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).