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).