Jack Conway | Red-Headed Woman / 1932

who needs pansies?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anita Loos and F. Scott Fitzgerald (screenplay, based on the novel by Katherine Brush), Jack Conway (director) Red-Headed Woman / 1932

 

For those brave heterosexual souls reading these pages, I can assure you that Red-Headed Woman is a thoroughly heterosexual affair, with nary a single gay scene. Given Lillian “Lil” Alexander’s (Jean Harlow) single-minded focus on any man she might use to work her way up to a life on the other side of the railroads tracks which can provide her with financial and social success, the movie doesn’t even have the time to actually present a pansy in person. Lil’s best friend Sally (Una Merkel), when Lil describes her interior decorations as “charming,” insists her friend is “getting to talk like a pansy.” It’s 1932 and no self-respecting Hollywood production could bear to be without a queer appearing somewhere in it.

     Topped with the crown of hair that Sally has magically converted from blonde to red, Lil, otherwise, is such a force of crass sexuality that she hasn’t time to think of anything else but how to dangle her gams, blink her eyes, and crook her finger to bring the men to her and put them under her control.

      Her first target is her married boss, Bill “Willie” Legendre, Jr. (Chester Morris) who happens to not only be happily married to Irene (Leila Hyams) but is fully in love with her. Love has nothing at all to do, however, with Lil’s charms of the goals she has set for herself behind them. Simply by stealing the mail off of Bill’s desk and hand-delivering it to his house the moment his wife has gone off for a short trip to Cleveland, she is able to seduce him and, since luck is with her, ruining his marriage when his wife unexpectedly returns to find them in a living room clinch—or since this film encourages his viewers to have prurient thoughts, maybe in an even more compromising situation. The makers of this movie would simply love for its audience to use their imagination, encouraging it from time to time with almost nude glimpses of Harlow’s breasts and a light shined-through a see-through dress so that men might get a glimpse of her gams in a manner than might even have made Marilyn Monroe blush. In case you missed that scene, Harlow’s hikes up her dress from time-to-time to give you a better view.

      When, god forbid, Irene is about to forgive Bill for his one-time sexual digression, Lil heaves herself into the phonebooth to which she’s lured him and forces her ex-boss to promise to meet her at her apartment the very next night. And when he doesn’t show up, she shows up to his house to reprimand him for not keeping the promise he made to her with that phonebooth kiss. When Bill follows her home to settle with her “once and for all,” she locks him in her bedroom and slips the key into her cleavage, forcing him into a sort of violent rape, and when he finally begins the inevitable manhandling that the script demands by slapping her in the face, she yells out "Do it again. I like it."

     As Keith Allison insightfully wrote in Diabolique Magazine of this scene:

 

“’Do it again,’ she…pleads? commands? sneers? “I like it!” And with that line, she robs a weak man of his illusion of control. She subverts a submission — being slapped in the face and begging for more — into an act of dominance. The man realizes, but cannot accept, that he is, in every way, bested. He can’t outwit her, can’t outthink her, certainly can’t outsex her, and his pathetic attempt at physical intimidation elicits nothing but defiance that sends him scurrying, confused and afraid, from the room pursued by peals of her victorious laughter. The battle’s barely begun, and he’s already lost the war.”

     What’s a man to do, particularly when he’s as dumb as all the men in this movie, who can’t seem to resist falling for the most manipulative tricks in the book. When Lil marries Bill the moment his divorce comes through, she is naturally upset that none of the fine people of Renwood, Ohio want anything to do with her, including Bill’s father William Legendre, Sr. (Lewis Stone). Almost maniacally, she turns her attentions to the wealthiest coal tycoon in the US, the visiting Charles B. Gaerste (Henry Stephenson), seducing the character acted by a man who in most films plays a “fuddy duddy” father, judge, or member of the royal estate, in order to force him to invite everyone to a party she hopes will put her on the social map. She almost succeeds—at least so she believes, until her friend Sally observes them all, after her party, scuttling off across the street to Bill’s ex-wife’s house for an affair that will surely make the headlines of the local paper.

      Unable to control her behavior, she badmouths the social scions of Renwood to their faces, putting her into a position of such disgrace that she has little choice but to rush off to New York where she forces herself upon Gaerste, who eventually himself begins “to like” the sexual abuse she heaps upon him while at the time she is having an affair with his chauffeur Albert (Charles Boyer, who this role made famous as a French-born lover).

      In short, this is the kind of movie that members of the Hays board such as Joseph I. Breen had nightmares about. And it only gets worse! When Bill Legendre reveals to Gaerste that she’s double-timing him, he forces her and the chauffeur out of his house. Having nowhere else to go, she high-tails it back to Renwood only to find that Bill has taken up again with his ex-wife, confronting him this time with a gun, shooting but only wounding him. Bill refuses to even allow her the attention of the newspaper headlines by deciding not to prosecute her.

      But the red-headed Harlow as Lil is by this time is almost invincible; Bill, his father reencountering her, yet again, at a Paris horse race where it appears she has married an older aristocrat whose driver just happens to be Albert, evidently the only man she possibly loves.

     The critic Allison nicely summarized the power of this film, putting it into a context of other films of the same year, many of which contained queer characters which I describe in these pages:

 

“With minimal tweaking, just a nudge here and there, Red-Headed Woman could have been a horror film, a forerunner to the sort of psycho-sexual melodramas that were becoming Alfred Hitchcock’s stock-in-trade. Put James Whale behind the camera, cast Colin Clive as yet another twitching man whose hair flops greasily into his face when he flails about, and Red-Headed Woman could have been a pre-Code Fatal Attraction exploring the sinister, self-destructive impulses born of selfishness, unrequited lust, and tendency of married men to philander then blame the “other woman” for their inability to remain faithful…. All of the same elements are there in Red-Headed Woman: passion, vindictiveness, cruelty, domination, submission, manipulation, and overt sado-masochism. But it’s not a horror film. It’s a comedy.

      That’s the sort of weird stuff that happened 1932, one of the great years in cinema history and arguably the best year of what became known as pre-Code Hollywood. The pictures of 1932 were packed to bursting with fetishism and deviance. Whippings, rackings, and brandings. Shirtless men, and women in tattered slips, were suspended over hot coals or pits full of punji sticks. Voyeuristic villains leered with sexual arousal as their sweat-sheened victims squirmed and squealed. And it wasn’t just the horror films; dramas, comedies, and adventure films all got in on the game. 1932 contained releases as shocking and varied as Tod Browning’s Freaks, Howard Hawks/Howard Hughes’ Scarface, and Ernst Lubitsch’s caper comedy Trouble in Paradise. Horror films flooded the screen with a parade of chilling depravity. In 1932 alone, viewers were subjected to The Most Dangerous Game, Island of Lost Souls, Murders in the Rue Morgue, White Zombie, The Old Dark House, The Mask of Fu Manchu, the technicolor Doctor X, and Boris Karloff in The Mummy, among others. Looming over them all was “the wickedest movie in the world,” Cecil B. DeMille’s unabashedly sleazy historical epic, Sign of the Cross.”

 

     With Harlow at the center of a film, who needed pansies to demonstrate sexual deviation? As Sally suggests, Harlow as Lil even incorporated their language in her wild spirit of sexual dominance and desire, a force which perhaps even the Hays Committee realized could not be easily squelched. England already knew better, denying this film permission to be shown in that country, although King George was known to have a personal copy.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).