Clarence Brown | A Woman of Affairs / 1928

signaling a story that can’t be told

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Arlen and Bess Meredyth (screenplay, based of Arlen’s novel The Green Hat), Clarence Brown (director) A Woman of Affairs / 1928

 

The 1928 film adaptation of Michael Arlen’s 1924 fiction The Green Hat met up with the recent 1927 code that movie executives had already created before the actual Hays Code of 1929. The film script written by Arlen and Bess Meredyth was not permitted to state the original book’s explanation why one of the major figures in the film, David Furness (Johnny Mack Brown), suddenly jumps to his death soon after marrying Diana Merrick Furness (Greta Garbo), nor why her brother and David’s dearest friend Jeffry Merrick (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) is so excitable regarding everything about David and refuses after his death to even see his sister. Nor could the script explain why Diana suddenly becomes so ill that she nearly dies soon after having a one-night affair with her former lover, Neville “Nevs” Holderness (John Gilbert). With all this censoring going on, in fact, it’s a wonder that Clarence Brown’s film is still so very watchable, forcing us to conclude that in its storyline this film is a melodrama while perhaps visually it is one of the most interesting of the coded LGBTQ movies of the period.

       The film holds back its answer to David’s death almost until the end, and the other two questions are simply left in mid-air. Jeffry simply admires and would emulate David we are left to assume on the narrative level, and his death naturally turns him even more into the alcoholic he was becoming in the first scenes of the film. He won’t see his sister because he presumes her lack of love for David had a great deal to do with his friend’s death.

        Diana’s own illness is expressed in the story simply in response to having lost out in her lifelong love of “Nevs” to his new bride Constance (Dorothy Sebastian) and his father Sir Morton Holderness’ (Hobart Bosworth) long hatred of her because of her freer and open attitudes toward living.

       The beloved, much-admired, and seemingly exemplary David Furness, it turns out—get ready for this!—was an embezzler, about to be taken away to prison when he jumped out their bridal suite window to his death.

       No one with even the slightest ability at age 10 to question whether or not there’s really a tooth fairy believes any of this narrative nonsense, and if they did they certainly don’t deserve to watch Brown’s intelligently directed film. For Brown and his significant actors make it quite apparent through his images and their acting what is really happening, while letting the plot go on its own merry way. They clearly signal to us what the story is not allowed to say.

        From the very first scenes, the young Fairbank character, in a surprisingly intelligent performance, sits out long periods of intense drinking with an almost manic exuberance any time his friend David is around. He admires his “decency”—a word which the censors also demanded instead of the word used in the original, “purity”—his honestly, and nearly everything about him, especially his looks. He can hardly keep his hands off him.

        As Jeffry states it plainly: “There are few chaps in the world as fine as you, David. I’m just a Merrick—all our men die drunkards.” But when a moment later, David expresses his concern for his friend: “I don’t like to see you drowning in alcohol,” Jeff immediately throws his full glass into the hearth, without drinking for the rest of the evening.

       And Jeff is furious when his sister Diana arrives late, having kept her date David waiting for so long. She’s been out with Neville, the man she loves which Gilbert plays so reservedly that we sometimes wonder if he’s all there. It is certainly not the same man who so intensely embraced Garbo in Brown’s Flesh and the Devil only two years earlier, a man who incidentally ended up in love with his best friend. But then Gilbert’s character here is basically a passive cypher.

       Jeff doesn’t seem to mind if David might marry Diana, sharing the same kind of attitude that Lew Ayres seems to take in a similar film about a wealthy family, George Cukor’s Holiday of a decade later, who is happy to see Cary Grant marry his sister just to keep him near him—as long it’s the right sister, Linda (Hepburn) not the spoiled and selfish Julia (Doris Nolan) to whom Grant’s character is engaged. Yet in Brown’s A Woman of Affairs we also sense Jeff’s jealousy and resentment in Diana’s treatment of his beloved David, along with his conviction that their marriage will never take place.

