William Roth | Floating / 1997

sink or swim

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Roth (screenwriter and director) Floating / 1997

 

Van (Norman Reedus), a high school swimming champion, and his family lived in a beautiful lake home in an area that serves as a summer resort. He had plans of going to college, and his life seemed quite perfect until his father (Will Lyman), struggling with alcoholism lost his legs in an automobile accident, with Van’s mother determining finally to leave both behind taking most of their finances and ownership of the lake-front home with her. Van, left behind to care for his father in the run-down cottage where they now live, has basically given up all his plans, somewhat grudgingly befriending two local petty thieves Jason (Jonathan Quint) and Flip (Josh Marchette). Whereas his family were once recognized as leaders among the local year-long residents, they are now seen as outcasts, and even Van’s former girlfriend, Julie (Sybil Temchen), now a college girl, has given up on the boy she considers a loser.

      William Roth’s beach-side version of this “town and gown”-like story pits the all-year locals against the summer visitors whose lovely homes are those whom Van’s buddies regularly burgle using Van’s former family home as a place to stow their stash of stolen TVs, recording devices, computers, and stereos. That is until Van’s vanished mother rents out the place to a university swimming coach (Bruce Kenny) and his family which includes his son Doug (Chad Lowe), a champion swimmer on his father’s university team. To Van, Doug and his family, now inhabiting his former home, seem to represent everything to which he had once aspired.

       Unfortunately, Roth’s otherwise likeable film from 1997 relies far too heavily on the simplistic values of normative society, setting up issues between those with wealth against the lower middle class, those academically educated vs. the working class, and the superficially lawful against those who live by their own rules to be able to thoroughly explore the far more interesting themes of which the movie hints.

     It’s almost as if Roth took the template of Peter Yates’ 1979 film Breaking Away, determining to portray a showdown between that film’s Dennis Quaid character Mike and its hero Dennis Christopher’s Dave Stohler, but forgetting to add in any of the latter’s queer and almost comic obsession with Italian cycling. Reedus has all the brooding charm of Quaid, and Lowe also has a queer obsession—he’s a closeted gay boy—but has little of Christopher’s loony charm. And in this case the one who wants to truly “break away” and go to college is Reedus’ Van, not the already locked-in college boy Doug, who would love to escape the judgmental abuses of his homophobic father/coach. Both boys have father problems, but in the end it is clear that the wheel-chair bound alcoholic is far superior at parenting than the athletically fit and spiritually upbeat swim coach. And unfortunately, that is the box into which Roth has steered his cinematic endeavor.

      If Van and his errant friends first pretend to take a liking to the new boy Doug simply to be able, metaphorically speaking, to “get into his pants”—to find a way into the house in which he lives to retrieve their stolen loot—Van, who has not been directly involved in any of the lefts, takes a special interest in the boy, in part because of Doug’s open-minded friendliness, mostly evidenced in of his desperation to be liked. The two share a love of swimming, but also it is clear that the new boy represents all that Van has dreamed of becoming, a college swimmer with enough financial support that girls like Julie might fall in love with him.

      You have to give the director of this work credit, however, for stirring up the waters just a bit in having their friendship slowly boil over into something else, Doug’s homoerotic attraction to his new friend, and Van’s not even minding terribly when he discovers, through a hidden magazine under Doug’s mattress, that his swimming chum is a homosexual.

       Doug’s father, seeing that his son has taken up with a far more masculine and, in his thinking, “normal” boy, forces a kind of son/father showdown by offering Van a swimming scholarship (talent unseen), which pits Van’s love between the father—who offers him everything he desires—and the boy in the flesh, an unhappily trapped figure caught in the mesh of his family life. But even then Van seems to choose Doug over his friend’s father—or even his own father as he plans to steal his dad’s precious small hand-painted soldiers, worth a significant sum of money, so that he and Doug might run away together.

