Dorothy Arzner | The Wild Party / 1929

no time for men

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Hopkins Adams and E. Lloyd Sheldon (screenplay), Dorothy Arzner (director) The Wild Party / 1929

 

Already in the 1920s a certain amount of authorial and directorial coding with regard to LGBTQ issues was taking place. William A. Wellman, for example, embedded his tale of male love in Wings (1927) within the narrative of war-time camaraderie, a nearly perfect fit that covered for their obvious visual affection and kisses. For the everyday movie-goer, not acquainted with the classic literature itself, even Manfred Noa’s presentation of signs of male sexual desire in Helena (1925) were easy to embrace by even the most devout homophobe within the context of wartime heroism and the kind of deep friendship that often develops between men living and fighting together day after day. It almost seemed to explain the island retreat at the end of the two former Legionnaire friends in Clarence Brown’s The Flesh and the Devil (1926) and certainly detracted our attention from what the sailors visually showed us in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). A close male friendship, particularly when a slightly younger man claimed to admire and want to emulate an older friend as in Brown’s A Woman of Affairs (1928) stood as good cover for a passionate love relationship and sexual boyhood friendships such as that in Jean Epstein’s Finis terrae (1929) which were even more opaque to audiences disinterested in looking deeper or unable to read beyond narrative declarations of heterosexual normativity.

     With women it was even easier to cover any possible lesbian interest. After all, females were known and still are for their communal gender involvement, and even in the Victorian age deep love of the unsexual kind expressed between women did not raise eyebrows. So for a lesbian director such as Dorothy Arzner it was not terribly difficult to code her 1929 talkie The Wild Party by gathering around the central character Stella (Clara Bow) several college chums who make up a group named the “Hard Boiled Maidens.” Recording their conversations with a boom mike, Arzner could present a rather complex narrative of young heterosexual desire while still cloaking any same-sex desires in the language of female friendship, distracting those who did not wish to recognize the depictions of the lesbian relationship between Stella and her hard-studying and non-partying opposite, Helen (Shirley O’Hara). A bit like Eisenstein, Arzner’s film shows us one thing while telling us something else. And for those who are most attracted to normalcy, that “something else” was for more disturbing than the open heterosexuality of these young girls, even if in their sometimes scandalous behavior might appear shocking for the time. Their heterosexual naughtiness was far preferable to the darker secrets that are played out before our very eyes.

     Film critic Luke Aspell perceptively writes: 

  

“As well as social space, Arzner also creates romantic interpersonal space, most strikingly in the naturalistic choreographies of homoerotic body language between Stella (Bow) and Helen (Shirley O’Hara). Just as Bow’s performance often seems plural in its transitional quality, a detailed physical performance accompanied by speech rather than an integrated speaking performance, so the scenes between Stella and Helen have two distinct, simultaneous meanings. As dialogue scenes, they are discussions of heterosexual activity; as images, they are depictions of a lesbian relationship.”

 

     This would be far more difficult in a silent film as in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, who was able to show us another reality only by his intense intercutting, sometimes blurring what we might imagine we are seeing by allowing us to glimpse only in an instant or two a man coming up behind and standing close to another or two men moving together as in a kiss. But with the use of a boom microphone, Arzner was given far greater freedom by allowing us to hear many voices speaking at nearly the same time in conversation which in its college girl banter sings the praises of the male body while sometimes hugging close the female friend.

     Once again, Aspell’s comments in his essay in Film Issue are provocative:

 

“Freed to move the microphone over and between her actors, Arzner creates an aural social space, and, despite the camera’s comparative immobility, can also follow mobile group conversations, as when the ‘Hard-Boiled Maidens’ gather around Stella (Bow) asking her to tell the story of the spoons in her luggage. The gradation between intelligibility and unintelligibility is relatively subtle; whereas crowded voices were often being used during this period purely for the novelty of their sound (frequently run, unsynchronised, over silent footage), the voices in The Wild Party are always distinct and embodied enough to carry narrative significance; as Sara Bryant notes, the sound of ‘women collectively chattering, singing, and laughing’ creates ‘an unruly acoustic experience that, at moments in the film, prompts from male characters ineffective disciplinary responses… or mild fear.’”

 

      The story of the “spoon,” for example, is crucial one in the narrative plot since it establishes how Stella accidentally met a man on a train, returning in the night after a bathroom visit to a berth she thought was her own in which she finds a man, James ‘Gil” Gilmore (Fredric March), who turns out later to be her anthropology teacher at Winston College where she is enrolled. Indeed, it is her relationship with him, first as an enemy, then as her savior, and finally as her lover and confidant that appears to be central to the entire film in terms of its heteronormative plot.

      His attempt as a teacher to tame the wild and thoughtless young girl who gets into trouble is the first signs indeed that he is interested in Stella. When she and her “HBM” friends get turned away from a class dance for their skimpy costumes they drive to a nearby roadhouse where they are accosted and she kidnapped by drunken men, which for all practical purposes constitutes the heart of the film. It is those actions, after all, which allow Gil to come to her rescue, admit his love for her, and ultimately to win her over to become his wife, promising at film’s end to whisk her away to Malaysia where together presumably they live happily ever after in an exotic and fulfilling world of adventure and love.

      But even as Stella tells what at first seems a nearly nonsensical story of the spoon (awarded to her as a “teasing” medal for her possible attempt to “spoon” or make love to him), the action of the girls around her tell us something different from where that narrative will take us.

