Frank Moser and Paul Terry | Fanny Zilch, Episode 1—The Banker’s Daughter / 1933 || Fanny Zilch, Episode 2—The Oil Can Mystery / 1933 || Fanny Zilch, Episode 3—Fanny in the Lion’s Den / 1933 || Fanny Zilch, Episode 4—Hypnotic Eyes / 1933 || Fanny Zilch, Episode 5—Fanny’s Wedding Day / 1933

the pansy hero

Frank Moser and Paul Terry (screenwriters and directors) Fanny Zilch, Episode 1—The Banker’s       

     Daughter / 1933

Frank Moser and Paul Terry (screenwriters and directors) Fanny Zilch, Episode 2—The Oil Can 

     Mystery / 1933

Frank Moser and Paul Terry (screenwriters and directors) Fanny Zilch, Episode 3—Fanny in the 

     Lion’s Den / 1933

Frank Moser and Paul Terry (screenwriters and directors) Fanny Zilch, Episode 4—Hypnotic Eyes / 

     1933

Frank Moser and Paul Terry (screenwriters and directors) Fanny Zilch, Episode 5—Fanny’s Wedding       Day / 1933

 

In 1933 Frank Moser and Paul Terry began their Terrytoon cartoon series about the banker’s ceaselessly unfortunate daughter Fanny Zilch. Even before the first episode begins, we are told that Fanny has been married three times previously, the last time to “Oil Can Harry,” who is determined to keep hold of her and destroy any possible future love she may have with her current sweetheart, J. Leffingwell Strongheart.

     The published synopsis to that first episode, The Banker’s Daughter, describes the two of them, villain and hero: “Oil Can Harry: a deep-eyed villain but his colors run. So tough he uses spinach as a boutonniere. Relentlessly he pursues Fanny for her beauty, wealth and streamline effect. Strongheart: a hero with a steely glint in his eye and a blush on his cheeks. They done him wrong who called him pansy and thought he couldn’t shoot from the hip.”

     As we quickly discover, it is Strongheart’s horse, “a fiery charger once free from the milk route” and later his dog who not only let our hero know when his Fanny is in danger, but take him to where Oil Can Harry has hidden her away, and provide him sufficient help that he successfully foils the villain in each episode.

     Given the film’s own promotional description of Strongheart, he is arguably the first cinematic hero who is described as a pansy, a homosexual evidently gone straight—or almost straight.

      In The Banker’s Daughter the muscular beefcake does little except to ride in to Fanny’s father’s board meeting to announce is his high tenor musical voice—both Fanny and Strongheart sing their lines as in the popular musical operettas of the day—that he will save the Banker’s Fanny. Fanny has been kidnapped by bootleggers (although it’s really Oil Can Harry who has her) and has had nothing to eat for a week except fried chicken.

      As we discover already in this first episode Fanny does pretty well in saving herself. Despite being tied up to a chair, she manages to boot Harry out the window, for which he now determines to punish her by pushing her into the chute where logs make their watery way to the saw blades of the mill. Taking his plane back to the mill, Harry turns on the saw as we watch poor Fanny make her way gradually down to her certain severance with life.

 

     Recognizing that he cannot possibly reach the mill on time, the horse takes his rider up to the very top of a clearly penis-shaped plateau and kicks him off, Strongheart landing inside the mill to do battle with Harry and, after flamboyantly posing and bowing for our applause, pulling Fanny from the sawblade’s cut at the very last moment.

     It is the second episode in which Strongheart reveals his true gay inclinations. In The Oil Can Mystery Fanny has been snatched again by the evil Oil Can Harry, have tied her lover Strongheart to a railroad track in the middle of the desert. Will beer arrive soon enough so that he might survive?

     It is Strongheart’s beloved horse who saves the day by crying bitter tears which clench his master’s thirst. His horse then flags the train conductor just in time and pull’s his Strongheart from the track onto his own back, racing away with the hero, presumably to save Fanny from her new endangerment.

     Harry skates off to his hideaway (he often wears roller skates in these adventures), locking door after door behind him and swallowing the keys so that no one can follow his nefarious actions.

      Nonetheless, Strongheart suddenly appears demanding that the villain should “Cease or I’ll slap you on the wrist!” Harry turns to engage with his enemy as the two suddenly take up a tango, singing the lyrics: “I’d love to dance a tango / I’d love to dance with you dear / I’m yours forever just say the word. / …Oh, tell me do you love me?

   

     At the crescendo, however, Strongheart tosses his dancing partner out the window. He turns to discover the whereabouts of Fanny only to discover she’s hanging from a strange stirrup in a basement chamber where, she sings, it is cold, he turning to his audience, to sing in antiphon: “O, my Fanny’s cold.”

