might suggest that in the movies after 1934 that I often “read in” LGBTQ content that they perceive is not really there, I would suggest that, in fact, after the early stereotypical presentations of pansies, sissies, and men and women in drag, regarding the later films of the 1930s, in order to discuss any kind of queer or even odd behavior the writers and directors were forced to either code that information or to stick to drag representations in their work. Any figure of sexual or behavioral complexity was presented in a manner that might not be read strictly as a gay figure yet might be perceived as behaving as a queer being to those in the know. The latter was not so much a kind of coding, but a shared reading that comprehended the behavior and attitudes of certain characters as sharing a great deal with those of the gay or lesbian worlds; and, in a sense, you had to know how the queer world perceived itself and its stereotypical representations to sometimes perceive that fact. There’s no way to absolutely prove these characters are gay or lesbian, and certainly they are never engaged at a fully sexual level—perhaps a clue in itself—but sensitively interpreted, could certainly can be read as queer.

     If heterosexuals cannot tolerate the possibility of such characters existing in a small handful of films in the long dry years in which it was impossible to actually depict a homosexual figure, I would simply remind them of the thousands upon thousands of heteronormative characters the gay world had to endure in the thirty years from 1934-1964 and in the vast majority of films thereafter.

      I simply ask patience, accordingly, with the films that I myself note aren’t explicitly LGBTQ oriented or which have no systematic evidence of coding. I am careful that all the films I discuss in this and other volumes of My Queer Cinema not to represent blatant misreadings or mere “wishful” thinking. Indeed, I am slow and careful to come to conclusions when I know that my queer reading will not be transparent.

     Jacques Feyder’s Knight Without Armour is just such a film. Primarily, the film is a fascinating heterosexual spy romance involving a British spy who has been asked before the revolution to infiltrate the revolutionaries. A. J. Fothergill (Robert Donat) speaks Russian so fluently that he has been asked to translate books into English and vice versa, and has been hired to return to Russia for that purpose. Almost the moment he arrives, however, he is told that he must leave the country in 48 hours for his comments on the Czarist government, and all of his work has gone for naught.

     The British spy Colonel Forrester (Laurence Hanray) attempts to and, after severe hesitations on Fothergill’s part, finally succeeds in recruiting him, assigning Fothergill the name Peter Ouranoff and assigning him the duty of involving himself with a revolutionary group in order to post of their activities. But the moment he joins a cell headed by Axelstein (Basil Grill), one of the hot-headed university students involved, Alexis, tosses a bomb into the coach that carries General Gregor Vladinoff (Herbert Lomas) as he celebrates in wedding ceremony of his daughter Alexandra (Marlene Dietrich) to Colonel Adraxine (Austin Trevor).

      The student is shot, but makes his way, nonetheless, to Peter’s apartment only to die there. Before Peter can even escape, he is arrested by Czarist authorities and, along with Axelstein, sent to the most obscure of Siberian outposts, where they must suffer cold, isolation, and seemingly eternal darkness even through World War I.

       Finally with the end the War and the revolution, they are freed. Before they can even return to St. Petersburg, however, Axelstein is made commissar of a Russian city and extending region and Peter is made his assistant. Nearby lies Alexandra’s estate.

      It is at this point that we are introduced to Alexandra, played by Marlene Dietrich.

      Dietrich is a notable LBGTQ icon, in part because she was herself bisexual, having been rumored to have lesbian affairs with Lupe Vélez, Greta Garbo, and many others, eventually in the 1930s beginning a long affair with Suzanne Baulé, better known as the cabaret hostess Frede. She also had an affair with Cuban-American writer Mercedes de Acosta, who also claimed to be one of Garbo’s lovers. Dietrich’s gathering of friends, renamed “Marlene’s Sewing Circle,” became a notable Hollywood lesbian grouping including close friends Ann Warner (wife of Jack L. Warner), Lili Damita (the wife of Errol Flynn), Claudette Colbert, and Dolores del Río. Edith Piaf was also a close friend.

      Today Dietrich is mostly remembered perhaps for her “drag” role in Morrocco, which I discuss in these pages, a truly iconic lesbian role that both shock and delighted Hollywood, depending upon your point of view.

       But in Feyder’s film under discussion here, Dietrich plays the role with great restraint and heterosexual devotion to Peter, who soon becomes her lover in the film. This film would have been included in this volume, in any case, since in one of her many needed disguises for escape, she briefly has to play the drag role of male White Russian Cassock soldier, even if of no great significance to the story.

       There are many brilliant set pieces in this film, and one of the most notable is the morning when Dietrich as Alexandra awakens in her white negligée from a night’s sleep and rings for her personal servant. When no one responds, she rings again, and then rises to ring for another servant, leaves the room to seek out yet another, and suddenly realizes that they have all abandoned her. She ties a up her top coat and wanders out of the mansion to face the peasant locals who, after a brief standoff, attack her.

