Lloyd Bacon | Fifty Million Frenchmen / 1931

pansy’s disqualified

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Jackson, Eddie Welch, and Al Boasberg (screenplay, based on the musical by Herbert Fields, E. Ray Goetz, and Cole Porter), Lloyd Bacon (director) Fifty Million Frenchmen / 1931

 

The motion picture Fifty Million Frenchmen was “based”—if one can describe the complete gutting of the original and its replacement with a “book” that was already dead on arrival as a kind of adaptation—on the Cole Porter of 1929, which had the same characters but little else. Because of the sudden total lack of the American public’s interest in cinematic musical comedies, inundated as they were with the rise of the talkies, Warner Brothers held back their technicolor musical film hoping things might quickly change. Alas, they didn’t, and by 1931 they had stripped away the Porter’s score and the drained the color out to a black-and-white production to release a script written by three movie hacks, Joseph Jackson, Eddie Welch, Al Boalsberg,* who replaced a theater book by Herbert Fields that was already stretching the limits of Broadway acceptance of zany plots. They assigned the direction to Lloyd Bacon, who had only three mediocre comedies under his belt (he later did 42nd Street), and who certainly didn’t have the fearlessness of the original director Monty Wooley. The Technicolor musical was released in other countries but is now lost.

      The reviewer from the Pre-Code.com site summarizes my feelings about this film:

 

 “All we have left is a start and go comedy that doesn’t shy away from the corniest gags it can manage.

      The plot, as it is, involves a bet between Jack and Michael, two rich men who are vacationing in Paris. Both are in love with Lulu, a dim blonde who is also vacationing in Paris. Jack makes a bet that he can get her to marry him without the use of his wealth, and Michael employs a pair of bumbling detectives, Simon and Peter (the comedic team of Olsen and Johnson), to make sure Jack doesn’t cheat.

       Olsen and Johnson as the star attractions falter here since their schtick is that they don’t really have much of one. Johnson has a high-pitched goofy sort of squeal and Olsen has a stick up his rear, but that’s the most of it. Their personalities melt in the face of a joke, as well, making their interplay seem fairly generic.”

       For the most part there is no real plot, and the work is centered around numerous vaudeville-like skits. For example, upon entering the Ritz bar, Olsen and Johnson, observing a nearby drunken patron who has passed out, attempt to mix a drink using his open, snoring mouth as the shaker. After Johnson is robbed by a woman who they’ve been working with as detectives, Olsen remarks: “Swell detective you are, letting a dame steal your watch,” Johnson snapping back, “That’s all right. I got her bracelet,” holding up the item for all to see as he giggles uncontrollably.

       Jack, the lead, spends most of the movie moping over his inability to find the woman he loves, Lulu Carroll (Claudia Dell), who, as the Pre-Code writer observes, “is as interesting as a piece of cardboard,” so that we hardly care whether or not he might find her without using any the millions he’s inherited. But at least he’s a plausible stereotype, the closest to character for which this film strives.

     Given the years of its birth, along with its parentage of Cole Porter and Monty Wooley, there is inevitably a fair share of “pansy jokes” to be tossed off at various occasions. Indeed, there are enough that perhaps, had this film been just a little more interesting, it might have found its way out of my out my grouping of persnickety sissies and into the more solid and sinful sodomite films; but Bacon and his actors evidently don’t even know what to make of the queer jokes that creep up from time to time.

       Early the film when someone asks what brought them to Paris, Olsen quickly replies “I came over looking for a man,” but since no one knows what to do with that suggestive line evidently, Johnson quickly adds, “I came looking for a woman,” the inquirer asking, “Aren’t there any women where you come from?, he answering “Yes, but I know them all.” Ba-bum, another dead end.