      That indeed might have made for a truly remarkable movie, the handsome straight James Dean-like figure running off into the void with a frightened gay kid—and without even a Nathalie Wood to come between them. But Roth both narratively and visually throws in the wrench at the very last moment, inexplicably having his hero unable to go through with his plans, narratively requiring Doug to get drunk, and as the police close around them, to drown by accident in the very waters where he once so gracefully swam. Van comes home to a father to which he is now symbolically wed, the older man suddenly able to strap on his prosthetic legs just in time to hobble over and put an arm around the boy he has always loved.

       Another gay man evidently needed to die for the sentimental myth of normative life. Sorry, this just doesn’t float for me this time around.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).

 

 

Arthur Hurley | 23-Skidoo! / 1930

get out of here!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Hurley (director) 23-Skidoo! / 1930

 

In just 9 minutes, this nasty little skit, that serves also as a kind of trailer for a Vitaphone musical, unleashes a misogynist-laced tirade against all kinds of “differences.” 

 

      Otto Ott (Lew Fields) runs a German beer garden where his angry wife (Helen Goodhue) demeans and fires all the waiters, much to the dismay of Otto, who through a series of Yiddish jokes, complains of his sufferings under her yoke. (“You don’t deserve a wife like me!” “I don’t deserve rheumatism but I got it!”)

      She hires a whole new team of waiters, whom Otto interviews, one by one rebuking and mocking the fact that one is too “fat” and laughs far too much to be a snobby waiter and one is too “skinny.” He mocks a third, a little person, for his stature—or lack of it. Meanwhile, he flits with the female waitress Frieda (Gloria Shea) and continues in his attacks of his imperious wife. 

       The final waiter is so “ugly,” “like a creature you see only in dreams,” he doesn’t know what to make of him or how to use him in the busy establishment in which people come primarily to get drunk and down a few brews with their family picnic lunches. Otto throws up his arms, declaring, “I don’t know what you are!”

        Finally, having said nary a word during the entire blast of abuse—the would-be waiter, tall and whiskered, looking a bit like a hobo—with a swishing gush of sibilants, an effeminate pose, and a flurry of hand movements to match, asks “So Mister, where you gonna place me?” “Oh, so that’s what you are!” Otto declaims in Lew’s Yiddish accent that he has also disparaged in his character’s hatred of all “types,” including his fellow Jews.

      This abysmal little film is a revelation of just how low films of the day would go in their expressions of horror of all differences from the male patriarchal presumption of authority. And gays were at the very bottom of even this low slung totem. 

      This short is an embarrassment for everyone involved and anyone who has the fortitude to watch it.

 

Los Angeles, March 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).

 

Richard Thorpe | The Dude Wrangler / 1930 [Lost Film]

pansy cowboy

by Douglas Messerli

Robert N. Lee (screenplay based on the novel by Caroline Lockhart), Richard Thorpe (director) The Dude Wrangler / 1930 [Lost Film]

 

Director Richard Thorpe worked for years on silent and early sound films that were known for their extremely low budgets. Since he had so little money for his productions, Thorpe generally filmed only one take of each scene, thus assuring the low quality of his movies. In the industry he became known as “Mr. One Take,” and it was not until later in his career, when he directed several of the Tarzan and Lassie films and musicals and comedies of the 1950s and  1960s such as Follow the Boys, The Horizonal Lieutenant, Ten Thousand Rooms, Jailhouse Rock, Three Little Words, and The Great Caruso that he received any significant credit for his talents, yet even these were often grade B movies.

     Most of the critics hint that his 1930 early talkie, The Dude Wrangler, was also a poorly made movie, although it stared some notables such as Francis X. Bushman and Clyde Cook, the later of whom was the director and actor in What’s the World Coming To? of 1926.

