George Stevens | Alice Adams / 1935

talking herself into romance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dorothy Yost, Mortimer Offner, and Jane Murfin (screenplay, based on the novel by Booth Tarkington), George Stevens (director) Alice Adams / 1935

 

When she wasn’t playing a boy (Sylvia Scarlett, 1936), an amazon warrior (in the stage version of The Warrior’s Husband, 1934), a lesbian-like pilot (Christopher Strong, 1933), or a witch (Spitfire, 1934),* and before she became known for playing strong, brilliant, and eccentric women who generally fought equally successfully for her men and against them (Holiday, 1938; Bringing Up Baby, 1938; The Philadelphia Story, 1940; Woman of the Year, 1942; Adam’s Rib, 1949; and Desk Set, 1957), Katharine Hepburn portrayed a vulnerable young woman of the lower class, simply due to lack of financial resources unable to compete with the wealthy girls of the town who had from time-to-time included her in their parties.

     The competition had only one objective: a wealthy young man who would provide love and support for the rest of a woman’s life. The central scene of Dorothy Yost, Mortimer Offner, and Jane Murfin’s rewriting of Booth Tarkington’s dark comedy, is the grand ball celebrated quite early in the film, organized by Mildred Palmer (Evelyn Venable) to which the young Alice Adams (Hepburn) has been almost incidentally invited. Alice must wear a calico dress made over from its appearance at an earlier party; and unable to afford a corsage, she is forced to steal violets from a public park; finally, she has no date, as in Vincente Minnelli’s later small town social dance in Meet Me In St. Louis, forced to go with her shanghaied brother, Walter (Frank Albertson), who would prefer to be out dancing and gambling at a black night club.

      Her brother dances one dance with Alice; but after that she can’t even find a handsome young man to ask her except, in another foretelling of Minelli’s classic, the monstrously bad-dancer and gay mamma’s boy Frank Dowling (Grady Sutton, who performed this role in the same year he had played a character in drag in Wig Wag after playing another such figure in Rough-Necking the year before). As Alice’s spirits wilt, so do her violets. The only joyful moment of the night is when Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray), an out-of-town rich boy rumored to be Mildred’s fiancé, asks her to dance—at the request of Mildred, so Alice imagines.

       When Arthur, with Alice’s bidding, finds her brother tossing dice in a back room with the black orchestra leader, the poor girl, now completely flustered, demands her brother take her home, permitting him to go off wherever he wants while she quietly sits in her room, looking out at the rain, in tears. Unlike Cinderella, she has returned home long before midnight and found no apparent Prince at the ball.

       For me, this ball says everything that the rest of the film merely reiterates: Alice’s father, Virgil (Fred Stone) is, as critic Farran Smith Nehme summarizes, “a mid-level employee who has risen as far in life as he ever will,” while many others of his generation have risen to powerful positions. Alice’s mother (Ann Shoemaker) is convinced that with the glue formula he has developed with another friend—working on time at the optical factory of Mr. Lamb (Charles Grapewin), might have and still could make him rich if only he’d not been so subservient to Lamb.

     Yet, despite an accident—vaguely hinted at in the film—from which Virgil is recovering, Lamb has continued to pay his salary and promises him his job back when he fully recovers.

      And despite her sadness and, to an extent, the loneliness she suffers from the social cruelties of the small town, Alice and her father are still proud and supportive of his past life, despite the constant complaints of unhappiness, mostly out of her love for Alice, expressed by Mrs. Adams.

     Indeed, despite the small town gossip about Arthur Russell and Mildred Palmer, it is to Alice whom Arthur is attracted. And most of the rest of the film is spent with Alice dating the handsome outsider. Unfortunately, the script and the director have convinced Hepburn that she must play an everyday girl pretending to be a patrician, speaking in a manner in which Hepburn might normally speak, but as Alice, exaggerating and giggling over lines that in her best roles Hepburn flawlessly express. At this point in her career, Hepburn had just had a series of flops, particularly with The Lake on Broadway, and her role as Adams temporarily saved her career.