    Helen, a studious girl, is hoping to win an award for the outstanding student which will pay for her continued education at the school, spends most of her time, unlike Stella and the other girls studying and typing up papers. Yet the moment she appears in Stella’s busy room just before she tells the story of the spoons, Stella goes to hug her and tease her face with a puff, actions with which she does not engage with any other girls. Throughout this movie, in fact, Stella can be seen hugging her roommate, something one might not necessarily notice—these are after all young girls who signify their many emotions through their bodies—except Stella seems to grow calmer and less girlish around Helen, and behaves toward her differently from the others.

      Helen, in turn, seems to have utterly no interest in men and obviously is desperately fond of her roommate. Were this film to be in color we can almost see her blush with pleasure each time she meets up again with the vivacious and beautiful Stella. At one point, when Stella teases her about spending all her evenings hard at work studying instead of searching out a man, Helen makes it quite clear that she has “no time for men.”

      The wild night at the roadhouse is without Helen. But at a later party in one of their boyfriend’s mansion, after she has cajoled and insisted that Helen join her in the fun, Stella is insistent at an early hour to return back to the dorm as she has promised her roommate. But this time even Helen seems to be enjoying the outing, particularly after Stella has saved her from the arms of a drunken boy who Stella and the others have “dizzied” out the door—dancing him in so many circles that he literally stumbles out the front door and collapses—and hooked her up with George (Jack Lunden), a boy who evidently Helen is attracted to, in part because of his kindness and decency.

      After agreeing to stay later at the party, Helen and George walk off to the beach where they remain for hours, simply sitting together innocently enjoying the moon and the feelings they have for one another.

       In the meanwhile, however, Stella has heard that Gil has been shot, although not seriously, by one of the men who had attempted to molest her. Truly suffering over the fact, she ditches her boyfriend for the night—over his great protestation—and retires to another room, truly shaken up over the event, particularly because if word gets out about the reason for the shooting both her and his reputation and her stay at the college will be challenged. When she realizes it is past time to return, she is disturbed by hearing, as another girl puts it, that Helen has gone “into the wilds,” the place apparently where some girls go to make love. She seriously goes after Helen, calling her name and is truly disturbed by finding her with George so far removed from the house, even though Helen assures her it was all innocent. But we realize in this series of untypical selflessness and true concern for Helen and Gil’s welfare that Stella is indeed far more complex than she might superficially appear.

       If her and Gil’s love appears to be the arc of the story, it is in fact far less important than this event and what happens after. Helen takes up a correspondence with George, writing him that she cannot see him because she is studying hard to win the class award, and recalling the night they spent together.

     Meanwhile, impatient, after a month of his absence because of the healing wound, to find about Gil’s condition Stella again goes far out of bounds by visiting him in his rooms late at night. Stella’s class foe, Eva Tutt, sees her going to Gil’s house, follows her, and finds proof of her visit through a rhinestone bow design that has broken off of Stella’s heel as she climbed over the fence. Rushing back to the dormitory, Eva pulls the fire alarm forcing all the girls out to be accounted for by Faith Morgan (Marceline Day), the highly ethical class president.

       Stella makes it back just in time, but Eva knows her secret. Moreover, as the girls rush out of the rooms the winds of the hall blow the stack of Helen’s correspondence over the floor and into the hall itself. It is inevitable that Eva will find the very page that Helen has written about her love and illicit (although pure) experience on the beach with George.

        And it is this sub-narrative that is truly the most important, since ultimately, when Stella discovers that Eva has Helen’s missing letter and has turned it into Faith who in turn has sent it on to the faculty committee that is the most important element of the story.

      For the very first time, Stella acts truly selflessly and maturely, joining Faith at the faculty committee to claim that the letter was hers, not Helen’s, arguing that Helen is the only one worthy of the class award and would never have been involved in such an affair.

        Her act means her own expulsion from school. As she packs up, exclaiming with usual pluck that it’s time to move on, keeping the truth about her reasons for leaving from Helen, and truly suffering for having to leave Gil, we see Helen almost in tears over the reality that she will have no one at school any longer who loves her as much.

       That Gil, impressed with Stella’s actions, decides to leave school as well, showing up on the train just as Stella is about to hand over her ticket to the conductor, seems like an add-on plot maneuver, particularly his announcement that as a couple they will soon be traveling to Malaysia. Who, in a US Hollywood-produced movie ever honeymooned permanently to what was then a British colony nearby Borneo, Thailand, and Indonesia, countries where women in the movies nearly always got into trouble and seldom came back happy. This seems like something from another script like George Melford’s East of Borneo of two years later or Bette Davis’ torrid murder romance The Letter of a decade later, told here only as a bromide to hide the real story of girls in love and Stella’s sacrifice to protect their secret.

     It is interesting in hindsight that neither Rose Hobart of the former movie nor Bette Davis was happy in her Southeast Asia location or romance. Joseph Cornell later devoted an entire film (1936) to the clips from East of Borneo just to convince us how terrible Rose’s life had been, which was later turned into camp in Ken Jacob’s Blonde Cobra (1963). Certainly, it is hard to imagine Clara Bow sweltering in the evening heat as she sips martinis by her hubby’s side.

      As we might have expected, however, coding does indeed work, leaving a film open to different kinds of reading through time and alternating perspectives. As critic Richard Barrios notes:

 

“Arzner's staging, particularly of its dormitory intimacies, gives it a Johnny Arthur-like transformation of something palpably different [from what might read like a dimestore romance]. The reviews of The Wild Party preferred to remain on the subjects of Clara Bow's voice....and the general silliness of the material. Only occasionally did they single out the unusually fluent direction, and never did they speak of the uncommonly tight and personal bonds of the 1930 graduating class of Winston College.”

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2022

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (July 2022).