     The author of  gay film guide Screened Out, Richard Barrios tells us that no print of this film now exists. But the story is a rather familiar one, repeating elements of Harry Schenck, Edward Warren, and Alice Guy Blaché’s Algie the Miner (1912), Buster Keaton and John G. Blystone’s Our Hospitility (1923), and Fred Niblo’s film of the very same year, Way Out West (1930).

     In all these films either an effeminate male or, in Keaton’s case, a “city slicker” is forced to come to terms with a more rough and rugged world than that to which he is accostomed. In the The Dude Wrangler’s case, the hero Wally McCann (Tom Keene) is described outrightly as a homosexual, one of the film’s flier announcing the works as being “The Story of a ‘Pansy’ Cowboy—Oh Dear!”

    One photograph from the movie depicts Helen dressed in a manly suite with a cigar in her hand while Wally sits nearby on a couch holding a skunk on his lap.

     To put it more subtly, the tale involves Wally, an effeminate young man who spends his time creating embroidery patterns for his Aunt Mary (Margaret Seddon). Helen Dale (Lina Basquette), who breeds ponies for polo games, becomes infatuated with Wally, but is furious with his inability to stand up for himself and be a man. In an attempt to please Helen, Wally buys land in Wyoming near Helen’s farm, intending to become a good farmer. When he finally buys the ranch, he celebrates by throwing a party. But another neighbor Canby (Francis X. Bushman) who also is love with Helen, plots with Wong (Sôjin Kamiyama) to arrange for a stampede of the cattle herd,  from which he intends to save Helen and win the girl.  But having heard of Canby’s plans, Wally fights it out with Canby, winning the battle and Helen’s love.

     Since I was unable to see the film, I don’t know how comedically these scenes were portrayed. But from the posters they look as if Wally had taken some wrestling lessons. Or perhaps he just enjoyed “wrangling the dude.” This is a lost film I truly wish I might have been able to have watched, despite its low production values.

 

Los Angeles, July 24, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).

Douglas Messerli | Manservants, Interior Decorators, Clothes Designers, Chorus Boys, Lady Wrestlers and Other Persnickety Sissies and Female Toughs in the Last Days of Hollywood's Cinema Sodom [essay]

 

manservants, interior decorators, clothes designers, chorus boys, lady wrestlers and other persnickety sissies and female toughs in the last days of hollywood’s cinema sodom 

 

The noted increase in cinematic cross-dressing, homosexual undertones, and the increasing portrayal of unmarried heterosexual relationships of the films of the teens and the 1920s, along with, one suspects, the increasing influence of foreign films such as Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Michael, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger, Downhill, and Champagne, William Dieterle’s Sex in Chains, W. G. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, and Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of the Poet did not go unnoticed by religious, governmental, and even film studio conservatives.

     In 1929 Martin Quigley, editor of the film trade newspaper Motion Picture Herald and Jesuit priest Father Daniel A. Lord created a code of standards, submitting it to the studios. In particular, Lord was worried about the lure and effects of film of the nation’s children.

     By February 1930 studio head Irving Thalberg of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and others met with Lord and Quigley, worried about direct governmental intervention, to establish a new set of codes. One month later the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) agreed to the Code, intended, in particular, to limit films which were widely distributed.

     Divided into two parts, the code—much like the 1927 list of “Don’t” and “Be Carefuls”—was divided into two parts, the first a set of general principles prohibiting movies from “lowering the moral standards of those who see them,” and a set of particular applications, a specific list of prohibited activities. Strangely homosexuality and the use of curse words were not even mentioned, presuming that they were included in the restrictions.

      Besides, homosexuals were included under the description of “sex perversion.” The code sought not only to determine what could be portrayed on screen, but also to promote traditional values. Sexual relations outside of marriage—which were forbidden to be portrayed as attractive or beautiful—were to be presented in a way that would not arouse passion or appear to make them seem permissible. Any sexual act considered perverted, including any suggestion of same-sex relationships, sex, or romance, was ruled out.

