dying for love
by Douglas Messerli
Lajos Bíró and Frances Marion (screenplay, based on the fiction by
James Hilton), Arthur Wimperis (additional dialogue), Jacques Feyder (director)
Knight Without Armour / 1937
As argument to those who might suggest that in
the movies after 1934 that I often “read in” LGBTQ content that they perceive
is not really there, I would suggest that, in fact, after the early
stereotypical presentations of pansies, sissies, and men and women in drag,
regarding the later films of the 1930s, in order to discuss any kind of queer
or even odd behavior the writers and directors were forced to either code that
information or to stick to drag representations in their work. Any figure of
sexual or behavioral complexity was presented in a manner that might not be
read strictly as a gay figure yet might be perceived as behaving as a queer
being to those in the know. The latter was not so much a kind of coding, but a
shared reading that comprehended the behavior and attitudes of certain
characters as sharing a great deal with those of the gay or lesbian worlds;
and, in a sense, you had to know how the queer world perceived itself and its
stereotypical representations to sometimes perceive that fact. There’s no way
to absolutely prove these characters are gay or lesbian, and certainly they are
never engaged at a fully sexual level—perhaps a clue in itself—but sensitively
interpreted, could certainly can be read as queer.
If
heterosexuals cannot tolerate the possibility of such characters existing in a
small handful of films in the long dry years in which it was impossible to
actually depict a homosexual figure, I would simply remind them of the
thousands upon thousands of heteronormative characters the gay world had to
endure in the thirty years from 1934-1964 and in the vast majority of films
thereafter.
I
simply ask patience, accordingly, with the films that I myself note aren’t
explicitly LGBTQ oriented or which have no systematic evidence of coding. I am
careful that all the films I discuss in this and other volumes of My Queer
Cinema not to represent blatant misreadings or mere “wishful” thinking.
Indeed, I am slow and careful to come to conclusions when I know that my queer
reading will not be transparent.
Jacques Feyder’s Knight Without Armour is just such a film.
Primarily, the film is a fascinating heterosexual spy romance involving a
British spy who has been asked before the revolution to infiltrate the
revolutionaries. A. J. Fothergill (Robert Donat) speaks Russian so fluently
that he has been asked to translate books into English and vice versa, and has
been hired to return to Russia for that purpose. Almost the moment he arrives,
however, he is told that he must leave the country in 48 hours for his comments
on the Czarist government, and all of his work has gone for naught.
The
British spy Colonel Forrester (Laurence Hanray) attempts to and, after severe
hesitations on Fothergill’s part, finally succeeds in recruiting him, assigning
Fothergill the name Peter Ouranoff and assigning him the duty of involving
himself with a revolutionary group in order to post of their activities. But
the moment he joins a cell headed by Axelstein (Basil Grill), one of the
hot-headed university students involved, Alexis, tosses a bomb into the coach
that carries General Gregor Vladinoff (Herbert Lomas) as he celebrates in
wedding ceremony of his daughter Alexandra (Marlene Dietrich) to Colonel
Adraxine (Austin Trevor).
The student is shot, but makes his way, nonetheless, to Peter’s
apartment only to die there. Before Peter can even escape, he is arrested by
Czarist authorities and, along with Axelstein, sent to the most obscure of
Siberian outposts, where they must suffer cold, isolation, and seemingly
eternal darkness even through World War I.
Finally with the end the War and the revolution, they are freed. Before
they can even return to St. Petersburg, however, Axelstein is made commissar of
a Russian city and extending region and Peter is made his assistant. Nearby
lies Alexandra’s estate.
It
is at this point that we are introduced to Alexandra, played by Marlene
Dietrich.
Dietrich is a notable LBGTQ icon, in part
because she was herself bisexual, having been rumored to have lesbian affairs
with Lupe Vélez, Greta Garbo, and many others, eventually in the 1930s
beginning a long affair with Suzanne Baulé, better known as the cabaret hostess
Frede. She also had an affair with Cuban-American writer Mercedes de Acosta,
who also claimed to be one of Garbo’s lovers. Dietrich’s gathering of friends,
renamed “Marlene’s Sewing Circle,” became a notable Hollywood lesbian grouping
including close friends Ann Warner (wife of Jack L. Warner), Lili Damita (the
wife of Errol Flynn), Claudette Colbert, and Dolores del Río. Edith Piaf was
also a close friend.
Today Dietrich is mostly remembered perhaps for her “drag” role in Morrocco,
which I discuss in these pages, a truly iconic lesbian role that both shock and
delighted Hollywood, depending upon your point of view.
But in Feyder’s film under discussion here, Dietrich plays the role with
great restraint and heterosexual devotion to Peter, who soon becomes her lover
in the film. This film would have been included in this volume, in any case,
since in one of her many needed disguises for escape, she briefly has to play
the drag role of male White Russian Cassock soldier, even if of no great
significance to the story.
There are many brilliant set pieces in this film, and one of the most
notable is the morning when Dietrich as Alexandra awakens in her white negligée
from a night’s sleep and rings for her personal servant. When no one responds,
she rings again, and then rises to ring for another servant, leaves the room to
seek out yet another, and suddenly realizes that they have all abandoned her.
She ties a up her top coat and wanders out of the mansion to face the peasant
locals who, after a brief standoff, attack her.
