Charley Rogers and Fred Guiol | Skirt Shy / 1929

the most kisses between two males ever portrayed in a movie

by Douglas Messerli

 

H. M. Walker (screenplay) Charley Rogers and Fred Guiol (directors) Skirt Shy / 1929

 

In several of his later films Harry Langdon plays a character that seems best described as a drunken baby, a grown man who speaks with a slur and can hardly put a full sentence together who looks so misshapen that he appears not to yet grown into an adult. This is particularly true of his Hal Roach films from 1929, of which Skirt Shy, an early talkie, is among.

     There’s no use trying to establish a coherent plot. Let us just say that the woman for whom Dobbs the butler (Langdon) works for, Maggie Herring (May Wallace), is bankrupt and was hoping in her latest meeting with her beau Edgar (Tom Ricketts) for a marriage proposal. He almost utters it, but can’t quite get it out, and besides he has now to hurry for the train since he’s traveling—to where and for how long is never explained.

      Maggie, however is certain the mortgage collectors will arrive the very next day, so she gathers her butler and maid, Nancy (Judith Barrett) to tell them that she must let them go, and hurries off to the bank to see if she might postpone the collection process.

      Almost immediately Edgar returns, having missed the train, now with a bouquet of roses. He plans to finally propose to Maggie. Seeing him at the door, Nancy pleads with Dobbs to find a solution in order to keep him in the house until her mistress returns, but Dobbs is lucky to even find his way across the room, let alone imagine a coherent plan. Knowing that their jobs on the line, she forces Dobbs into female attire, pleading with him to keep Edgar in the house by suggesting that she is mad at him.

       How anyone other than Dobbs himself might possibly perceive him as being a facsimile of Maggie Herring is a problem resolved by Edgar losing his eyeglasses almost the moment he enters the room. Simply seeing the outline of someone in female apparel who smells of perfume, which Nancy has sprayed upon Dobbs in plentiful squirts, he attempts to propose, with Dobbs playing hard-to-get as he attempts to evade Edgar’s sudden changed demeanor, attempting to kiss his lover every opportunity he gets. His evasion leads to a chase through the botanical shed.

      Everything suddenly becomes even more complicated as a long-forgotten beau of Maggie, a cowboy friend of her youth (Arthur Thalasso) also shows up ready to marry her as well, cash in hand. He too is infected by a desire to kiss his sweetheart, and it soon becomes apparent that Langdon now holds the record of the most kisses between males ever portrayed in a movie. Perhaps only later in the century would this record be broken.

    As the two loving beaus encounter one another, their actions turn into hate as they quite meaninglessly struggle to get rid of the other through gunfire, bricks, and even bees, Dobbs taking the brunt of it and even joining in the attempt to drive away the cowboy who is the more fit of the two.

      The endless skits that involve their warfare are increasingly tedious and, I’m sad to report, not very funny. But finally, Maggie returns to find her glass arboretum destroyed and the two men exhausted, the cowboy particularly upset by the fact that he has discovered that Maggie is actually a man.

      Presumably she marries Edgar and lives happily for a few years longer, looked after by her quite incompetent but truly loyal butler.

     

Los Angeles, December 8, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).