      Meanwhile, Oil Can Harry has sneaked back into the building, turning on the water valves in an attempt to drown his captive. We observe Strongheart drilling a series of circular holes that might easily be compared to “glory holes” in a public bathroom cubicle, as his trusty steed rushes off to the fire department to bring help before his friend Fanny drowns. Not to worry, Strongheart pushes the wall, breaking into a larger hole through which the water rushes out as he swims in to save his Fanny and together the two are swept out into a finale wherein they two proclaim their love, accompanied by the firemen, he lifting her high in his arms, and she lifting him even higher as the chorus declares “The End.”

 

     Nowhere again in this short series does Strongheart lapse quite so completely into his pansy past.

     In the 3rd of the series, Fanny in the Lion’s Den (released in July 1933), Harry captures Fanny once more, tossing her into his basement lion’s den, this time keeping her captive for several months. In the meantime, Fanny has utterly tamed the lions, taught them how to dance, and plays card games with the former “beasts” who now hate their keeper as much as she does.

     During this long period, Strongheart has apparently been resting on his porch, bottom up, his buttocks covered in a cross-patch that presumably indicates his “lost Fanny,” a sexual pun that also suggests that he has “lost his ass” or in gay parlance been sodomized, in plain words, fucked.

     His friendly pooch, however, has found Fanny’s footprints and followed them to Harry’s cabin door, immediately running back to tell his master who jumps on his friendly horse and races off to find his lover once more. He breaks in, briefly duels with the villain and tosses him to the crocodiles, hugging his Fanny to him as they sing, with the lions as a back-up chorus, of their love.

     In Hypnotic Eyes, the penultimate episode (August 1933), Fanny Zilch has once more gone missing—so the newspapers shout. This time Harry’s got Fanny locked away in a basement safe, who he lures out with hypnotism, obviously hoping to forego her hatred for him by altering her mind. Strongheart appears, knocks on the door, and demands his love’s release. But Harry shoots him, as our pansy hero falls seemingly dead. But his pet dog takes a plunger and, one by one, sucks out the bullets from Strongheart’s chest. His trusty horse slides under his body and off they go, the heroic trio, horse, dog, and heavily muscled lover to find where Harry has now taken his beloved Fanny.

       Harry has carried her on in his small airplane, and the pooch, realizing that they too must become airborne saws off the horse’s tail on which he has been riding which turns what’s left of the tail into a propeller which whirls up the horse and rider to the heavens where they encounter Harry’s flying machine. The down-to-earth dog finds an alarm attached to its own tail, which a passerby, who happens to be a look-alike Charles Chaplin calls in the Keystone cops. Even Al Jolson, Joe E. Brown and Jimmy Durante take an interest in these events.

     Strongheart’s flying Pegasus finally kicks off his heels, downing the airplane, as Fanny and her savior go flying off upon his friendly horse into the clouds.

     In the final episode, Fanny’s Wedding Day, the church is already full as the film begins. Fanny is dressed and ready for the grand march down the aisle, while Strongheart rides up to the church, stopping a few moments before he enters as his horse and he cry over their leave-taking, both shedding copious tears for the end of their sweet relationship.

     Harry has something special cooked up for the day, as he drops hundreds of skunks into the church, all the celebrants racing out, as he once again scoops up Fanny and skates away with her before stashing her in the sidecar of his motorbike.

     Strongheart, aghast at the events, rides off with on his trusty steed, but strangely stops off first to tell the head editor of Film Daily that he has once more lost his Fanny. “Again?” shouts the editor, who has no longer any patience given the number of times Fanny has gone missing, and throws our ex-hero out! Perhaps the news media had grown tired of the series.

     Of course, Strongheart eventually foils Oil Can Harry’s plot by tossing him off a cliff, he and Fanny singing out the series’ closing chords.

    Terrytoons were always perceived as being crude in both their visual and narrative representations. Even Paul Terry remarked, "Walt Disney is the Tiffany's of the business, and I am the Woolworth's." At moments, however, these cartoons showed remarkable style and creative cleverness. Today we see their influence particularly in certain cartoon-influenced artists such as some of those connected with Chicago School Imagists, particularly in the repetitions, so common in Paul Terry’s short animated works, of an artist such as Roger Brown. And this series demonstrates all the flaws and charms of that studio’s achievements. Although one can’t claim that the directors were being particularly sensitive to gay men in this work, the “former pansy” is still the hero of the series who manages, with a little help, to save the day again and again even if he has to tango his way into his heterosexual intents.

 

Los Angeles, December 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).

