Leon Trystan | Piętro wyżej (The Apartment Above) aka Neighbors / 1937

sex appeal

by Douglas Messerli

 

Emanuel Schlechter, Ludwik Starski, and Eugeniusz Bodo (screenplay), Leon Trystan (director) Piętro wyżej (The Apartment Above) aka Neighbors / 1937

 

In the years just before World War II, Poland made some excellent comedies, but none as frenetic and popular as the 1937 movie The Apartment Above, which combined both classical and dance band music, singing, farce, and a totally unexpected drag scene. Some have compared it—I’d argue, mistakenly—with the works of the Marx Brothers, but any film that features a goose which for no good reason appears to become a beautiful girl is good for my gander. Commenting on the Polish site Oldcamera, Paula Apanowicz argues that it is “a journey into a distant era—an encounter with a laughing interwar, feeling on the back of one's neck the cool breath of the catastrophe that was about to happen in a moment.” And Lukasz Budnik of the polish site Film goes even further in asserting that The Apartment Above is "one of the most valuable films of that time [the interwar period], considered by many today to be the best."

      The tenement house at 13 Szczęśliwa Street contains several apartments, including those of Hipolit Paczek (Jozef Orwid), the building’s landlord, and above him, Henryk Paczek (Eugeniusz Bodo). The two men are unrelated and utterly different in temperament, the landlord Paczek wishing he might get rid of his upstairs tenant as fervently as Henryk Paczek wishes the old man might die and leave him in peace, or at least fix his stove! But the worst of their gripes with one another is that every week Hipolit rehearses his classical musical group, he on the flute, while above Henryk drowns them out with a rehearsal of his own swing band.

      Moreover, Henryk is a popular radio announcer whose legions of followers, particularly pretty women, who often knock at Hipolit’s door to be told, in no uncertain terms, that they’ve got the wrong Paczek! When Hipolit finally takes the nameplate off his own door, Henryk mischievously replaces it with his own calling card.

       That silly maneuver results in the confusion that is at the center of this farce, since Hipolit is expecting a visit to the city from his niece, Lodzia (Helena Grossówna). Lodzia shows us, quickly realizing that the first-floor tenant is not the same Paczek as her uncle and moving on up to Henryk’s apartment instead. When no one answers that door, like any enterprising would-be intruder she checks under the rug to discover the key, and lets herself in. The first thing she does his call up a friend, Alicja Bonecka, to tell her she’s arrived. She then, quite naturally, undresses, seeks out the guest room and falls into bed.

      Meanwhile a quite drunken Henryk arrives home with a goose he’s won at a barroom raffle. He sets down the goose, goes to his toilet, and returns to see a woman where the goose was sitting just previously. Understandably, he returns to wash his eyes out, peeking in to observe the young lady now petting his goose.

      Discovering that she has entered the wrong apartment, Lodzia is ready to depart, but in a drunken pique of anger when she has insisted that he is not the true tenant of his own apartment, he has thrown the key the window. And now, they are locked in for the night. Of course, he immediately falls in love with the mistaken intruder, offering her up the bed she’s already occupied, he sleeping, as many a drunk has in the history of cinema, in the bathroom tub.

      In the morning, he peeks in to see his sleeping beauty, discovers the key has landed on the edge of the roof outside his window, and quickly retrieves it. But by the time he returns from his shower, Lodzia has discovered the key and left. Fortunately, so he believes she has left behind her calling card, Alicja Bonecka, Lodzia’s friend.

      So begins the series of frustrating mistaken identities, which eventually involves one of Henryk’s gold-digging male friends, determined to marry a wealthy woman. Since both Bonecki and Paczek appear on his list—the first with an eligible daughter and the second with an eligible niece—Henryk demands he cross off the first, who he is now determined to marry, and focus on the latter, a marriage he will even help along, given that such a money-hungry scoundrel would be the perfect punishment for his landlord’s ward. Since Lodzia has fallen in love with Henryk, as well, it’s clear that there will be a great deal of trouble ahead with similarly amounts of comic maneuvers to be accomplished before the two can clear away their many misconceptions. The story plays out like a typical heterosexual farce.

