intentionally missing targets
by Douglas Messerli
Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Henry Myers
(screenplay), William A. Seiter (director) Diplomaniacs / 1933
William A. Seiter’s film of 1933, Diplomaniacs,
a work created around the then popular comic team of Bert Wheeler and Robert
Woolsey is a vaudevillian potpourri determined to slice every last shred of
politically correct nicety. In Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Henry Myers’ culturally
and racially diverse list of targets: Indians, Chinamen, Frogs, Fags, Dykes,
Krauts, and Little Black Mammys all got rhythm enough to toss out stale tag
lines, jokes, and puns. So many arrows are shot into the air enough of them
actually land everywhere, giving the sensation of being bombarded by “sex of
one and a half a dozen of another.” I think you comprehend my predicament.
Fortunately, the Oopadoop Nation, wealthy from their oil wells, are
willing to pay Nilly and Glub millions of dollars to represent them at a Geneva
Peace Conference, guiding the waring nations to peace. To celebrate the occasion,
they dance a little number that makes Busby Berkeley look like a minimalist
while squaws and braves alike sing a mix of Pig Latin and baby talk, ending in
the phrase:
Oodgay-i-bay
Codgay-i-bay
which gives you an idea of the later gay humor
that is thrown in every so often just to spice up the racial slurs.
Totally against peace are (surprise surprise) the ammunitions makers
headed by Winklereid (Louis Calhern) who is determined to rob the money the
Indians have given Willy and Hercules and steal the secrets they carry in their
diplomatic briefcase on their ship voyage over. To help in this impossible task
Winklereid calls forth his “dirty assistant,” “Chow-Chow, the China Man” (Hugh
Herbert), who actually is tired of playing the villain and tries to get out of the
job.
Winklereid also purchases the services of a brand new “vamp” Dolores
(Marjorie White) whose job it is to pick the briefcase lock while Chow-Chow and
Winklereid move in on the money belt Hercules keeps on her person at all
times.. Dolores is quite sure of herself: “I got what it takes to take what
they got.”
But she has little left to do since the first moment the secret agents
stride down the ship’s dining room grand staircase, announced as the Secret
Agents for Peace, Willy’s papers come sailing out of his briefcase by the
dozens. To waste her time, Dolores inexplicably falls in love with the singing
Willy and wrestles him to the ground to prove her devotion, repeating the act
over and over throughout the voyage.
Already a little stewed, Hercules follows suite: “Send me one, too.”
“Won’t one steward serve for both of us?
“No, you eat yours, I’ll eat mine.”
The Captain, rolls his eyes and hisses: “O cannibal!”
They all get drunk, the Captain so sotted that according to the
international newspapers the ship takes 8 months to cross the Atlantic,
circling, circling, circling. In the end, one has to wonder whether there were
enough stewards to go around!
When they finally arrive in France, Winklereid, having failed in his
mission so far, is met with four European fellow arms manufacturers, Schmerzenschmerzen, Schmerzenpuppen, Puppenschmerzen,
and Puppenpuppen, who demand he hire the “toughest person in the world” who
works out of “the world’s toughest dive,” The Dead Rat—surely the precursor of
“the seediest dive on the wharf,” “populated with every reject and cutthroat
from Bombay to Calcutta,” where Ted Striker and Elaine Dickinson meet in the
Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams’ Airplane! (1980), a film very much in
this and the Marx Brother’s Duck Soup’s tradition.
It turns out the toughest person in the world is a woman, Fifi (Phyllis
Barry), two young female beauties in negligees, obviously calling up a cheap
lesbian fantasy reminiscent of the masses of waving harem girls from scenes of
DeMille and others of the day. Fifi fights dirty, however, kissing her male
opponents to death as they burn and sizzle from her steamy, deep
tongue-in-the-mouth endearments. Winklereid, Schmerzenschmerzen
Schmerzenpuppen, Puppenschmerzen, and Puppenpuppen attempt to recruit her for
their cause, but she eventually falls for Hercules when he shows up in the dive
later on.
Chow Chow has become so bored that he declares, “I wish I were back in
China with my wife who I hate.” Eventually he slips away rowing a slow boat
back to China where he is met by his wife announcing, “Your dinner’s cold.
You’re five years late.” Pointing at the three children accompanying her, he
asks, “Say, where did you get all these kids?” “That’s a surprise.” “Now that
I’m home, you can stop surprising me.”
Finally Willy and Herc wind up dressed in yodeling costumes in Geneva,
“where the nations of the world fight for peace.” Indeed, a war is going on
within the Conference Hall, as all the international representatives are
represented fighting with one another. The diplomaniacs arrive,
In the process they talk the former Peace Conference warriors into
signing their document, winning the battle while—since Winklereid has slipped
in Willy’s original handwritten proposal filled with double negatives (“We
promise not to make no more war on nobody at no time.”)—assuring the outbreak a
new World War. The boys fly home only to discover they have been drafted.
Sorry, did I say this was an LGBTQ movie? Surprise!
Los Angeles, April 21, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (April 2021).
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