     But frankly, I find this role a difficult one to endure, despite my love of Hepburn’s acting talents. She is great at playing the patrician as in Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, and The Philadelphia Story, but closer to the bad actress in Stage Door in this role. Fortunately, the affectations she insists upon keep slipping and what even she describes as “just me,” the ordinary girl behind the badly learned elocution lessons shows through. As Nehme suggests: “Also lovable are Alice’s flashes of honesty, the yearning and sense of her own daring when she tells Alfred, ‘I decided that I should probably never dare to be myself with you; not if I wanted you to see me again.’”

      Her prediction that at some point Mildred Palmer and her family will reveal her for who she truly is, in fact, comes true, particularly after her father, finally convinced by his harping wife, when he uses up their savings and takes out a loan on their house to bring his glue factory into reality. Lamb claims that the formula is his, and that Virgil has now stolen it from him; Alice’s brother gets into debt and steals from Lamb’s payroll; and Alice’s mother convinces her that it is time to invite Arthur to dinner, a three-strike evening which has the potential of making all of Alice’s nightmares come true.

     Most critics speak of the Adams’ comically disastrous dinner—a multicourse series of basically heavy peasant dishes all served up one after one on the hottest night of the year overseen  by the hilarious gaffs and often seemingly intentional “subversive forms of protest” (Nehme) by the hired maid Malena (Hattie McDaniel)—that truly does end, at least in the novel, their relationship as the best sequence of the film.

      Actually, had the film stayed true to Tarkington’s book, MacMurray, in his fairly dishonest and caddish abandonment of Alice, could have added this role to his later “bad guy” roles such as in Double Indemnity, Caine Mutiny, and The Apartment. Certainly, he might have seemed more credible than as the ever-patient romancer.

      Both director Stevens and Hepburn argued against the producer Pandro S. Berman against changing the original story; indeed Offner had been hired to rewrite the script written by Yost and Murfin, to bring it back closer to Tarkington’s original; but gaining the support of Hepburn’s friend George Cukor, Berman convinced them of the film’s ending wherein Walter’s jail time and Virgil’s financial ruin are corrected by a reunion with Lamb brokered by Alice; when she returns  to her porch she finds Arthur still there, having heard everything and willing to marry Alice nonetheless.

      As Nehme points out, in the original Alice returns to the stairway of Frincke’s Business College where Alice first encountered Arthur after the dance, this time climbing the rest of the stairs, “on her way to a life in office work.” The original book reads: “Half-way up the shadows were heaviest, but after that the place began to seem brighter. There was an open window overhead somewhere, she found, and the steps at the top were gay with sunshine.” That noble ending would have accorded with the Hepburn I love, while the other merely marries her off like all the others girls of her age, dooming her presumably to a boring life of a housewife having to deal with a man with seemingly little of intelligence. Just as throughout most of this film, Alice will have to do nearly all the talking.

      It’s fascinating that even a popular writer such as Booth Tarkington wrote endings for both this film and Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Andersons that studio heads thought far too dark for their audiences, in my estimation ruining both films.

 

*The roles of these early films were particularly those lesbian-oriented Hepburn sought out according to what George Cukor told Scotty Bowers (Full Service, 2012). Cukor continually attempted to steer his friend Hepburn away from such ventures.

 

Los Angeles, August 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).

George Cukor | Sylvia Scarlett / 1935

refusing to learn

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gladys Unger, John Collier, and Mortimer Offner (screenplay, based on the novel The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett by Compton MacKenzie), George Cukor (director) Sylvia Scarlett / 1935

 

In his 2012 tell-all book, Scotty Bowers—who served for years as Hollywood’s unofficial sexual agent (without taking money for his services) for dozens of stars over several decades—tells the story that at one of George Cukor’s notorious gay-friendly parties, Bowers met Katherine Hepburn, with whom he spoke to at length that afternoon, struck by her intelligence and cocksure attitude. He describes her as appearing with a “severe short haircut, tightly cropped and combed with a boyish side part. She was wearing a suit with trousers and had no makeup on at all. She looked infinitely more masculine than feminine.”  