     All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience. Authority figures had to be treated with respect, and the clergy could not be portrayed as comic characters or villains. Under some circumstances, politicians, police officers, and judges could be villains, as long as it was clear that those individuals portrayed as villains were the exceptions to the rule.

     The depiction of miscegenation (defined only as sexual relationships between black and white races) was forbidden.

   The entire document was written with Catholic undertones, and stated that art must be handled carefully because it could be "morally evil in its effects," and because its "deep moral significance" was unquestionable. It was initially decided to keep the Catholic influence on the Code secret. A recurring theme was "that throughout, the audience feels sure that evil is wrong, and good is right.” The Code also contained an addendum commonly referred to as the Advertising Code, which regulated advertising copy and imagery.

    In February 1930 Variety published the entire Code, predicting that state film censorship boards would become obsolete.

    Jason Joy, head of the Committee until 1932 and his successor, Dr. James Wingate were, however “unenthusiastic” in maintaining the Code, and were considered generally ineffective. For example, Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930) was passed by Joy with no revisions, while it was considered indecent by a California censor. With over 500 films a year to review and a small staff with limited power, Joy’s committee, although negotiating numerous cuts from films, was more willing to work with studios, which led, ultimately, with is being hired at Fox for his writing talents. His successor Wingate simply couldn’t keep up with the pace of films being produced. The Great Depression, moreover, led studios to seek out racier material which might attract dwindling audiences to their films. By 1931 The Hollywood Reporter joked that “the Hays moral code is not even a joke anymore; it’s just a memory.”*

     Yet, the Code had an enormous effect, nonetheless, particularly with the rise of Joseph I. Breen in 1934, who had worked for the Hays Code committee since 1931. And the basic principles of the 1930 Code were still in place, with writers, directors, and studio producers simply finding subtle ways to subvert some of the principles.

      From 1930 to 1933 filmmakers began to introduce a wide range of homosexual figures who, having no sexual role in their films and standing apart from the general heterosexual plots of the movies, nonetheless offered a stereotyped viewpoint of the sexual “other,” at least allowing for the fact that gays and lesbians still did exist even though the cinema had almost completely neutered them. And given the ugly vision of producers, bosses, husbands, fathers, and other men in power in these early Great Depression films, the sissies actually seem more capable and happier than their heterosexual opposites. Yes, these gay figures are made to seem ridiculous but they most emphatically know who and what they are.

       n his Screened Out: Playing Gay Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall, Richard Barrios describes the pansy craze. Speaking of one of the major pansy actors, Bobby Watson playing the character Paisley in Manhattan Parade, Barrios writes:

 

“As done to a crisp turn Watson, Paisley was one of the most conspicuous of gay characters in sound films thus far, setting the tone for portrayals of that Uncle Tommy of onscreen gayness, the Pansy, Sissy, Fairy, Nance, Fruit, Queer. From early 1932 to mid-1934 and beyond, Hollywood reflected the (now-fading) pansy craze in earnest, steadily codifying gay men onscreen by dress, manner, voice, and gesture. The fedora hat, the gestures that alternately swept and minced, the little mustache, the flower in the lapel—the pansy was as immediately recognizable onscreen as he was on urban sidewalks (while millions of gay men and women without a codified look were allowed to pass undetected). For women, there would be less exposure, since the pansy craze had not been about male impersonation. Nor were there verbal labels. The portrayals, however, were numerous, and the look was even more distinctive than that of the men: jackets resembling men’s waistcoats, starched shirts with neckties, close-cropped hair, monocles, cigars.”

 

      Barrios argues, based on a Variety article, that the “craze” began with a newsreel cameraman covering a dog show who, becoming bored with the canine performances, began to pretend that he was a mincing dog owner whose animal had won the award of heroism, “gushingly thanking all and sundry for the gorgeous honor bestowed on his little precious.”

