Edward F. Cline | Go Chase Yourself / 1938

winning by losing

by Douglas Messerli

 

Paul Yawitz, Bert Granet, and Walter O’Keefe (screenplay), Edward F. Cline (director) Go Chase Yourself / 1938

 

Although director Edward F. Cline helmed a significant number of works with gay subtexts over the early years of filmmaking with “Fatty” Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, and Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, his 1938 film with comedians Joe Penner and Lucille Ball, both appearing in their first feature films, cannot truly be said to be a queer movie.

     But this work is a true farce, and when the not so very clever bank teller, would-be singer, and daily sucker for every contest and promotional gimmick named Wilbur Meeley (Penner) accidentally meets up with two gangsters, Nails (Richard Lane) and Icebox (Tom Kennedy) and reveals where the bank’s real safe is hidden, the work turns into a kind of campy film that, at moments at least, can’t help it—despite the restrictions of the Motion Picture Code and Joseph Breen—but appear at moments to be a coded gay film.

     Meeley spends a great deal of time in his deposit line talking with “friends” who encourage him to give up small amounts for their pretended “give-aways,” raffles, and other imaginary ways of making money, but can’t be bothered by the mousy and meek sissy (Chester Clute), who finally finds the opportunity to tell Wilbur that he has actually won something, a streamlined trailer.

     Wilbur is overwhelmed by his luck, the only problem being that he doesn’t even own a car, and must, like a horse, pull the streamlined trailer home by rope.

     There he is met by his not so happy wife, Carol (Ball) who is not at all impressed that he has finally won something that has utterly no purpose in their lives and who, while accomplishing numerous household chores, is asked to provide her husband with his continued advances on his miniscule weekly allowance. She suggests that he spend the night sleeping in the trailer instead of joining her in their conjugal bed.

      Wilbur gladly does so, delighted by his new utterly pointless prize.

    Meanwhile, the crooks sneak into the bank, steal $50,000 from the hidden vault and attempt to outrun the police who are on their track. In this film of impossible coincidences, they discover, while trapped in a cul-de-sac, Wilbur’s trailer, hook it up to their car, and accordingly elude the police. And before the night’s out Wilbur finds himself sharing his small trailer bed with Nails and the even denser-minded Icebox.

       If this isn’t gay then it surely should have been, as suddenly Wilbur—who earlier in the day caught his suit coat in the vault door and instead of reopening the locked door, simply snipped the fragment away with a scissors—is suddenly seen by police and the angry head of the bank, Hamilton Halliday (Granville Bates), as one of the gang.

      Before he even knows what’s happening, Wilbur is not only spending one night in bed with the boys but traveling across the state as the gang rushes off into hiding, as well as sharing friendly breakfasts with them in the moderne trailer kitchen. So dense is Wilbur that, despite his realization of what the others have done, he actually feels pleased at moments to be perceived as their friend. Obviously this is a man desperately in need of approval and love, which he certainly doesn’t get a home or in the workplace.

      Of course, it’s not really love they offer, merely determined as they are to keep him close so that he won’t report their whereabouts. Nonetheless, the fool is able to find a way by crawling up a desert electric transmitter to get a worker to help him call his wife, and later, again in the frenetic whirl of coincidence, to be able to help the daughter of a wealthy copper tycoon, Judy Daniels (June Travis), temporarily escape her upcoming marriage to a French count Pierre Fountaine de Louis-Louis (Fritz Feld). 

      In a matter of a few frames, Judy is whisked by her family back home to marry the rascal, Carol has boarded a train to rescue her now defamed husband (how could such an incompetent, she muses, ever be involved in such a crime?) and encounters Pierre, a total fraud and actually a would-be Casanova (in the manner, one might argue of Alberto Beddini, the Italian fashion designer in Mark Sandrich’s Top Hat of 1935), whom she uses as a shield by demanding he invite her to his wedding with Judy Daniels to escape the police and banker Halliday who have joined her on board hoping to be led to Wilbur.

      When the gang members finally realize that the young woman Wilbur has helped is the daughter of the J. D. Daniels (George Irving), the copper titan, they use their now always confused bank teller to invite themselves to the wedding.

       At the Daniels estate everyone meets up with one another, as Wilbur, of course, imagines his wife is having an affair with Pierre just as she imagines he is somehow involved with Judy Daniels.

     Pierre, Judy’s father and mother, Halliday and the police are by this time so confused no one can comprehend who is who and why they are attending the would-be wedding. But one thing is certain: Pierre is revealed to be a crook and Carol, Wilbur’s wife, is definitely not Pierre’s cousin. They end up in a local jail overseen by the spittoon spitting, radio-listening warden (Arthur Stone), who despite his stolid Swedish skepticism is finally convinced by Carol—playing a role of a jailed moll not dissimilar to Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby—that, having heard Wilbur on the radio singing a song of his whereabouts and plight, that she knows where he is.

     They rush to the sight, finding Wilbur and his now now-so-friendly brothers, but all end up in the trailer, which (don’t ask) finally gets disconnected from the gangster’s car and goes endlessly careening backwards down mountain paths while somehow miraculously remaining on the curving roads.

     When it finally crashes into a haystack, Wilbur flying through the air into the stack, he is proclaimed as a hero (after sending what was supposed to be Judy’s suitcase with a ransom note, but actually a matching case with the stolen money back to the copper king). Carol, still handcuffed to Pierre and the Warden, moves to kiss him, but results instead in the Warden kissing Wilbur, the lonely, long-employed Warden actually smiling with pleasure and Wilbur jokingly pinches the Warden’s butt.

      This farce is pure hokum, but we still glimpse possibilities of love and relationships that by 1938 were simply not permitted to be represented in US movies. And if this film isn’t precisely an LGBTQ work, it is most certainly queer.

      I decided to watch this work because it appeared in the fullest list of gay films on Letterboxd, Beryl Parkey’s “Any and All LGBTQ+ Films” where a lot of films appear just because someone or another thought it seemed queer to them. It’s not to be fully trusted. Yet it certainly is more reliable than the completely humorless and absolutely blind AI system Google has installed which greets me when I query on any gay context. AI, sounding again a bit like a schoolmarm scold, assured me “There is no evidence of explicit gay content. The film is a fast-paced "screwball comedy" plot focused on a bank teller (Penner) who wins a trailer in a raffle and inadvertently gets involved with bank robbers.” It went on to explain just how strict the code was in those days, as if I hadn’t yet done my homework.

     I think I’d rely any day on the eyes of someone who just thought it sounded gay—and not just in the “happy and mirthful” manner.

     If by film’s end Lucille Ball’s character is not precisely happy with her lot in life, moreover, I might remind my readers of the most unhappy trailer trip on which she ventured with her later husband Desi Arnaz in Vicente Minnelli’s The Long, Long Trailer.

 

Los Angeles, May 5, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).