hypochondria
by Douglas Messerli
William M. Conselman (screenplay), William
Anthony McGuire, Robert Hobart Davis, and E. J. Rath (story, based on the play The
Nervous Wreck by Owen Davis), Nacio Herb Brown, Gus Kahn, and Walter
Donaldson (music and lyrics), Thornton Freeland (director) Whoopee! /
1930
Eddie Cantor’s cinema musical, Whoopee!,
fresh off the Broadway stage, closing in 1929 after 407 performances, was also
a hit in the movie theaters. The songs are quite wonderful, including from the
original production Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson’s, “Making Whoopee,”
"Yes, Sir, That's My Baby" (not in the movie), and “My Baby Just
Cares for Me”; and despite the kitsch parade of the Goldwyn Girls (which
included Virginia Bruce, Paulette Godard, and Betty Grable) choreographer Busby
Berkeley, in his first movie outing, had already established some of his
wondrous aerial-viewed numbers that created remarkable kaleidoscope effects never
before seen on film.
But
then there’s Eddie Cantor (as Henry Williams), Ethel Shutta (as Mary Custer),
Paul Gregory (Wanenis), Eleanor Hunt (Sally Morgan), Spencer Charters (Jerome
Underwood), Chief Caupolican (Black Eagle) and a whole crew of cowboys and
cowgirls, many of whom can’t act, who play out a script determined to demean
nearly everything it touches: Native Americans, Jewish businessmen, blacks,
women, and in particular, queers which throughout Eddie Cantor’s character keeps
claiming as his default personality. Racial and sexual stereotypes in the late
1920s and 1930s were obviously seen as something so funny that it drew
audiences in droves to the theater, since, except for the music, that’s
primarily what this equal opportunity offender of a work delivers up for your
delectation.
You have to give Cantor some credit simply for his audaciousness of
playing a hypochondriac weakling who, as he himself keeps repeating, is simply
too “delicate” to get married. Besides at any moment he may die of one of his
dozens of ailments which, to protect him against, his nurse Mary Custer keeps
spooning out liquid medicines and doling out pills.
Actually, the same kind of figure also made Hollywood a great deal of
money in Rock Hudson’s 1964 film Send Me No Flowers, Rock playing a
figure who also assumes he’s about to die and, accordingly, begins to look for
a new husband for his wife, Doris Day, attending only throughout the film to
the look and sexual appeal of other males and, eventually, even sharing a bed
with his next door neighbor, Tony Randall.
And like Rock’s perverse take on things, in Whoopee! he have
entered into a very strange universe. Sally is about to be married, and a whole
contingent of cowboys and cowwoman have descended upon at the Morgan ranch to
celebrate. Unexpectedly, her former lover Wanenis also returns from working in
the mines in Montana. He’s definitely not made welcome back in his childhood
stomping ground, and is told to stay away from Sally and the wedding.
Why most the cowboys are wearing pink ties and pink shirts is something
we’re not privy to. Let’s just say that costume designer John W. Harkrider was
one of Florenz Ziegfeld’s favorite art directors and costume designers.
And
why the asthmatic, nervous, terrified pansy Henry is hanging out on their ranch
in the American Southwest is never explained; perhaps he has traveled there
simply for his health. But what he does otherwise or did prior to his endless
kvetching, we’re never told. Somehow this strange fish out of water keeps
getting hooked by women who make his life quite difficult.
In
Whoopee! Cantor mostly spends his time running away from the caresses of
his nurse (as he explains to her: “Why do you keep pestering me with your
overtures when what I need is an intermission?”) and—when Sally Morgan, about
to be wedded to Sherriff Bob Wells (John Rutherford), gets cold feet and runs
off with Henry, lying that she and he are about to elope—attracting the
attentions of nearly everyone else in the work who chase after the couple
determined bring back Sally and to do away with Henry.
You
see Sally is really in love with the local half-breed Wanenis (Gregory) who
can’t marry her because of his part-Indian blood. Both Sally’s father and
Wanenis’ dad Black Eagle refuse to even discuss the possibility; but then due
the miscegenation laws of the time it was also a felony. So what’s a poor girl
like Sally to do but grab onto the underdog weakling Henry and catch a ride to
the nearest ranch where she hopes to escape. On their way he sings of his one
“girlfriend who turned out to be a friend of a boyfriend of mine.”
To describe the plot that follows would be bit like trying to chart out
in a few paragraphs a trip from Texico, New Mexico to Wayne, Maine. And I’m not
about to attempt it. It’s better to focus on just a few views along the route.
They run out of gas and steal a gallon by gunpoint from a passing auto.
They arrive at a ranch where Henry is immediately put to work as a chef
(although he’s never cooked nor hardly eaten a
full meal in his life), and there he
encounters the man whom he robbed, also, it turns out, a very “nervous nellie.”
Together the two talk about their operations and attempt to show one another
their scars, peering into one another pants and lifting up each other’s pant
legs before tumbling over and over one another in attempt to see just each
bodily scar is and observe its full length and width. When Cantor finally gets
a good look and is told the outrageous prince Underwood had to pay for the
operation, Cantor quips: “Oh well no wonder, you got hemstitching!” Obviously,
it’s one of the most blatantly gayest scenes ever put to film before a couple
of gay men and lesbians laid down together with one another on the screen to
have sex.
While
pretending to be chef he hides in the oven which, as expected, explodes,
turning him into a blackface character which serves as another cover and gives
him the opportunity for a few more distasteful racial jokes, as well as a few
jibes at Al Jolson. Fortunately, he does not attempt a “darkie” accent,
although the situation obviously requires him to do a song and dance number in
the style of Bojangles.
For a long, awfully unfunny vaudevillian-like skit that is clearly meant
to satirize modern-day psychiatry they call in the ranch owner’s bratty
college-educated son who, requiring all the suspects to hold plates in both
hands, requires them to free associate with the words he tosses out, presumably
forcing them to tremble and drop the dishware to their feet. They don’t, but
Henry cheats.
For the next episode he and Sally return to the road, running off to the
nearby reservation (“I called ahead to get a reservation”), the whole gang on
their tail. Meeting up with Black Eagle again, Henry is forced to smoke a peace
pipe and is inexplicably made a member of the tribe. And there, after a truly
abysmal Indian fashion show with Goldwyn Girls as models, Henry meets up with
his friend Wanenis and, seeing him for the first time naked from the waist up,
spends several moments commenting on and stroking his pectoral muscles and lean
chest. As Richard Barrios observes, it may represent “only a wee moment of
shtick, but nevertheless would hardly have been acceptable by a ‘regular’
leading man instead of a comic”—or, more specifically, by a comic playing a
sissy.
Sally finally catches up with her lover, who—after they restate and
re-sing their love for one another—is about to walk away from her once more
knowing they can never be married. Miracle of miracles, Black Eagle reveals the
truth: Wanenis is a white boy he pulled from a ranch whose father and mother
had died, raising him as his own son. Blessed be the saints, he’s of pure blood
and can marry his white squaw. Sorry folks, but that’s all!
That’s the way this film works, creating such a comic disaster, that
against all odds the nurse gets her Henry, even if why she wants him cannot be
explained. As the song goes:
I wonder
what's wrong with baby
My baby
just cares for me
Looking at this movie today, with its vision of any “others” who don’t
fit the all-American white heterosexual standard as being simply targets of
vaudevillian humor, it’s hard for anyone to like this bawling bigoted baby.
Los Angeles, August 28, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review
(August 2021).
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