      Pathé and Fox both decided to run the bit in their newsreel which immediately became so popular, a true comic delight to its audiences, that Paramount sent the same cameraman to another show for a second round of “canine-devoted effeminacy.” Eddie Cantor even incorporated it into his vaudeville show at the Palace.

     While the skit might have been so popular that it led some writers and producers to incorporate it into their films, I truly doubt whether those incidents alone determined the vast number of “pansy” and “lesbian” appearances in the films from 1930-1933. Indeed, the creators of first films I write about below from 1930, could not even have known of the 1931 incident. And the pansy had already appeared as a character type in Ralph Cedar’s The Soilers (1923), Howard Hawks’ Fig Leaves (1927), R. E. Williamson and Joseph E. Zivelli The Wanderer of the West (1927), Fred Niblo’s Way Out West (1930), and Richard Thorpe’s The Dude Wrangler (1930) among others, all before the cameraman determined to entertain audiences with his sissy dog lover.

      In the selections from films below I have attempted to summarize the appearance of such ancillary figures in a great number of movies during this period, saving me from having to describe full plot summaries of a few of the lesser films, particularly since the pansy or Sapphic references were carried no further than the few moments of screen time devoted to them. In more significant movies, however, I continue to describe the entire plot since I have always argued that the context in which gay characters in relationship to the heterosexual figures is of vital importance.

     Films from this period which carried their pansy figures further into their plots or subtly connected their central character’s actions with the sissy boys and boyish girls, along with works that featured their queer figures, are discussed outside this multi-page collation. This gathering is simply a way of indicating just how extensive these stereotyped visions of homosexual beings permeated the entire film industry, even after the 1934 date which is generally seen as a serious attempt to eradicate all non-normative sexual figures. In many cases even during these years, several films’ original scripts along with their gay figures did not survive the censorship, and after 1934 Joseph I. Breen and Will H. Hays often demanded that such scenes from earlier films be excised. Although some of these have been restored in several cases we have left only the censored versions. Like the Afghanistani Taliban, these individuals and their Codes permanently deleted and defaced numerous works of US art and helped make gays invisible for decades longer than what might have otherwise occurred. 

 

*For my comments in the above few paragraphs I have relied heavily on the well-written and informative Wikepdia essay on the Production Code.

 

Los Angeles, November 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

 

Robert Z. Leonard | Let Us Be Gay / 1930

midsummer madness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rachel Crothers (screenplay, with additional dialogue by Lucille Newmark, based on the stage play by Crothers), Robert Z. Leonard (director) Let Us Be Gay / 1930

 

Perhaps I should begin this essay by noting immediately that the title of Robert Z. Leonard’s 1930 film, Let Us Be Gay, has absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality or lesbian behavior. The “gay” here refers solely—well almost entirely—to the common, but now dated meaning according to the Oxford dictionaries, of being “lighthearted and carefree.” Indeed, Rachel Crothers’ reimagined stage play from 1929, is a rather arch and shrill mansion-bound comedy of manners that superficially seems a bit like the kind of play that Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee mocked in their Auntie Mame (1958), “Midsummer Madness.”

      In her time, Crothers, who until Lillian Hellman’s rise to fame in the late 1930s and 1940s, was perceived as the major female dramatist of the day. And although several of Crothers’ plays seem to motion toward feminist issues, others of her works, almost of which are centered on women’s lives and problems, parody radical feminism.

     This play, in particular, almost seems a sell-out to the cause. The basic plot is a thin one, nicely summarized by Ed Garea on the Celluloid Club site:

 

“As the film opens, we are in the house of Bob and Kitty Brown (La Rocque and Shearer). Kitty is a hausfrau who dotes on her husband, this day serving him breakfast in bed. She’s the definition of meek and subservient. Bob would like to stay and chat but he has an important date to play golf and he has to get ready. At one point, he can’t find his favorite tie and asks Kitty where it could be. Kitty, ever so dowdily dressed, is making yet another dress, but finds the time to locate the missing article of clothing. She asks Bob if she can come along on his golf date; after all, she has in the past. Bob, however, is evasive, telling her that he’s already rushed and for her to dress properly would take too much time.