      Cukor, one of her favorite directors—she worked with him on ten films—later admits to Bowers that he was often challenged by Hepburn to allow her to dress as she appeared at the party, which her hairdressers, costumers, and make-up artists continual resistance. According to Bowers, Cukor complained that Hepburn “didn’t know how to behave in public.” “It’s not that she’s a dyke. I have no trouble with that. But the studio does. They’ve been pleading with her not to advertise that fact in public but she ignores them.”*

    Whether or not one wants to believe Bowers who also claims to have over the years set Hepburn up with many lesbian companions—although I’d suggest that most of the Hollywood figures he names as being gay, lesbian, and sexually indeterminate have by now been substantiated as being so by others—in Hepburn’s case, her friend, gossip columnist Liz Smith and biographer William J. Mann have both confirmed Bowers’ assertions.

     My point in mentioning all of this is not to claim the great actor as a being a unsung member of the LGBTQ community, but to simply contextualize her film from 1935, Sylvia Scarlett, in which she most certainly did have the opportunity to wear her hair very much as Bowers describes her wearing it years letter, along with pants, and a look that overall is quite masculine. Indeed, in the film the young female daughter, Sylvia trims away her braids and most of her hair, combs it into a mannish style and dons male attire to become a boy she names Sylvester so that she might join her criminal father, Henry (Edmund Gwenn), in his escape from their home in Paris to his native England.

     The events that befall them, both on the boat over and their early adventures with a con-man they meet on the boat, Jimmy Monkley (Cary Grant) are not of terrible importance. The one event that suggests some of the innuendos that are to follow is when the always scheming Henry, falling in almost immediately with Jimmy—a name, incidentally, which Hepburn called herself as a tomboy growing up in Connecticut)—reveals to him that he has lace wound around his chest as if it were a corset. Although we already know that he is planning to sneak this lace, stolen from his last job, through customs, his sudden decision to unbutton the bottom of his shirt to reveal that he is wearing the lace corset, might at first suggest to anyone other than the criminally experienced Jimmy that his new acquaintance loves to wear the common feminine item used for trimming dresses and in underwear apparel the way that film director Ed Wood loved to wear angora sweaters under his shirts.

     But Jimmy is wise to it all and, in fact, reports Henry to the customs’ officers so that he may get through the line unchecked with an illegal container of jewels. Once Henry and his new-born “son” are freed from being retained at the customs office, Jimmy repays the price Henry expected to see from its sale, along with the fine he has had to pay. And with that Jimmy has suddenly acquired two new partners in crime.

   Their criminal attempts, however, are stymied by the good intentions and open generosity of Sylvester, who, for example, when they attempt to con a maid Jimmy knows, Maudie (the comedienne Dennie Moore) of her mistresses’ pearls, ends with Sylvester demanding they give them back so that she won’t lose her job.

     Frustrated with the young boy’s behavior, the three, along with Maudie decide upon Sylvester’s suggestion to take to the road as traveling performers with the queer-laden moniker of The Pink Pierrots. Singing and dancing are not their forte, and their first audience’s reaction, led by a handsome local well-to-do painter, Michael Fane (Brian Aherne), results mostly in laughter, for which the always impetuous Sylvester takes them to task.

      Yet even if they have little talent and seem to take in no money regarding this “caper,” everyone seems to be vaguely happy once they have moved from the city into the country, the pattern of many a pastoral fable which Cukor’s film promises to become. Henry, having fallen for Maudie, takes up house with her in one of the caravans, leaving Jimmy and Sylvester to other—much to the inner Sylvia’s understandable dismay.