Al Boasberg | Myrt and Marge / 1933

being happy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Beatrice Banyard (screenplay, based on her radio program), Al Boasberg (director) Myrt and Marge / 1933

Based on the long-running daily radio show which ran from 1932-1942, the film Myrt and Marge (1933), directed by Al Boasberg, is a rag-tag revue with comedic skits interspersed among singing and hoofing acts all threaded together in a silly “hey, kids, let’s get together and produce a play”-plot that might make Andy Hardy go slouching off in embarrassment. When the current producer and his partner of the supposedly Broadway-bound My Ladies’ Legs go bankrupt, the cast along with the “rude mechanicals” who haul and operate the scenery and props all join up with Myrt Spear (Myrtle Vail) who takes over as manager to recharge this stalled theatrical vehicle. After all they’ve all got plenty of talented performers—themselves—and, when Myrt drops out, they add a new comedian/dancer, Eddie Hanley (Eddie Foy, Jr.), and his small-town sweetheart Marge Minster (Donna Damerel), eventually finding a wealthy angel, Jackson (Thomas E. Jackson). What can go wrong? 

      In this case, almost everything. For one, the dancing chorus girls in this movie make Ruby Keeler seem like a fairy-light ballerina; their hard pounding taps should bring the house down even if the applause of the small audiences they attract wouldn’t be able to drown out the sound of dropping hair pin.

     Foy, who later in his career would reveal his significant talent (his performances of “It’s a Simply System” in Bells Are Ringing and “I’ll Never Be Jealous Again” in The Pajama Game represent two of the greatest topical comic songs in film musical history), is here a fairly gifted dancer in bad need of a good choreographer. But the jokes radio-and-screen-writer Beatrice Banyard hands him only demonstrate his roots as a vaudevillian ham. It’s hard to be convinced of his character’s love for Marge when it is so evident that he holds himself in far greater esteem. When he crawls into Marge’s bed late in the story to deter the Angel’s determination to receive some amorous pleasures as payback for his investments, you kind of wish that he’d held off and let the backer get in a couple of smooches before he slugged him in the kisser. But this heavy-footed and heavy-handed film squelches almost of the fun with the old-fashioned slug-fest played out in the dark, with no time for a little gay sexual insinuation.   

    Minster has a nice, slight, crackle of an amateur voice but her dancing is a mix of gymnastics and contortionism. And for utterly no earthly reason except for the film’s Deus ex machina—when she suddenly takes over the role of the show’s angel—Marge’s heavy-set mother (Trixie Friganza) trots along with the company to make sure no one might touch her baby still clinging to her more than ample bosom.  

    The heavy lifting backstage crew is the corny, punchy, and slap-happy Larry, Moe, and Curly—better known as The Three Stooges—overseen by the slightly more talented Mullins (Ted Healy), who soon after this film the comic group ditched—alas. The temporary fourth stooge, Bonnie Bonnell (Sue, whose friends call her Suzannah for short), with her Gracie Allen-like comic logic, fortunately shows up each day as a backstage crasher with a new contract written out on a laundry list. I must admit that I have never comprehended why the violent trio who seem to have found the shreds of all the jokes the Marx Brothers ripped up in disgust, appealed to anyone but fourth-grade bullies. But here, with Healy, they do actually sit down for a moment, pick up a fiddle, and pluck out a tune on the piano that is momentarily rather sweet.

    There is a little jab at possible racist Asian humor when the company dines at a local Chop Suey joint, but luckily they either forgot the punch-line or immediately lost interest in the skit. There is  a rather loony and almost raunchy grand finale where the entire female chorus-line circle round the coils of a gigantic cobra, where at one point the camera goes zooming down a double row of the dancer’s spread-open crotches just before the snake grabs the princess in his teeth. And there is a lovely little ditty titled “Draggin’ My Heels Around” with Foy dressed up, without explanation, with a pair of outsized white gloves as a bowtie. But otherwise, these ladies’ legs are need of some heavy shaving.

     But then heaven does sometimes deliver up lovely strangelings in her stork’s beak. For the pansy-player of this creation is born into the script not only for a line or two, but serves as the stage manager and hangs out with the entire team until the end. Beloved by both his fellow thespians and the script, Clarence (Ray Hedge) dishes out catty comments and comebacks to several members of the cast. In the film’s very first scene as he gathers up the chorus girls’ costume accessories into a trunk, he notes by the tired look on the face of one girl that she’s been out late the night before with a lover, accessing the situation as being “catch as catch can.” The cheap perfume of a second girl smells to him “like a goat.” Turning to his assistant he observes, “If we could get the run on this show I could make the second payment for my kimono.” A third chorus girl hands him her boa saying, “Put that in the trunk and don’t wear it.” He hisses back, “Selfish!” Later, when yet another of the chorus beauties shows up with a pair of net stockings which, she insists, have just a little a rip, he, inspecting it more carefully, declares: “A rip? My dear, it looks like King Kong going to a masquerade.”