 

         Locked away in her study, she is eventually faced with commissar Axelstein, who asks Peter to secretly take her away to Petrograd when she can be properly tried, the locals being committed to simply murdering their symbol of the Czarist greed and abuse.

         It is upon that long voyage the two take together, encountering on alternating days White Russian troops and Red revolutionaries that this film focuses.

         Another of the most astounding moments of the film occurs soon after Peter meets her, taking her to the local train station. There he meets up with the station master who assures him that the train to Petrograd stops there every day precisely at 2:20 each day. But soon after, Peter realizes that the Stationmaster is calling invisible travelers to a train that has never appeared, that all trains have, in fact, have stopped running and that the stationmaster is quite mad, running his ghost-ridden world as if nothing had changed.

        In order to protect his charge, Peter helps her to escape through the Red Russian lines to the nearby White Russian troops, where in another remarkable scene, the soldiers find dresses for her to wear as she heads what is to be their last supper, dressed in a slim gown covered with glittering sequins.

        When the Red Army takes over, she is imprisoned again, Peter returning as a Cassock and stealing a piece of paper appointing him commissar of prisons, helps her to escape once more—this time in the aforementioned male cassock garb.

        The two hide out in a forest which happens to be on her former estate, there finally expressing and presumably consummating their love. Finally, together they catch a train, but upon its stop are forced, like all the others, to show their hands as evidence of being either a peasant revolutionary or a wealthy White Russian. Peter passes the test, but obviously Alexandra cannot. He joins her at the revolutionary table where they send most of their claimants to the firing squad, just as previously have the White Russians, and the Red Revolutionaries before that.

        The two, pretending to be brother and sister, are questioned first by a man named Poushkoff (John Clements), who asks threatening questions concerning why Peter is not serving in the military and what is he doing accompanying his sister into such territory. His fellow inquisitor, however, almost immediately recognizes through a photograph that the woman before him is Alexandra, and is ready to send them both to be shot. But Poushkoff insists that the photograph is only a somewhat similar and argues that since they have the Adraxine gardener among their prisoners, that he must identify her first.

      We do not yet know Poushkoff’s motives, but we suspect that he has warned the gardener to disavow knowing Alexandra, which he does. Poushkoff further demands that they be identified in Samara, he offering to accompany them there as their guard.

       What follows is one of the most inexplicable and provocative sequences in the history of late 1930 works of cinema. Poushkoff, a man of learning, takes them into his personal coach, sleeping with them on the two cabin bunk beds and a couch for Alexandra, and offering to share the little he has in foodstuffs, bread and cheese. Previously, Peter has bartered with locals, bringing back cans of meat, brandy, and even other vegetables unheard of in the current battlefronts. And they share these foods they’ve carried with them with him.

      He is so thankful and appreciative and beyond that, so enamored of Alexandre and her lover that by the next morning he collapses into tears in what only be described as a kind of nervous breakdown. Most critics have simply described him as a sensitive man who has become aware of who this couple really are and what they stand for. But it is apparent to me, that Poushkoff does not admire Alexandre and Peter because they represent the lost Czarist Russia. He is an intelligent student who clearly supports the revolution, in theory at least, but has not been able to abide what happens in reality, has been broken by having to live with the fact that he himself has helped to kill vast numbers of individuals over whom he stands in judgment.

       Neither is Poushkoff, like so many of the courser males both of the White Russian and Red Armies who would wish to have sex with her or even rape her for her beauty, interested in her body. Rather, he is a true Russian Romantic, a man who admires Beauty and the seemingly courtly love he observes in Peter and Alexandre, symbolized by the kiss he has observed of Peter offering Alexandre’s hand as they fall into sleep.

       To anyone even slightly aware of character types in both fiction and film, Poushkoff is a weak man, not fit to be a Red Army butcher who determines who dies and who lives. A man who cries—particularly in the age of the brutal Hays Code and the Production Code Administration headed by Joseph Breen—is not a real man but an overwrought young romantic who is willing to allow this couple and the romantic love they represent to escape via the Volga Boatmen of the famous Russian folk song, determined even to commit public suicide to distract the others from their disappearance into his romantic conception of escape. Russian literature is full of his kind. And whether or not one asserts that such behavior is that of a homosexual or not, it is inevitably queer, representing not the acts of a level-headed heteronormative man in control of his emotions.

      Although one can justifiably recognize Peter as a kind of “knight without armour,” he nonetheless, is protected by guns, an Oxford education, and his deep heterosexual desire. He is a daredevil, who ends the film by holding on to the outside of a departing train with a feverish bride-to-be within. It is Poushkoff, ultimately who is a true knight without anyone or anything to protect him. As everyone knows, and Vito Russo reminded us, gay men in film must almost always die, often to preserve heterosexual love.

 

*In Yiddish, a pushke is a little tin can for collecting alms. As his name further hints, Poushkoff, “poush-head,” is a push-over, even a pouf, something as insignificant as the palm of one’s open hand to collect alms for the poor (in Aramic, puska).

 

Los Angeles, June 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).