       The moment that David wins the rowing competition for Cambridge the very next day, Jeffry leaps down a substantial distance—almost as Fairbanks’ athletic father might have—from the high banked viewing cabana where he has been watching the race with others in order to be at the river spot where David shores his boat, the first to greet and congratulate him.

      If this isn’t love, pure homosexual desire—not youthful idolatry as the script would have it—I might never trust my “gaydar” again. But I can fully trust Brown’s coding and strangely Fairbanks’ compliant acting. Jeffry loves David so deeply that when the latter jumps to his death, Jeffry immediately retires to a room in order to drink himself to death. The film allows no other logical explanation. In short, Jeffry is a homosexual in love with David, whether or not they have ever engaged in sex.

       Diana’s difficulties are more complex, but they shout class snobbery on the part of Sir Holderness and his passive son Neville, who allows his father to send him off to Egypt. Diana sees through the plot immediately, that Neville has been sent away in order to keep him from marrying her, the two having been “playful” lovers from childhood on, she, however, having grown up to take it seriously even if Nevs has not.

       Neville’s momentary rebellion ends the moment his father sits him down for a talk, the son giving in almost before his pater has opened his mouth with his well-stocked British platitudes about the pride of familial generations (“I know you will do what is right. Ten generations are watching you.”) No wonder Gilbert appears throughout unable to “act,” not only act as a character but to even act out his character; there is nothing there for him to embody.

     Poor Diana is left alone at their kissing-tree for Neville’s father to break the news, she, with her own pride, making a “gentlemanly” agreement that she will not interfere with Neville’s future decisions.

   In Nevs’ long absence, Diana seemingly gives into the patient courting of David Furness, but apparently will still not give into his sexual needs, loving Neville even for having lost him. The scene they have together is a rather odd one, soon after their marriage, he still having rice in his pocket.

    Garbo lies in the middle of her bridal bed, the light brightly shining behind her, with the groom outside of two large, closed doors, apparently afraid of entering or, at least, fervently debating whether to enter. Finally, he taps gently on the door, she inviting him in. He goes to her, kisses her forehead and tells her he loves her, pausing to complain that she has never once told him that she loves him. Her answer evades the question: “You are fine and honorable David. I want to make you happy.” At that moment there is a knock on the outer door, and David creeps away from the bridal bed to be greeted by two strange men.

       David drops the rice in his hand almost as if it were a magic talisman, the two men entering the Hotel de Deauville suite. Back in the bedroom, we watch Diana pull the light switch off and then on again, on and off, on and off, as if were madly signaling for help, a boat about to crash on an unseen shore or shoal.

 

   One of the men produces a large metal object that at first glance looks almost like a claw or a huge ring rather than being what we eventually perceive it to be, one of a pair of manacles. Getting out of the bed, Diana enters the living space. For a moment David seems sick, but suddenly rushes over to the window, opens it, and leaps out to his death.

      No one can believe that David would have any reason to have committed suicide, to have willingly jumped from the window, and Diana allows that belief to remain until Jeffry arrives insisting on the only other interpretation, that she has been the cause of his death, that her inability to truly love him has led him to take his own life. All the others accept milder views in accordance with that prescription. And, accordingly, she has no choice after but to live the lie they have imagined and created for her, taking on lover after lover throughout Europe, a catalogue of men later nicely collaged for us through a reporter’s leafing through his newspapers’ files as background work for Diana’s return to England upon discovering of her brother’s severe alcoholic illness.

      Before we move forward in the plot, however, let us quickly think back over the events that happened that fateful night of David Furness’ death. What if, as the plot later argues, he had been an embezzler and, desiring to do the decent thing, had told his wife. She stands by him, but cannot truly love him, obviously, and does not wish sex, although what sex has to do with it at this point is not quite clear. The detectives show up with handcuffs ready to cart him off to jail, and he, unable to face those who have believed him to be so decent, jumps to his death. It almost makes sense.