      But the film has other layers that most such romantic comedies do not permit. First of all, Hipolit and Henryk also each have a manservant, a kind of Laurel and Hardy-like pairing of Protazy (Stanisław Woliński) and Damazy (Czesław Skonieczny), who seem to be inseparable friends who have created a rather looney game called “Beaver.” For this game, they have scored the colors and lengths of beards, while adding in extra points for actually being able to put their hands to the bearded man’s face and pull his whiskers, with even more points for being able to pull the stubble of a man on a bicycle. Consequently, throughout the movie they shout, at the most unexpected moments, “beaver,” switching the gender of the coarse term for female nether parts, together rushing forward to the proud wearer of a goatee, imperial, or Vandyke, to perform their strangely homoerotic gesture, laying hands on many an unwitting man.

     At the climax of the heterosexual farce, moreover, during a huge formal costume party attended my Hipolit—got up in medieval armor in which the head visor keeps falling down to prevent his observation of events—accompanied by his soon-to-be gigolo “son-in-law” in search of the costumed Lodzi, Henryk suddenly appears in full Mae West-like regalia singing, as Ray Best, one of the films two musical hits by Henryk Wars, “Sexapil.” His sudden appearance in drag is so unexpected to the audience that his convincing rendition of that song is even more compelling, as for a few moments even the film’s audience might wonder who this drag queen is and where did she come from.

      Certainly, all the film’s characters appear to be suddenly wowed and stunned by her performance, something that even the rightest magazines and newspapers of the day such as Prosto z mostu took note, A. Mikulowski hinting at his reaction as opposed to both the film and theater audiences:  "Bodo appears dressed as a woman, arousing the enthusiasm of the less picky audience, then the hands folded in applause fall down." Certainly, this gathering of Polish high society, I thought to myself, represent the total opposite reactions of today’s US Tennessee, Arizona, and Kentucky legislators who are now working to ban drag performances.

      Indeed, Hipolit unknowingly falls in love with the Henryk in drag, following him about for the rest of the evening like a love-struck puppy whimpering for a Masiff. Despite the pleasure taken from the evening’s entertainment, the night does not end well for most of our central figures.

     The various parties come together in a kind of temporary peace only after Henryk gathers Hipolit’s classical group with his own in a recording studio in a jazz rendition that includes its classical roots, allowing both sets of performers to battle it out with their “instruments” as opposed to their fists. Of course, Henryk wins the niece’s heart, just as the gigolo gets her friend, her father claiming, after all, that he has no great wealth.

 

     In a late scene of the movie, Protzy and Damazy exit their building together only to be greeted by a kind of marathon bicycle race of orthodox Jews, with more than enough beards and bicycles to delight them for the rest of their lives.

      This scene was made even more delightful for me by the fact that, after not being able to find a copy of the original Polish film with English subtitles, I stumbled instead, to my amazement, upon a version of Piętro wyżej dubbed in Yiddish, along with English subtitles, Shkheynim (Neighbors). The song “Sex Appeal,” translated in Yiddish by Joseph Tunkel, goes something like this in English:

 

             Sex appeal

             It sets your blood afire.

 

             Sex appeal

             It fills you with desire.

 

 Followed with the Yiddish punctuations:

 

             Ach, Eck, Vey, Oi

 

     According to Erich A. Goldman, writing in Visions, Images and Dreams, “Whereas the Polish release had failed to attract any attention in New York a few months earlier, the Yiddish version did extremely well.” I must say that hearing it Yiddish was a true treat, since I know more Yiddish words than I do Polish and, far more importantly, that this was probably one of the last European Yiddish films ever released.

 

Los Angeles, April 28, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).