Raoul Walsh | Sailor’s Luck / 1933

et-gay the ansy-pay

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marguerite Roberts, Charlotte Miller, and Bert Hanlon (screenplay, with additional dialogue by Ben Ryan), Raoul Walsh Sailor’s Luck / 1933

If there was ever any evidence that screenwriters and directors needed and wanted obvious gay figures in their films, one need only see Raoul Walsh’s 1933 film Sailor’s Luck. Primarily and proto-version of later works such as On the Town, Walsh’s film centers around a sailor’s romance of the girl he’s finally find that’s right for marriage.

      These two figures, Jimmy Harrigan and Sally Brent, sweetly played by James Dunn and Sally Eilers, perform the standard series of approaches and retreats, of full-out love and retributive anger that every film romance demands. They’re accompanied by Jimmy’s two sailor friends, composing the trio of sailors on the wild spree of shore leave that defines such sailor comedies. These two, Barnacle Benny (Sammy Cohen) and Bilge (Frank Moran) share the same girl, Minnie Broadhurst (Esther Muir), but mostly hang around just for laughs, Bilge performing as a kind of straight man—a muscle-bound bruiser who plays classical piano and reads political essays in the American Mercury—while Benny plays a large-nosed rubber man who lovingly prats and falls his way through the movie, which along with other racial slurs is why this film is rarely screened today and has been described by one film commentator as “one of the least politically correct films of the 1930s.” I gather she or he has not seen many 1930s films.

     The oily villain of the piece, Baron Darrow (Victor Jory) weaves his way in and out of Jimmy and Sally’s comings and goings slowly attempting to seduce the pretty girl boarding in his small hotel, The Minnehaha Arms. For absolutely no reason and with little logic, he’s planning a huge marathon dance from which he hopes to rake in thousands of dollars while stiffing the winners, and wants the good-girl Sally to enter and, presumably, become his personal prize. Given the fact that the fleet is suddenly called to transfer from the Los Angeles port of San Pedro to San Francisco, he almost succeeds, Jimmy and Sally misreading one another with every telephone call and unannounced visit in between. But, of course, “sailor’s luck,” he finally realizes what a fool he’s been in suspecting his lovely Sally’s virtue, he and his friends along with all the other gobs who’ve come ashore create a ruckus, beating up the gangsters and freeing Sally so she might join Jimmy as he awards her with a gold ring around her finger.

      In between, obviously, are a great many comic scenes; if anything there are far too many, one involving a banana man who claims the navy has stolen all his fruit, another involving a long ago chair broken over the head of Bilge by Minnie in her for boarding house, and a third far too-long series of sequences with a drunken man in a tuxedo, J. Felix Hemingway (Will Stanton), who Minnie eventually marries presumably to inherit his fortune when he falls down in the street for the very last time. In the film, he plays a kind of Chevy Chase-like figure, stumbling and clattering through space. It’s almost inevitable that he might at some point meet up with the constantly prancing and flitting form of Benny.

      But there is yet one other comic figure introduced in only one scene, an early episode wherein Sally, having just taken on a job as a swimming pool attendant and part-time swimming instructor—a job doomed from the start since she not only doesn’t know how to swim but is terrified by water (an interesting fact given that she ends of the film almost married to a seaman)—quickly perceives that her fellow bathhouse attendant is a flaming effeminate homosexual, who snips and snaps back at the womanizing swimming club owner, but flaunts his sexual delight at seeing so many sailors enter his establishment.

      Director Walsh gives this character played by Frank Atkinson a great deal of on-screen time, far more than the usual pansy role. Richard Barrios describes part of his role and reveals that originally it was to have been far longer, brackets representing my asides:

 

“...he waves coyly at Dunn and pals (“Hi, sailors!”), and earns from Dunn a pig-Latin putdown: “Hey, fellas, et-gay the ansy-pay.” Atkinson’s appearance doesn’t go much further than that in the film [although he does later get thrown into the pool by the banana man to which he expresses his sissified indignation], but the surviving script files of Sailor’s Luck make it clear that a higher-profile gay presence had originally been planned [the writers, interestingly, being mostly made up of women, Charlotte Miller, Marguerite Roberts, along with Bert Hanlon]. From the very beginning, it had been decided that the swimming pool sequence...would feature a gay character, and there had been some casting planned: a performer named A. Martinez was penciled in to play Violetta, tagged by the script as ‘A Spanish Nance.’ Originally, Violetta was to appear when heroine Sally Eilers hands him a woman’s swimsuit by mistake, and he delightedly puts it on. Then, in a later script, Violetta is the brother-in-law of the pool manager, figuring quite tempestuously in a great deal of the action around the pool. When the idea of using Martinez was dropped, Violetta became Cyril, with whom the sailors engage in a mock flirtation. Finally, the part was trimmed some more until Cyril became the nameless non-Spanish nance of the final print.”

     What becomes clear through the recounting of Barrios’ marvelous research is that gay figures throughout the 1930s appeared to still be of great importance to writers and directors as comic figures, social commentary, and perhaps just out of their need to remind their audiences that such figures, their gay friends, still existed. Why else spend so much time and concern over a such a minor figure in the overall structure of a heterosexually-themed movie? The trimming of such a role, moreover, reveals the increasing interference of the Hays Office, which only a month later, with the release in April of The Warrior’s Husband, would ban even the use of panzees on screen, forcing the near-elimination of all obvious homosexuals for the next 4-5 decades in cinema.   

    Homosexuals, male and female, disappeared as if they no longer walked the American earth, and any hint of their existence existed only under the cover of coded language and innuendo instead of the broad gestures that had grown out of early cinematic cross-dressing roles, vaudeville, and burlesque. In hindsight the sisses—despite the numerous negative connotations they brought up and still do for us today—were a delightful fad that Joseph I. Breen and others of his ilk sought in a fit of moral outage to stamp out.

      Yet, it was precisely the illogic of including such a fluttering figure, along with the flittering physical comedy of someone like Sammy Cohen and the pratfalls of actors such as Will Stanton that made the standard comedy romances interesting and palatable. A critic like Leonard Maltin could not describe such a work as “insanely funny” without them.

 

Los Angeles, March 13, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).