      Yet questions remain. Why is he so fearful of simply entering her room for marital sex if he has been honest with her and she has still accepted him in marriage? How can she possibly describe him as still being “honorable” if he is an embezzler? Although the signal that danger is ahead may arise from her fear of his arrestment, who is she signaling? Herself? And why did the prop man choose such an absurdly large pair of manacles that look more like claws than police detective handcuffs.

     I suggest that the director is telling us that what we later are hear about this series of events is mistaken. Everything is wrong with this picture. A thief cannot be honorable. A woman does not signal to herself of an upcoming threat. The police do not play with props that exaggerate the circumstances of the character’s crime. An everyday thief is simply arrested and jailed. Perhaps even the leap from the window seems in excess. The entire scene does not fit the melodramatic circumstances, but seems to be something out of a noir of a few years later. One might accuse the usually precise director Brown, in this case, of pure exaggeration. For the scene does truly shock us, and we seek an answer to these events even when we are told the full story near the end of the work, accepting it like a key that doesn’t quite fit.

     Neville, meanwhile, is engaged to the family-approved Constance. She is the kind of perfect young wife that money is always able to sniff out: truly innocent, fresh, beautiful, and what some might say, almost mindless except for the fact that we soon discover her to be a rather intelligent sleuth. Even as we first encounter her and Neville at a quiet family dinner with their and the Merricks’ mutual friend Dr. Hugh Trevelyan, she knows something is amiss as Diana herself—the woman who after her husband’s death is unwelcome back in Britain—brings a message to the doctor asking him to come immediately to help save Jeffry’s life.

      Jeffry, as we know, cannot be saved. Even in 1928 Hollywood had already established the precedent that gay men must die. (See my comments on The Barefoot Boy of 1914). And this film is not even on Vito Russo’s list of all the queers Hollywood killed off over the years.

     The occasion of Diana’s visit, however, leads to Neville’s realization, just three days before his wedding, that he is still in love with Diana. And even as Diana speeds away with the good doctor, Constance perceives that she has to get to know more about this legendary woman, particularly since, she soon realizes, the “huntress” still controls her husband’s heart.

      Neville and Diana link up again immediately after Diana takes the doctor to her brother, leading to a one-night affair in which the film shows them not even having removed their formal clothes—their encounter symbolized only by the fact that Diana, after kissing him, retreats to the bedroom—before the doctor shows up in their room announcing Jeffry’s death. Diana becomes pregnant and later suffers a miscarriage, while the always obedient Nevs returns to his Cons, attempting to live happily ever after.

       Nevs knows nothing about Diana’s pregnancy or the miscarriage, and, for that matter, neither do we. Superficially all we both know is that Diana now lies sick in a Paris hospital. Once again Doctor Trevelyan serves as the go-between, visiting Neville and his bride to beg him to visit Diana in the hospital where she keeps repeating his name.

       Constance now knows enough to demand he go, and is ready to pack his bags, but he, pretending to be the honorable man for once, insists his wife join him. He meets up with the woman now in a feverish semi-coma, not even able to recognize him. But when he leaves her room, Diana gets up out of bed to find the flowers which the doctor has just removed. Finding them on the nurses’ desk she holds them in one arm that can suggest only two things: that she has just won a beauty contest or that she is embracing a baby, of which obviously only the latter applies. So Brown tells us the truth, we realize what she has kept from Neville and which the writers have been forced to keep from us. Her desire to see Neville now makes sense, and his return comforts her, bringing her back to reality.

    But in that reality she now spots Constance and once more is forced to do the “decent” or the “pure” thing, denying their love for the wife’s sake, even if this seemingly innocent child has by now recognized that she will never again fully have the love of her husband.