     Accordingly, for a few moments at least this movie settles into a lovely tale of sexual indeterminacy, as Maudie, taking the young boy under her wing, asks him about his whiskers, helping him to imagine his own oncoming puberty by using an eye-liner to draw a Ronald Coleman-like mustache over his lips. Always ready for a fling with anyone in pants, Maudie suddenly hugs Sylvester and plants a big kiss on his lips, again making the crossdresser fairly uncomfortable.

     Almost before he can escape from Maudie’s sexual embraces, however, Sylvester must face bedding down with Jimmy, who seems to love the idea of having the “boy” join him under the covers, as he strips down to the waist, commenting “You’ll make a proper hot water bottle”—yet another incidence of screenwriters hinting to their audiences of Grant’s sexual preferences off screen.

      Even the womanizing Michael, who to apologize for his and his friend’s mocking of their act, invites them to an evening celebration at his nearby cottage, feels something special about the boy. As Film Comment critic Michael Koresky reminds us, Michael feels something special about Sylvester: “instantly intrigued by young Sylvester [he comments] ‘I like you . . . Come up to my studio.’ It’s because of, not despite, Hepburn’s boyishness that Michael feels an attraction. ‘There’s something about you…’ he muses, while Hepburn stretches out on the gymnast rings that suggestively dangle in his studio.”

      Later, Michael not only repeats his fascination but imagines that his fascination with what his mistress, Lily, has described as “such a pretty boy, has something to do with his own art, which apparently does not simply include applying paint to canvas but seducing those who sit for him: “I know what it is that gives me a queer feeling when I look at you . . . There’s something in you to be painted.”

      Time went so far as to insist that the film “reveals the interesting fact that Katharine Hepburn is better looking as a boy than as a woman.”

       Although this might have been meant as an absolute put-down of the actor and the film in general, their comment demonstrates that if Cukor and his writers had been able to continue to amble down this lane instead of veering off to the road laid out of the Hays Code and studio notions of what the general public should be allowed to see, they might have created an absolutely splendid movie.

       But before you can even blink, the former feisty Sylvester, who has immediately fallen in love with her would-be Pygmalion, steals a woman swimmer’s summer frock and appears for her sitting with Michael as Sylvia, the woman underneath her more fascinating previous persona.

      Michael, in relief for his inexplicable attraction to a boy, now laughs it off and, as any male assured of his dominance might, proceeds to tell his new-born woman how to attract the opposite sex. When Lily, who has stomped out of the party the night before after being slapped in the face by Sylvester for abusing his drunken father, gets a look at her lover’s new guest, realizes that she too has been “tricked,” now kisses the girl in a fake-show of feminine bonding. Perceiving finally that now even as a pretty young woman she is once again being humiliated by both Michael and his Russian lover, Sylvia returns to the little circus she has helped to create, perhaps even regretting her attempt to enter the heterosexual world.

     In this world also—as Maudie runs away with another man from the love-stricken Henry, who on a stormy night goes in search of her to bring her back—women are punished for the very frailties that the men so admire. In this instance, however, it is Sylvia’s father who is destroyed in the process, falling to his death in the dark from a nearby cliff.

     There are now only the two, Jimmy and Sylvia left, and Jimmy, seemingly just as attracted to her in her new costume as before—probably realizing that she might serve as good of a hot-water bottle—suggests they move on together as a duo. Jimmy’s offer of their pairing quickly leads her to openly note, as she might equally have to Michael’s attempt to mansplain her own sexuality, “You’ve got the mind of a pig.”

      “It’s a pig’s world,” he immediately responds.

      Indeed, in a world dominated by men such as Michael and Jimmy, it is. Hearing the cry of a drowning woman calling out for Michael to save her, Sylvia (and the movie itself) quickly zigzags back into Sylvester mode, as the Hepburn character throws off her female shoes and athletically jumps into the roiling waters to save Lily, who she presumes has attempted suicide over her and Michael’s rocky relationship.