     Years of experience watching these sorts of movies tells us instinctively that golf is the last thing on Bob’s mind, and a phone call shortly after he exits the bedroom confirms our suspicions, especially when he tells the caller never to phone him at his house. But it’s too late, she is on her way over to “clear the air,” and shortly afterward she’s standing in the living room. Just as she has her arms wrapped around his neck, who should saunter in but Kitty? Bob is too visibly embarrassed to speak, but his squeeze introduces herself to the shocked Kitty as Helen, adding that she thought it was time that they met.

      Kitty, quickly pulling herself together, tells her adversary that she has heard a lot about her from Bob. Helen, damage done, tells Bob she’ll be waiting out in the car. After she departs, Bob and Kitty get into it, with Kitty asking him to leave. Bob coldly tells her that if he walks out that door he’s not coming back, which is fine by Kitty. After he leaves, Kitty breaks down in tears.”

    Three years later and after a long stay in Paris, Kitty (Norma Shearer transformed into glamorous mode) is an entirely different woman, a beautiful, well-dressed, joyful, frivolous manhunter who evidently the eccentric millionaire Mrs. Bouccicault (Marie Dressler) is so fond of that she has invited her to her Long Island estate to help break up a nasty relationship between her granddaughter Diane (Sally Eilers) and a bounder she has met, Bob Brown (Rod La Rocque), who just happens to be Kitty’s ex-husband. Apparently, “Bouccy,” as Kitty calls her, doesn’t realize that the two Browns were once a couple.

      The play seems absolutely clever enough until Kitty discovers that the man she is supposed to steal away from the young girl is the very man who destroyed her youthful happiness, and from there on as the two are forced to perform flirtatious gestures while holding deep feelings of anger and regret, the double weight of being “gay” cracking through the air with a sound as if someone had become determined to laugh heartily at every line that anyone ever imagined might be naughty or hinting of wit, reducing Shearer’s performance and the register of her voice to a mini-series of “hee-haw.”

     Given Dressler’s wonderful ability to chew up her butler along with her lines, the movie might still have been somewhat enjoyable if it weren’t for the fact that the figure playing Brown, La Rocque (an actor who was rumored to have had an affair with gay travel writer Richard Halliburton), weren’t as wooden as the grand staircase of Bouccy’s mansion and the fact that her other guests are made up of the totally dislikeable individuals such as the frozen widow Madge Livingston (Hedda Hopper) and three other males, among them a clumsy British lothario, Townley (Gilbert Emery) and a perfectly nice young man Bruce Keene (Raymond Hackett)—whom Bouccy intends her granddaughter to marry. The third male is the only truly comic figure, played by the long-time cinematic “swish” Tyrrell Davis (whose performance in as the dancing instruction in Our Betters did more than any other film to force Joseph Breen to outlaw all cinematic sissies) who this time plays an utterly boring poet who gets his inspiration apparently from cuddling up to and subserviently obeying the commands of the female sex. He is certainly not interested in the normative institution of marriage, announcing at one point that he most definitely has not been married and making it clear that he wants nothing to do with the sexual and familial aspect of female relationships.

      He is Madge’s “boyfriend,” forced to move every bench and chair upon which she sits a fraction of a few inches closer (to what, we are never told), to endlessly pick up her dropped handkerchiefs, and to fetch her any liquid or condiment that she can conjure up. Davis’ character, Wallace Granger, provides great comic relief for a few moments, and presents us with a sort of bridge between a sissy and a gay masochist who loves to be punished by a sadistic woman, a role Hedda Hopper performed later so effortlessly as a gossip columnist, something no one might have imagined had been explored in film as early as 1930.

