Christy Cabanne | The Midshipman / 1925 [Difficult to find]

nice boys do not always make the best lovers

by Douglas Messerli

 

F. McGrew Willis (screenplay, based on a story by Carey Wilson (screenplay), Christy Cabanne (director) The Midshipman / 1925 [Difficult to find]

 

Make no mistake, this difficult to see silent film from 1925—a copy of which does exist in George Eastman Museum Motion Picture Collection—is a heterosexual romance with no obvious LGBTQ content.

   I’ve included it here, however, not even because it stars the very gay Mexican actor Ramon Novarro as the movie’s star, James Randall, and features actor William Boyd as midshipman Spud, long rumored to have had an affair with Howard Hughes with naked pictures involved, and a possible later relationship with gay actor Randolph Scott, despite Boyd’s five heterosexual marriages and his famed portrayal later in his life of the clean-living upright cowboy Hopalong Cassidy.

    Neither of these actors portray figures in this film that are even hinted to be gay, although Novarro’s beauty does most certainly dominate the story.

    This film, after all, was mostly filmed on location at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and was authorized by the Department of the Navy, allowing the use of an entire brigade of midshipmen as extras There is not even a sustained coded message in the plot which mostly involves Randall’s attraction to and courting of his young mentee’s Ted Lawrence’s (the freckled-faced Wesley Barry) sister, Patricia (Harriet Hammond).

    What this film does reveal, however, is a few of the tropes that would later appear in Brown at Harvard (1926) and even, in more subtle ways, in William A. Wellman’s classic Wings (1927) and William Wyler’s later Tom of Culver (1932). Of course, anytime you gather a mass of young men living together night and day, the tensions and relationships between them often hint at homoerotic possibilities, particularly when you match up someone like the beautiful Novarro with the fit but intellectually inferior Tex (Harold Goodwin).

     Early in the film, the resentful Tex is matched by the pansy dance teacher who assigns him a “ladies” role in relation to Randall’s “male” position. Yet here the dance, instead of a similar scene in Tom of Culver in which the dance releases the expressions of the two men’s friendship and possible love, ends in a kind of comic and clumsy march of the two across the screen.

     There’s also a very strange moment early in the film when an uppperclassman asks the freshman plebs, gathered around the table for their meal, two strange questions, which in fact do seem quite coded. The first: “Why do they call a battleship ‘she?’ Tex Wilson has no answer. But Randall immediately comes back with what seems to be a clever riposte, “Because it can’t grow a beard.”

This strange and enigmatic reply actually makes sense in the homosexual vocabulary: in gay slang “a beard” is a person—usually a woman—who knowingly or unknowingly dates or marries a gay man to provide him with heterosexual cover, helping to conceal his true sexual orientation. The ship, filled with men, is a beloved cover for the presumable behavior of the men within. Tex simply doesn’t get it, but Randall is praised for his “brilliant” answer.

     The second question seems even more confusing: “Why are battleships painted gray?” Randall’s seemingly absurd answer also receives commendation. “So the fish will know they’re not radishes.” This perhaps refers to the Vermont term “had a radish,” referring to the fact that wild radishes are poisonous to sheep and rabbits, suggesting that anyone who eats such an underground product will not survive the encounter. It relates, also perhaps, to another underground idiom referring to something that’s no longer worth anything, that has no meaning or purpose. Gray, in short, is not red, bloody, and dying, but something that belongs to areas of life that are not fully understood or accepted by mainstream society. In the water, the unknowable gray beast is alive and purposeful, even dangerous, not worthy of taking a bite.

     The fact that these coded messages suddenly appear out of nowhere hints at where this movie might have ventured, but due to circumstances doesn’t go there. Wilson simply shakes his head in confusion, the conversation seemingly having washed over his and most of the audience’s head.  

     From now on, so the script seems to warn us, everything will be quite literal. A simulation of ships moving together in dangerous waters, soon after, ends up not in what might have been an important example of bodily contact, but in a brooding call by Tex for Randall to stand up and fight it out just because his symbolic boat has been crashed into by the men manipulating Randall’s play craft.

 

      The fight, encouraged by an upperclassman, does reveal a kind of male-on-male admiration of the body, if nothing else. As they both strip off their shirts, the young man overseeing their battle is at first quite impressed by Tex’s impressive pectorals and chest, but when he looks over at Randall’s even more beautifully developed thoracic cage, he almost smirks in utter appreciation of his physical beauty.