      As soon as the reborn Sylvester has deposited her former rival into a bed in the remaining caravan, returning to life as Sylvia, she runs off to report the event to Michael, who jumps into his car with her in tow to redeem his actions. But when they arrive at the camp they see the caravan has disappeared. The true opportunists, Jimmy and Lily, have run off together, and the chase is on, pausing only for a few moments at a fork in the road, where Michael explores the terrain to the right and Sylvia the route to the left. There, she, temporarily at least, toggles her way back to gender confusion which had once made this movie so interesting—but now simply serves as source of confusion—when the very first person she encounters just happens to be the bather from whom she had stolen the dress.

     Now forcibly re-attired in male dress again, the now thoroughly torn Sylvia/Sylvester goes speeding away with Michael, this time with the mad Sylvester at the wheel—since Sylvia has accidently slammed her fellow traveler’s fingers in the door—each of them apparently attempting to return the other to his/her proper heterosexual partner.

      Michael is certain that Lily will insist upon returning with her new lover to Paris, so the traveling detectives follow. On the train that is destined to speed Sylvia/Sylvester back to home country, she spots the fleeing villains but refuses to tell Michael of her discovery. A few moments later, he witnesses them together in the dining car, also keeping the truth from his friend.

      Recognizing that perhaps it no longer matters whether or not it is Sylvia he loves or her inner Sylvester, he pulls the train’s emergency chord, halting their voyage just long enough so that they can slip back into nature and return to the place from where they started—he hopefully no longer needing to explain to her about how to become a woman and she without the need to even identify her gender.

      In this “happy” yet more traditional ending, however, we still know that something important is missing, namely the earlier mystery behind their sexual beings and desires that had so electrified them. And the future, given the society which they must now embrace, looks fairly bleak.

       It is no wonder that audiences of the day were confounded by this film, which lost over $363,000, an astounding amount in those early Depression years. Cukor never worked with the film’s studio, RKO again, and Hepburn henceforth was described as “box office poison” until she made the very heterosexual movie with Cukor at MGM, The Philadelphia Story for which she had purchased the rights.

      We now might better comprehend why Cukor would describe Hepburn to Bowers, soon after that successful movie’s release, as a person who “doesn’t know how to behave in public.” It seems that she was still Sylvester instead of being Tracy Lord.

 

*Bowers also quotes Spencer Tracy as insisting that the stories about his and Hepburn’s secret love affair were all a product of the studio publicity department, and he resented the fact that, at times, Hepburn seemed to really believe it, wishing that she might just leave him alone. According to Bowers, the straight Tracy loved and demanded letting him suck him off. This is Hollywood after all. Truth is always a difficult matter.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema (September 2020).

 

Arthur Robison | Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) / 1935

the sentimental dreamer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hans Kyser and Arthur Robison (screenplay, based on the original story and screenplay by Hanns Heinz Ewers and Henrik Galeen), Arthur Robison (director) Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) / 1935

 

The young Prague student Balduin (Anton Walbrook) of Arthur Robison’s 1935 version of The Student of Prague, first filmed in 1913 and again in 1926 is quite different in many respects from the two before him.

     For one, instead of moping alone at the beginning of the story, worrying about his finances, this young student, popular with his peers, sits in a drinking hall celebrating with his other friends the birthday of his girlfriend, Lydia (Edna de Greyff). He is a healthy, loving individual, not the moody outsider of the Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye movie.

     The student drinking bar, moreover, is visited by a new guest in the village, the opera singer Julia (Dorothea Wieck), performing for a few nights at the Prague opera, she too being a very different creature from the wealthy local Countess Margit Schwarzenberg of the original.

      A friendly woman, Julia, delighted by the student’s recognition of her, even is gracious enough to perform a song for her admirers, not from her opera repertoire but a student drinking song very different from the anthem with which the students begin the film.

