Marcel Varnel | Girls Will Be Boys / 1934

convenient cross-dressing

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roger Burford, Clifford Grey, and Curt Siodmak (screenplay and scenario, based on a play by Curt Siodmak), Marcel Varnel (director) Girls Will Be Boys / 1934

 

In this oddly titled British film—it concerns only one girl and she actually doesn’t want to be a boy—the truly misogynistic Duke of Bridgewater (Cyril Maude) is visited by his granddaughter, Pat Caverley (Dolly Haas) who, discovering the Duke’s hatred of women, dresses as a boy visiting in an attempt to uncover why he has excommunicated her father and to learn perhaps if he (her male double) might become the heir.

      Given the entry of a woman disguised as a man into all-male world ruled over by an addle-minded and toadying head butler, Grey (Edward Chapman) and a handsome business manager Geoffrey Dawson (Esmond Knight), there are plenty of moments of male hysterics as Pat convinces everyone she is a boy, except for Grey who has brought her, very much against his will, back to the Bridgewater mansion.

     Much like Gilbert Pratt’s 1924 comedy Grandpa’s Girl, Haas’ Pat proves to be a spunky, independent thinker who, although put through heavy training to turn him/her into a better physical specimen, inevitably falls in love with Geoffrey who together finally find a way to convince the old geezer of a grandfather that a female heir is just as good as a male.

     The only rather clever twist in this simple crossdressing tale is that when Pat turns back into a woman in order to help greet and serve as hostess to the visiting Princess of Ehrenstein (Irene Vanbrugh), her grandfather thinks Pat is still a boy now successfully dressing up in drag to provide the social graces he has felt missing when greeting the unwanted guest. The Duke doesn’t seem to be amazed at all of how wonderfully convincing his male heir is as a female impersonator, but simply seems mystified that all the men around her, including the Princess’ womanizing son, Sanders (Charles Paton)—who the female Pat flirts with in order to make Bernard jealous—can’t see through his grandson’s disguises.

      The work is well directed, and there are a few delightful comic moments, but for the most part by 1934 this kind of tale had become a stale subject that titillated and joked about crossdressing in the manner of Viktor/Viktoria rather than truly being interested in transgender desire. Pat, in fact, is totally relieved by having to transform herself back into her cis-gender self, and discovers, in the end, no matter how much she might wish to dismiss the woman-hating coot of a granddad, she loves him dearly; he realizing that the admiration is mutual, meaning that she will inherit the estate and marry its handsome business manager, the perfect resolution of family and financial concerns, in short, the best of all possible worlds.

      By 1934, frankly, the whole pretense of convenient gender confusion and resolution was becoming boring. Of far greater interest is the film in which Haas played just previous to this one, Das häßliche Mädchen (The Ugly Girl, aka The Ugly Duckling), directed by the Jewish filmmaker Hermann Kosterlitz (who in the US would later be known as Henry Koster), a film which used her character to explore the implications of being ostracized from society as the Jews were. By the time of its 1933 premiere, Kosterlitz had already escaped, but Haas’ co-star Max Hansen, who was reputedly half-Jewish, had in 1932 performed a cabaret song, "War'n Sie schon mal in mich verliebt?" ("Have you ever been in love with me?"), implying that Hitler was homosexual, which led the Gestapo to send a contingent to the theater to create a riot. The Film-Kurier described it:

 

“[W]histling was heard from various sides. The applause stopped. The whistling continued. The curtain remained closed because rotten eggs were thrown at the stage. Someone called from the balcony: "We want German movies! We want German actors! We do not need Jewish actors, we have enough German actors! Aren't you ashamed, German women, to applaud Jewish actors? Oust the Jew Max Hansen, who only six months ago sang a couplet about 'Hitler and Little Cohn' in a cabaret!"

 

     Soon after, Hansen left Germany for Vienna and then Copenhagen, while Haas quickly accepted the invitation to come to England to work on this film, and remained. Later she would marry American caricaturist Al Hirschfeld and perform in several stage shows including the 1946 musical Lute Song with Mary Martin and Yul Brynner, off-Broadway in The Threepenny Opera, and in film as the murderer, Otto Keller’s wife, in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess.

 

Los Angeles, March 29, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).