      A moment later the producer Grady shows up to tell the suddenly gathered cast the worst news first (he and his partner are bankrupt). As he begins “You know how much I love you all,” Clarence snipping back, “That’s the worst!”

      “My partner and I are insolvent,” announces Grady.

      “Well, we can’t all be happy,” Clarence quips.

      While his lines alone may not be terribly funny, his character is, and we can’t wait to hear what might come out of his mouth whenever he’s around (not enough, alas, to save the film or the show its actors are in). But not since Eadweard Muybridge’s two women walked up to one another in 1887 to engage in a kiss or William Kennedy Dickson’s young men took one another in their arms in 1894 to dance has a truly gay figure in film really appeared to be enjoying himself. Far more than the Wildeian attempts at wicked wit of the sad players in the band of boys gathered for a party in Mart Crowley’s 1970 work, this queer boy from 1933 is perfectly delighted to throw out a riposte for each and every occasion, while his subjects are equally pleased to bow down to him for his superior naughty wit. What a gift this silly little film has given us in Clarence. If they only knew it, Beatrice Banyard and Boasberg might have handed over their collective BB-guns to Clarence to let him take endless shots at the entire cast.

     All we have left is a little buckshot in the rear, as our resident queer, dining in the aforementioned Chinese restaurant teaches Bonnell how to properly knit while he patiently sits for a while to play straight man to her comic attempts to explain where she was born (“My Aunt Minnie’s house.” “And where did this Aunt Minnie live?” “She moved.” “Exactly where were you born?” “In the front room on Thursday morning.” “How do you know it was Thursday?” “’Cause the next day they wouldn’t give me any meat.” It goes on....) Tired of playing “second banana,” he stands, announcing “I’m a wreck. I’ve been on my feet ironing all day.”

     Moving off to another table, he declares it’s his birthday, so he’ll take every check, which once presented to him, he holds out his hand out to ask politely for the money with which to pay them. Unlike Harold’s birthday party in The Boys in the Band, no one goes home bitter or unhappy here, for Clarence’s humor is never mean but simply points up all of our self-delusions. I shall always imagine Myrt and Myrtle’s gay boy lounging about in his kimono with a good book or even a cute boy waiting in his bed.

 

Los Angeles, April 6, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (April 2021).

 

 

 

Léo Bittencourt | Vagalumes (Fireflies) / 2021

a stroll through the park late at night

by Douglas Messerli

 

Léo Bittencourt and Ricardo Pretti (screenwriters), Léo Bittencourt (director) Vagalumes (Fireflies) / 2021 [19 minutes]

 

Brazilian director Léo Bittencourt’s 2021 cinematic work Fireflies is not so much a traditional movie as it is a night tour of a world that most of the citizens of Rio de Janeiro never encounter, yet by day know well as the Parque do Flamengo, Roberto Burle Marx’s extravagant public park of fauna and flora, built, as Bittencourt himself describes it as “one of the major public works to renovate the city center of Rio.” “In this process of ‘modernization,’” he continues, “countless poor families were removed to the periphery and important hills were demolished.”

    By choosing to shoot at night, however, Bittencourt and his crew featured not “actors” as much as a different population, marginalized and forgotten, who seek out the park as a refuge at night. Among the “cast” were Daniel Dos Santos de Andrade, Elisa Lucinda, Gabriel Fernando de Castro, Gleiton Matheus Bonfante, Lino Besser, Lourival Júnior, Niana Machado, Paulo Guidelly, Rafael Medina, Wallace Lino, some homeless and simply washing themselves, some involved in the candomblé folk religion, one a cat woman who feeds the park’s dozens of hidden strays, and most gay cruisers who seek out the park for companionship and sex.

     Without judging or even fully explaining their actions, Bittencourt categorizes them as “fireflies” “that shine in the dark of the Aterro.” Bittencourt summarizes, “These characters, who despite being the shadow of the modernist ideal that conceived and built the park, makes this space a place for experiencing other forms of sociability, struggle, and pleasure.”

     Unlike so very many films that have featured gay park cruisers, here there is little interest in voyeuristic images of sex. Although we certainly witness some men engaged in what appear to be sexual activities, we observe far more just wandering, appearing for moments in one place and another, before totally disappearing. The beauty is their movement, the trace of their existences, the light that shines in their seconds of sharing, pleasure, or simple existence.

    Bittencourt argues that what was created as an idealized space for the daytime city dwellers, under his camera becomes “A space that only exists through cinema. Vagalumes narrates an evening stroll which begins with a sci-fi atmosphere and builds a sensory experience among plants, people, animals and architecture that ends with the entire park cumming.”

 

Los Angeles, April 7, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).