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).