      Her song, composed by Theo Mackeben, recounts, according to the English translation, two men Straight and Bent, the latter of whom “loves his totties,” while the former drinks “rum.” Straight dies and Bent, amazingly survives. It is a very odd foretelling of the two aspects of Balduin’s later personality.

      Read today, of course, is very tempting to perceive it as a kind of straight/gay dichotomy, “bent” in British English often meaning a “queer” or “faggot.” But according to most sources, that meaning of word “bent” appeared in England only in the 1950s. From the turn of the century through the 1930s, “bent,” long associated with ideas of corruption, being spoiled, or ruined, meant to get or to be drunk. It is perfectly reasonable, accordingly, for the bent man (or drunkard) to love his “totties” (a variation presumably of the Irish hot toddy) and the straight man—he who also takes his liquor straight—to prefer rum. The excuse of drinking a “hot toddy” is usually to keep out the cold and fortify the system, which would also help to explain why the bent man survived, while the straight man died.

       But I still find it difficult to believe that Mackeben, who composed popular songs and operettas in Weimar Berlin as well as playing in cafes and dance bands early on, might not be also be hinting at some sexual manifestation in the German original; and I refuse to believe that by 1935 some smart British queer who had spent a while in the Berlin gay bars could not easily have realized that the opposite of someone who is sexually straight might be described as an “eccentric” or “ruined being,” other meanings associated with the word bent—not to ignore the obvious verbal oppositions of the two words. In Scottish, moreover, a “tottie” means a “tot” or young boy or girl (“children”) while in British it is also a sexual slur of a young woman; and “rum” in British signifies someone who is “eccentric,” “strange,” or “queer.” In short, the bent man loves his kiddies or young ladies while the straight man loves the queer. I’ll come back to this song and its conundrums later in the essay.

       Even more remarkable from the early versions, this 1935 version of original Edgar Allan Poe conceit of the doppelgänger casts the Faustian figure named Scapinelli in the 1913 version as a far more dangerous man of the world who appears to have been something close to a Pygmalion regarding Julia, having, so the script hints, provided her or taught her how to become an opera singer of such charm, and, accordingly, she is still under his sway, although she has gotten him to promise to leave her alone, which as the film opens he has for a long year, this Scapinelli, named Dr. Carpis (Theodor Loos) finally finding it impossible to be without Julia’s golden voice.

       As in the earlier version, Balduin falls madly in love with Julia (the substitute for Countess Margit) and quickly forgets his former innocent serving girl Lydia, even fighting over the mis- treatment of Julia with a fellow student through a fencing match which he bloodlessly wins.

       If Carpis is hopelessly in love with Julia, he nonetheless spends the entire evening at the opera, to which Julia has invited Balduin for his courtly manner, starring at the handsome young student through his opera glasses, suggesting an interest far deeper than a mere matter of checking out the boy’s infatuation for Julia. To further involve himself with Balduin, he helps the student to discover the opera singer’s lost bracelet, and encourages him to attend the annual opera ball to gain the attention of the diva.

       Unlike Scapinelli, who offers his Balduin a vast fortune for the mirror (and, of course, the image of Balduin in it), Carpis only demands that Balduin should cover the mirror over with a drape, keeping the being who he describes as Balduin’s “sentimental dreamer” self under wraps, a clear reference to  Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, in this case hiding the innocent, beautiful self in the closet, while permitting the competitive, brutal lover—the “straight” would-be Casanova—to go freely about the world.

       Balduin gains his fortune from the gambling tables, after being “taught” by Carpis; and indeed throughout the rest of the film, the man later realizes that he cannot lose any game of chance and nearly goes mad proving it.