     Davis plays the role magnificently until he is forced to join to the two males in absolute reverence of the new woman from Paris, while Kitty, by definition, must pretend to be deferential to all their attentions. The conflict forces her into what becomes—as Kitty herself describes it—a French farce, with various men hiding out in every room of her suite, and costing her the opportunity, so it appears, to keep her ex-husband away from the young Diane, whose heart he will surely break as he has her own years earlier.

     Perceiving that Kitty has failed to do her job effectively—since in retaliation for her supposed sexual dalliances, Brown has now proposed to Diane—Bouccy, who seems to have known more that she has let on, calls in Kitty’s nanny and her two children, who everyone seems to have forgotten (along with the critics), even though the characters played by child actor Dickie Moore and an unnamed girl are introduced to us in the very first frame. They come running to their father, who evidently hasn’t even bothered to see them in his three years’ absence, kiss him, and swing his philandering heart back in the direction of the normal American household of the first few scenes of the film as he asks Kitty to marry him again.

      Much to our shock, the giggling dunce accepts him, and the film ends with a reunion kiss. Perhaps Kitty was just getting tired rescheduling her appointments with her would-be suitors or, even more likely, just got tired of being gay, in the dated meaning of that word. She seemed far more convincing putting her arms around the young Diane in the attempt to help her negotiate the world of meaninglessly badly behaving men. Perhaps she should have tried out the new definition of the word that just a few years later would be cast into cinema history by Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby.

 

Los Angeles, February 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).

Al Christie | Charley’s Aunt / 1930

four weddings and a funeral of sorts

by Douglas Messerli

 

F. McGrew Willis (screenplay, based on the play by Brandon Thomas), Al Christie (director) Charley’s Aunt / 1930

 

One might describe Brandon Thomas’ 1892 farce Charley’s Aunt as the forerunner and proving-ground of most of the drag and gender-confused cinema of the 20th century. In both England (where it ran for over 1,466 performances) and in the US where it was also a hit, the play was revived internationally numerous times and adapted several times into cinema.

    Like all farces it is plot heavy, and since I have already discussed the 1925 film version of this work, I will simply repeat the basic structure of this tale from that earlier entry while altering the names of the cast members, this version starring Charles Ruggles as Lord Fancourt Babberley, better known as “Babbs.”

     University roommates Charlie Wykeham (Hugh Williams) and Jack Chesney (Rodney McLennan) are in love with Amy Spettigue (June Collyer) and Kitty Verdun (Flora Sheffield) who are respectively the daughter and niece, wards of Stephen Spettigue (Halliwell Hobbes). Unfortunately, although they have reason to believe the young women are attracted to them, they have been unable to get up the nerve to ask them to marry.

      Meanwhile, Spettigue learns that once Miss Verdun is married he will no longer be the recipient of a stipend for her support and fearing that loss of income refuses to allow either his own daughter or his ward see the young men, planning instead to take them off to a summer vacation spot where there are no young men in sight.

      Charley gets word that his Brazilian aunt, Donna Lucia D' Alvadorez (Doris Lloyd), a woman he has never before met, has traveled with a young lady, Ela Delahay (Flora le Breton) to England and plans to stop by for a visit that very afternoon, perfect timing the young men realize, since she might play the required chaperon to a luncheon party to which they plan to invite their women friends and pop the question.

      Meanwhile, their busybody college chum from another room, “Babbs,” trying to collect on a loan they’ve never paid back, attempts to rob them of the bottles of champagne they’ve set out for the event. He’s about to prepare for a new play in which performs in drag. Catching him in their room, they suggest that he also join them at the luncheon to help keep Charley’s aunt busy so that they might have time with the girls. But when, soon after, they get word that the aunt has changed her plans about her visit, and after seeing “Babbs” in his new female attire, they get the idea to have him replace the aunt so that the girls will have no qualms about a lunch alone with the two bachelor men.