Locked away in her study, she is eventually faced with commissar
Axelstein, who asks Peter to secretly take her away to Petrograd when she can
be properly tried, the locals being committed to simply murdering their symbol
of the Czarist greed and abuse.
It is upon that long voyage the two take together, encountering on
alternating days White Russian troops and Red revolutionaries that this film
focuses.
Another of the most astounding moments of the film occurs soon after
Peter meets her, taking her to the local train station. There he meets up with
the station master who assures him that the train to Petrograd stops there
every day precisely at 2:20 each day. But soon after, Peter realizes that the
Stationmaster is calling invisible travelers to a train that has never
appeared, that all trains have, in fact, have stopped running and that the
stationmaster is quite mad, running his ghost-ridden world as if nothing had
changed.
In order to protect his charge, Peter helps her to escape through the
Red Russian lines to the nearby White Russian troops, where in another
remarkable scene, the soldiers find dresses for her to wear as she heads what
is to be their last supper, dressed in a slim gown covered with glittering
sequins.
When the Red Army takes over, she is imprisoned again, Peter returning
as a Cassock and stealing a piece of paper appointing him commissar of prisons,
helps her to escape once more—this time in the aforementioned male cassock
garb.
The two hide out in a forest which happens to be on her former estate,
there finally expressing and presumably consummating their love. Finally,
together they catch a train, but upon its stop are forced, like all the others,
to show their hands as evidence of being either a peasant revolutionary or a
wealthy White Russian. Peter passes the test, but obviously Alexandra cannot.
He joins her at the revolutionary table where they send most of their claimants
to the firing squad, just as previously have the White Russians, and the Red
Revolutionaries before that.
The two, pretending to be brother and sister, are questioned first by a
man named Poushkoff (John Clements), who asks threatening questions concerning
why Peter is not serving in the military and what is he doing accompanying his
sister into such territory. His fellow inquisitor, however, almost immediately
recognizes through a photograph that the woman before him is Alexandra, and is
ready to send them both to be shot. But Poushkoff insists that the photograph
is only a somewhat similar and argues that since they have the Adraxine
gardener among their prisoners, that he must identify her first.
We do not yet know Poushkoff’s motives, but we suspect that he has
warned the gardener to disavow knowing Alexandra, which he does. Poushkoff
further demands that they be identified in Samara, he offering to accompany
them there as their guard.
What follows is one of the most inexplicable and provocative sequences
in the history of late 1930 works of cinema. Poushkoff, a man of learning,
takes them into his personal coach, sleeping with them on the two cabin bunk beds
and a couch for Alexandra, and offering to share the little he has in
foodstuffs, bread and cheese. Previously, Peter has bartered with locals,
bringing back cans of meat, brandy, and even other vegetables unheard of in the
current battlefronts. And they share these foods they’ve carried with them with
him.
He
is so thankful and appreciative and beyond that, so enamored of Alexandre and
her lover that by the next morning he collapses into tears in what only be
described as a kind of nervous
breakdown. Most critics have simply described
him as a sensitive man who has become aware of who this couple really are and
what they stand for. But it is apparent to me, that Poushkoff does not admire
Alexandre and Peter because they represent the lost Czarist Russia. He is an
intelligent student who clearly supports the revolution, in theory at least,
but has not been able to abide what happens in reality, has been broken by
having to live with the fact that he himself has helped to kill vast numbers of
individuals over whom he stands in judgment.
Neither is Poushkoff, like so many of the courser males both of the
White Russian and Red Armies who would wish to have sex with her or even rape
her for her beauty, interested in her body. Rather, he is a true Russian
Romantic, a man who admires Beauty and the seemingly courtly love he observes
in Peter and Alexandre, symbolized by the kiss he has observed of Peter
offering Alexandre’s hand as they fall into sleep.
To anyone even slightly aware of character types in both fiction and
film, Poushkoff is a weak man, not fit to be a Red Army butcher who determines
who dies and who lives. A man who cries—particularly in the age of the brutal
Hays Code and the Production Code Administration headed by Joseph Breen—is not
a real man but an overwrought young romantic who is willing to allow this
couple and the romantic love they represent to escape via the Volga Boatmen of
the famous Russian folk song, determined even to commit public suicide to
distract the others from their disappearance into his romantic conception of
escape. Russian literature is full of his kind. And whether or not one asserts
that such behavior is that of a homosexual or not, it is inevitably queer,
representing not the acts of a level-headed heteronormative man in control of
his emotions.
Although one can justifiably recognize Peter as a kind of “knight
without armour,” he nonetheless, is protected by guns, an Oxford education, and
his deep heterosexual desire. He is a daredevil, who ends the film by holding
on to the outside of a departing train with a feverish bride-to-be within. It
is Poushkoff, ultimately who is a true knight without anyone or anything to
protect him. As everyone knows, and Vito Russo reminded us, gay men in film
must almost always die, often to preserve heterosexual love.
*In Yiddish, a pushke is a little tin can for
collecting alms. As
his name further hints, Poushkoff, “poush-head,” is a push-over, even a pouf,
something as insignificant as the palm of one’s open hand to collect alms for
the poor (in Aramic, puska).
Los Angeles, June 9, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June
2023).