       As I wrote in my 2021 essay on the early version of this film, the Wilde story has just as much significance there; but here it is far more explicit, and Balduin’s adoration of his younger, innocent self makes for more sense in this 1935 film, whereas in the earlier version, in which the mirror image was let free as well, it was harder to sympathize with the mirror image, which had become the monster. Here, in a reversal of Dorian Gray story, it is the straight “free” Dorian whose physiognomy begins to change, while his visions of his earlier self remain beautiful and pure.

       The mirror image is not set upon the world, but appears, so it seems, only in the imagination of increasingly brutal Balduin, who when he fights with Julia’s other suitor, Baron Waldis (Erich Fielder), despite his promise not to kill him, can no longer control himself.

        Julia finally realizes that she cannot escape Carpis, while this version of the devil, having attained his revenge, determines to leave her alone now forever. 

      Unlike both the 1913 and 1926 versions which used Expressionist cinematic conceits to great advantage in representing Balduin’s fear of his other, far more dangerous self—the very reasons why most critics still today prefer those silent films over this 1930s talkie*—here it is quite clear that Balduin merely conjures up his mirror image, he is not a being who can enact his own desires.

And in this manner, we recognize the true villain as being Balduin himself and not the monstrous doppelgänger. Admittedly, that removes most of the film’s horror. As Dan Stumpf observed in Fantasy-Horror Movie Review, “This Student wouldn’t scare a nervous cat.”

     But its ending is even better, I would argue than was Henrik Galen’s 1926 version with the memorable Conrad Veidt. I wrote of that 1920s ending:

 

“What Galeen reveals in the final show-down between Balduin and his shadow is that the man-without-a shadow has terribly aged, becoming a hardened and howling older man, while his shadow self is still an attractive young student. And in some respects, his murder of his former self equally represents jealousy and revenge for that fact. Galeen handles the final shooting of Balduin far better than did the 1913 version. Here the shadow, returned to the mirror, pulls his own shirt open to prepare a naked target for the gunman, who when he shoots, observes the fragments of self fall into pieces of glass around him, some of the fragments still revealing his own reflection. At first, unaware of his own wounds, he seems to take comfort in that fact, that his “other” image is now trapped in the glass, but gradually he realizes that those fragments are the last images of a dying man, himself.”

       Knowing that the gunman is the truly evil being beforehand as we do in Robison’s retelling, the scene is even more touching, and far more openly homoerotic. To Mackeben’s music that might remind one of an Alfred Hitchcock score in its driving rhythms and lyrical melody, Balduin literally begins to tear his room apart in his search for the now missing other. Gun in hand, he watches his own delusions, as the mirror image returns, entering the room and walking past Balduin as it returns to stand in front of the mirror. as in the 1926 version, he pulls open his shirt to allow Balduin’s bullet to enter directly into his body.

       Balduin shoots, cracking the mirror. He moves toward the mirror, his own image growing ever larger. Looking at himself very close up, almost in a kiss of his own image, he observes: “There he is again, the sentimental…dreamer.”

      Opening his own shirt he sees his wound, touching it, before puts his finger up to touch lips of the mirror image before sliding, along with the mirror image, to the floor. He picks up one fragment, looking into at his own face, before it drops and he falls dead.

      Narcissus has never before been played out so marvelously.

      And so. the straight man does indeed love his rum, his queer self, while the bent man loves his own totties, his own youth symbolized by the “sentimental dreamer.”  Whether Julia’s song was sexual or not, the ending of this film is most clearly homo-sexual, representing a deep love of the same sex, and, in this case, the same being. 

   There is no question that the earlier scenes and even perhaps the abstraction of the silent film version’s story made for superior works of cinema. But Robison’s Student is in many ways far more logical and even more complex; and its ending is my favorite of the three.

 

*The most famous commentator on this film was Graham Greene, who described this film, in his 1936 review, as “dull [and] a curiosity, a relic of the classical German film of silent days.” Unfortunately, I fear, some critics believed him at his word without bothering to explore the 1935 film themselves.”

 

Los Angeles, August 12, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).