     When Diana finally returns again to England, smuggled in, as she puts it, by Trevelyn, Neville meets up with her, this time insisting that they marry after his divorce from the woman who he has now made to suffer. A final showdown with Sir Holderness, who in his last stand attempts once more to prevent their love, even calls up her relationship with David Furness, which finally brings forth the “truth” the cinema has supposedly been withholding, Neville revealing—over Diana’s protests that “it is the one thing that must never be told”—that her husband was an embezzler. “He killed himself because he was going to prison. Diana paid his thefts and kept his name clean—that’s decency!” But even here, so Diana claims, Neville has stolen one last time from her, in this instance, as she puts it, “You’ve taken from me the only gracious thing I’ve ever done.”

     She rushes off in her auto, crashing into the kissing-tree where she is killed.

    Once more, we feel like we are in one room observing characters acting in a manner that suggests something of the greatest gravity, while being told a story about a liar and a mere thief whose robberies Diana has attempted to cover up. Something is still wrong with this story, signaled, just as Garbo previously did, by the director’s visual presentation.

     We’re encouraged, in this respect, to further question the information the plot has put upon the table. From whom, for example, did David, who appears to have been a Cambridge student, embezzle thousands of dollars? The story doesn’t even suggest he is employed. For what purpose has he stolen all this money, surely not to live a richer lifestyle since he seems to be living a rather ordinary existence, despite his well-tailored tuxedo which every young man wore in those days? And why is his having stolen money something “that never can be told,” words that reverberate with Oscar Wilde’s statement about loving one’s own sex. Within the movie itself there are no answers, but many in the audience of the day would have read Arlen’s notorious book, and would have known that David’s real “dilemma” was not a crime but a condition, that he had been infected with syphilis. The signal that Garbo in her wedding bed was signally was not herself, but to her audiences. Pay attention to what is about to happen; it isn’t what it looks like—or for that matter what we will be later told it was.

       According to the notions of the day, when venereal disease was the equivalent of AIDS, literature and cinema would have pointed to only two relevant sources of such a disease: 1.) a heterosexual involvement with servants (as in Ibsen’s Ghosts) or regular encounters with female prostitutes; 2.) if one were engaged in “perverted” sexual activities such as homosexuality. We have no evidence at all of David being a heterosexual cad, particularly if we recall that Jeffry thinks him to be “pure”; but we have even reason to suspect that he might have been gay, having sexual encounters with Diana’s brother, which may also account for his own drinking and early death.

       If he was gay, it was still understandable why he may have wanted to marry; there was no way in 1928 to be openly gay and be perceived as a “decent” fellow, let alone a “pure” one, with which the original fiction aligns him. Like the boy in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire who married Blanche Dubois, his homosexuality, one can presume, made it difficult to consummate the marriage.

       As an honorable man, a decent man, the person everyone knew David to be, he would surely have told his wife of his situation, and his vacillation to even enter her room on their wedding night suddenly makes perfect sense, as well, unfortunately, as does his sudden leap out the window; while the visitation of the detectives makes little sense, as if they were a manifestation of some dream-like fear, signified by the outsized handcuffs. We now can comprehend why for Diana the truth “cannot be told.”

       Even Brown’s film could not tell that truth, despite the director’s and his actor’s endless signaling of it. The tragedy of this story suddenly redeems Brown’s seemingly overstated melodramatic gestures.

       Brown, it is often noted in film commentaries, was Garbo’s favorite director; but so too was he a favorite of Joan Crawford, Lionel Barrymore, John Gilbert, and Clark Gable. In this film, as well as the earlier Flesh and the Devil, Garbo is revealed as a woman who enters a room, sits on a couch, or stares into space unlike any female US-born actor of the day. And in this early film we meet a Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. who bears little resemblance to his more common role as an acrobatic womanizer.

       This MGM movie is still very much available; but studio censors, not the Hays Code people, almost made this film a lost one hiding in plain sight.

 

Los Angeles, June 29, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).