     Against his will, Randall quite easily defeats the more brutal and coarser Tex, but even then he shows sympathy with the man he is beaten up, and is quite angry when his fellow midshipmen attempt to congratulate him for his prowess. Quite obviously, he has been raised as a peaceful man.

But again, whereas Wyler or Wellman might have pushed their warfare and its closure as an almost romantic gesture, director Christy Cabanne turns it almost in a grudge which Tex continues to hold through most of the film until he finally discovers that the villain of the piece, Basil Courtney (Crauford Kent), has sent a woman to visit, against regulations, the on-duty guard room to ruin Randall’s career, while actually destroying the innocent Lawrence’s chances to graduate.

     He saves the day in reporting the truth, in short, not because of any deep feeling he may have developed for his fellow classmate, but out of sense of duty.

     An earlier scene in which the young midshipmen are learning how to row, which in Conway’s Brown at Harvard becomes an expression at their youthful beauty, a truly homoerotic scene in that film, is in The Midshipmen turned into a comic scene, the men remain fully dressed as the boat begins to sink.

    Even Randall’s growing fondness of the young midshipmen Lawrence whom he comes to mentor and help find his role among his high achieving schoolmates, which in the other films I mention might have suggested perhaps an inkling at least of romantic interest, is here simply a gesture of good will, Randall apparently so disinterested in the young boy’s looks that when Lawrence asks him to help fill out a dance card for his sister, Patricia, at the upcoming dance, he, imagining her to look like her brother, bows out of any participation in the dance.

    She is, of course, the stunning woman with whom he falls in love, the relationship that dominates this movie, which allows no time for these young boy’s admiration for their fellow peers.

     What is fascinating is how this film uses similar tropes in the other films I mention that help to indicate that there is some subtle homosexual relationships going on, to push away from that very possibility. In the process the handsome man at the center of this film, Randall (Novarro) becomes a kind of unapproachable virgin, as the villain describes, the “unkissed” hero.

      Accordingly, even though it is quite clear in the plot that Randall has fallen in love with Patricia and will do everything in his power to save her from Courtney’s clutches, it is difficult for us to imagine what his love consists of other than the dedicated love of his elderly mother which consists of tears and chaste kisses.

      Is this man really capable of sexual love? We certainly have clue of any sexuality behind the beautiful body he inhabits. And even at film’s end, when insists that Patricia marry him, she pushes him away, he demanding that she has a duty to love him, coming close to a kind of misogynistic view that characterizes Coutney’s virtual attempts to lock her up and rape her.

    If only Randall might have kissed one of the boys, we would at least have known that his hormones were in good shape and he was ready for love. Here, the virgin king seems as stand-offish and unready for any kind of relationship as the innocent pleb he was on his first day, tutored to enter the institution only because his mother insisted he emulate his dead navy-serving dad.

     Howard and I had a neighbor when we first moved in Washington, D.C. in 1970, Bob Orr, a lovely gay man who became a beloved friend and helped us to discover opera. He was a professor at the Annapolis Naval Academy who had been cited several times as an outstanding and highly admired teacher. Bob died the following year of recurring Leukemia, which I now suspect might have been an early case of AIDS. (He regularly stalked the stacks and bathrooms for young men of his age in the Library of Congress so he told us and, as we learned in helping to clean his apartment, he had been a lover of Anthony Perkins). How marvelous it must have been for the midshipmen of the day to have such a loving, sensual being as a teacher.

    In The Midshipmen we get no glimpse, other than the pansy dance teacher, of these “future admiral’s” teachers. The higher-ups simply proclaim new rules which they must obey. For a movie supposedly about heterosexual love, accordingly, we get no indication of what that kind of love consists of or what it even means. These boys seem to remain utterly innocent.

    The only lust that is even hinted at in this work is that upperclassman’s broad smirk when he catches a glimpse of Randall’s naked chest. And the only real bodily contact that occurs in this film are the arms the boys put around one another in their dancing lesson and the slugs which Randall regrets having to inflict on Tex. Surely somewhere in the mass of male flesh someone, I hope, must have sneaked into another boy’s bed and discovered what he might define as love.

    This film almost becomes an exemplar of why filmmakers sometimes need to involve their characters in homosexual relationships just to learn about and prove they’re capable of heterosexual love. At least the British always understood that boarding school and even university was a learning ground for young men to explore sex. These American boys are clearly unready to settle down and have families, which may be why so many USA men gather each weekend at their local bar in an attempt to reclaim their schoolboy days.

 

Los Angeles, April 14, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).