      As often happens in such farces, people regularly drop in to add to the complexity of the situation. In this instance Jack’s father, Sir Francis (Phillips Smalley) also suddenly shows up to visit his son, reporting that having done a thorough audit of his finances, he finds they are now debtors. Jack suggests he join them also at lunch and woo Charley’s aunt who is notoriously wealthy and a widow. Obviously when he discovers that she will replaced by their friend, it is too late, and he daren’t reveal the truth.

     When the girls go missing, the bothersome father and ward, Spettigue decides to butt into the celebrations.

      For the next hour or so we are treated to “Babb’s” ridiculous attempts to imitate a Brazilian heiress, having utterly no knowledge about who she is and only knowing that she comes from Brazil, the land of the nuts. And nutty is the key word of his desperate attempts to keep in character, particularly when beyond all rationality, and with to the shock of his son, both Jack’s father and Spettigue fall head-over-heels in love with the aunt, dueling in their attempts to win her over.

     The drag figure is so abstractly presented that it allows nearly any good character actor to add in whatever particular acting tricks and personality traits they want to be featured. Ruggles is already performing with the prissy nervousness that he would later reveal in Bringing Up Baby and numerous other roles, an actor who, if he’d been born a few years earlier, might have served in the numerous pansy roles played by the likes Johnny Arthur, Franklin Pangborn, and many others. But as in most of Ruggles’ roles, here he plays a heterosexual, this time temporarily forced into drag but fully consumed with the loss of his own young woman, who after her father’s death ran off to Brazil, a common destination for romantic and disenchanted Britishers leaving from the port of Liverpool if one is to believe A.J. Lees Brazil That Never Was.

     Without exception, Thomas’ farce also brings in, at the very last moment, the lovely and sophisticated real aunt and her companion, Babb’s lost love, Ela, who immediately realizing the absurdity of the young men’s fibs, play along without revealing their true identities. But not before the rejected Sir Francis recognizes Charley’s real aunt as a woman he loved from long ago in the past, thus hooking him up with both lost love and the money he needs to continue in his life.

     So too do the boys find the courage to ask their girls to marry them and are quickly accepted. Babbs recognizes Ela, although she, like all the others, cannot recognize him, and when he finally reveals himself, she accepts his love only after a great deal of dismay and doubt. Certainly, one might wonder about a beau dressed up as a woman at the very edge of marrying an old man, a situation that reminds one most particularly of Jack Lemmon’s Daphne’s last scenes with Joe E. Brown’s Osgood Fielding III in Some Like It Hot.

     The only one who winds up without a soul is the foolish Spettigue, whose loneliness and  poverty, the writer suggests, is his reward for his cross-gender licentiousness and greed.

     Christie’s version, with the requisite comings and goings of the entire cast, is fairly lively, but the acting, particularly on Ruggles’ part is rather hit-and-miss, with far too much comic athleticism and impossible to believe asides that might work wonderfully on stage but seem ludicrous on the narrower frame of a film with those who are not supposed to hear standing inches away from the whisperers.

      And, of course, even the original was already a hackneyed story supposed to provide guffaws

without end. There are most certainly laughs in this chestnut, but not nearly as many as Sennett and Christie’s two-reelers had already provided his audience, along with his far more absurd situations facing his stars soon after such as the Ritz Brothers, Buster Keaton, and even Bob Hope.

The next cinematic reincarnation of this story would be Jack Benny’s 1941 performance of the aunt.

     But oddly, this film bid a kind of farewell also to the dominance of drag in LGBTQ cinema. Obviously, there would be numerous drag performances throughout the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st. But the focus shifted even beginning in the late 1920s and certainly even within the same year toward gay and lesbian figures who, despite their brief appearances and stereotyped behaviors, were at least not playing at being gay or lesbian, but actually were as cis gender beings homosexuals. In short, although being gay might still be representing as something of humor or even to be laughed at, it was no longer a mistake or joke.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).