       Soon after, a “real live” pansy slides up next to them at the bar, asking for a drink. “O barman, barman, I say, old fellow, a tall, frosted glass with the tiniest piece of lemon peel.” All Johnson can do is uncontrollably squeal, which might lead our prissy friend to imagine for a moment that he’s one of his kind, but such behavior is so absurd that he simply doesn’t know what to make of it as he continues, “A dram of whiskey, a digestion of bitters, a lump and a half of sugar, garnished with a sprig of mint, two cherries, two red cherries.” He’s made clear who he is, but Johnson is so busy squealing that we hardly identify his species let alone his sexuality. The audience doesn’t need Johnson’s taunts to know what was going down, and probably is now more confused than well-humored.

       The best role in this film in search of a way to be simultaneously naughty and funny, is given the American tourist, Violet (Helen Broderick, who later played the marvelous Madge Hardwick, Everett Edward Horton’s worldly-wise wife in the Rogers and Astaire vehicle Top Hat). Here she plays a woman who has already seen the town without being able to find anything that’s left her feeling she’s “insulted,” and wants Jack, now working as a tourist guide, to take her someplace truly naughty. 

     He shows her dirty postcards, but she’s already bought several of them and sent them off to her nephews and nieces. He offers to take her to “dark theaters with little holes in the walls you can look in,” which she finds vaguely of interest (if she were an art collector 30 years later she would certainly have purchased Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés), and offers her a knife which when you look into its pinhole is a picture of a muscleman covered only by a thong. She’s not insulted, but does ask, soon after, to see it once again.

      A short while later she encounters Olsen and Johnson working as baggage handlers nearby, who have accidently just opened a large traveling case in which there are drawers and drawers filled with women’s lingerie. Coming upon them, she wonders what they’re doing with all the “Curios,” suggesting her attitude toward such feminine undergarments.

 

Simon: “You’re wrong, lady. This is female underwear!”

Violet: “I was right. Curios. You know, I promised the folks back in America I’d come back with some underwear.”

Simon: “Oh, lady. You should have started out with some.”

Violet: “I meant for the folks back home!” 

 

She turns to go, but turns back again, calling out, “Which one of you two girls is a model,” Simon looking Peter, “I told you to keep your hands off your hip.”

     Amazingly, she finally does get them both to model her lingerie choices, dragging in a little bit of crossdressing into the film’s search for naughtiness. But even she’s not convinced, and purchases nothing from them.

     In between these events and the film’s not speedy enough end, Jack, Peter, and Simon attend a formal ball where they pretend to be magicians and show up at the racetracks where they all bet on a losing horse named Pansy, of course. Despite a number of lame jokes (“I hope pansy isn’t a polite horse.” “Who’s pansy by?” “I don’t know. Every time I see her she’s by herself.”), the horse miraculously wins only to be immediately declared as “disqualified.” Bringing back Violet just to deliver the quip, the director has Jack tell her the bad news, “Pansy’s been disqualified,” to which she quips—obviously foretelling the Hays Code decision of two years later—“I thought she would be.”  The writers, however, can’t even let that joke lay, for a few minutes later Pansy is once again declared to be the winner.

     Chasing for a closing, the film later requires Jack to be kidnapped with Simon and Peter running on foot after the auto into which the villains—hired by his betting partner Michael—have tossed him. They follow the car followed by nearly every gendarme in Paris through the auto-clogged streets over the roofs of the cars, down a newly tarred side-street, and through a whorehouse that appears to fear group orgies, before finally catching up and bringing us back to the end of the bet just in time to explain to nitwit who he wants to marry that he’s truly well-to-do. Consequently, she doesn’t ask a single question and mutters out the words, “I do” just as the movie gives up trying to do anything further to save itself or possibly insult its audiences any further.   

 

*Of the three, Boalsberg was the exception, having written, by 1931, Keaton’s The General and Chasing Rainbows, and later contributing to Freaks, A Night at the Opera, and A Day at the Races. In 1933 he also directed one a movie with one of the healthiest portrayals of a gay figure in the 1930s, Myrt and Marge. But at the time Jackson had already written for dozens of now-forgotten films, so he was obviously hired as the head writer.

 

Los Angeles, April 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).