a coming out story for
straights
by Douglas Messerli
Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Vincent Lawrence
(screenplay, with additional dialogue by Mae West [all uncredited] based on a
story by Louis Bromfield), Archie Mayo (director) Night After Night /
1932
If one can’t exactly describe Archie Mayo’s
1932 film Night After Night as contributing to our awareness of the
LGBTQ community of the early half of the 20th century, you can at least claim
that it is somewhat LGBTQ aware, at least enough that it almost codes its gay
and lesbian references, of which there aren’t that many.
No
Hollywood pansies appear in Joe Anton’s (George Raft) high class speakeasy;
contrarily, early in the film, when it looks like a competing crime family
might want to end his life early and his close friend Leo asks him what kind of
flowers he might like—in case it might end in his funeral—Anton answers:
“Anything at all except pansies.”
His
relationship with his close associate, Leo (the always wonderful Roscoe Karns)
is quite obviously not a homosexual one, but it might as well be given the
complete devotion Leo shows to his “boss,” arranging his daily flowers,
breakfast, underwear, bath, appointments, and morning awakenings. Leo, Joe
promises when he later makes it clear that he might be leaving the speakeasy
business, promises to keep him near and dear wherever he goes. They are quite
clearly companions for life and have a far more amiable relationship than Joe
and his several women friends.
But the only real gay relationships presented in this film are lesbian,
shown in brief clips of the speakeasy celebrants, and played out in a
humorously coded manner through the accidental female friendship that develops
between the unlikely “school teaching” elder Mabel Jellyman (Alison Skipworth)
and the always quick-quipping and ready-for-anything Maudie Triplett (Mae
West).
Mabel (“Miss Jellyman” as Joe always refers to her) has been hired to
educate the rough-edged Joe into better manners, proper language, and the
basics of the daily news for the very same reasons that Paul Verrall is hired
to teach Billie Dawn the same things in George Cukor’s Born Yesterday
(1950), to allow the character to properly enter into the company of high
society, and in this case it also almost seems to backfire in some of the same
ways.
Joe has invited his grammar-correcting educator to dinner with the woman
of his dreams, Miss Jerry Healy (Constance Cummings), during which they
accidentally meet up with one of Joe’s ex-girlfriends, Maudie, who in the
several confusions of the evening, befriends the increasingly drunken Mabel,
with the two of them finally winding up spending the night in Leo’s bed—without
Leo. It’s not exactly a true “lesbian” pairing but it might as well as be given
West’s usual
acceptance of anything sexual that comes her
way. At one point in this film, when Mabel asks her “Do you believe in love at
first sight?” Mabel, in typical Mae West manner, pauses for second before
quipping: “I don’t know, but it sure saves a lot of time.” A few minutes later,
when Mabel, who all her life has been looking for just a little excitement,
asks, “Maudie, do you really think I can get rid of my inhibitions,” the girl
snaps back, “Ah sure, I got an old trunk you can put ‘em in.”
If
nothing sexual happens in their nighttime bedding down together, something
earth-shattering does occur the next morning for Mabel, who having missed her
teaching gig, is hired by Maudie—whom Mabel has mistakenly perceived as the
head of a prostitution ring—to become a hostess in her chain of beauty parlors.
That same evening ends for Joe in a quick kiss from Jerry Healy, which
the next morning he reports over and over to his symbolic “husband-companion”
Leo, in way that allows purposeful misreading (a trick of the tongue we might
expect from the uncredited pen of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, whose witty dialogue
graced the gay friendly Diplomaniacs and other films such as Woman of
the Year and All About Eve).
Joe: She kissed
me.
Leo: You told
me that before.
Joe: All
right I’ll tell you again. You don’t mind, do you?
Leo: I’m a
little tired. But I don’t mind.
We
know, obviously, that when Joe queries if Leo doesn’t mind, that he’s asking if
Leo doesn’t mind that he mentions once more that he’s been kissed. But the
construction of the sentence might almost seem to refer back to the act of
kissing: “You don’t mind that she kissed me?” as if he needs to ask for Leo’s
permission. This is particularly redolent with meaning since Joe does almost
ask for Leo’s agreement with everything else he does, including selling his
business, which Leo strongly advises him not to do.
The
point of all this is not to suggest that Mabel and Maudie or Joe and Leo have
same-sex desires, but simply, given their intense relationships with one
another, that the author and director toys with the possibilities behind the
censors and simply movie-goers backs. Even pre-code, that’s about all
filmmakers felt they could do with gay allusions in their films.
But
this is, after all, a film quite centered in outsider sex and the desire
to enter a world seemingly unobtainable to the lovers given their natural
natures. The central love story here, between the former boxer, now gangster
Joe and the Park Avenue socialite—who grew up in the very mansion where Joe’s
speakeasy now exists—Jerry Healy is a heterosexual relationship that is
nonetheless quite queer.
From Joe she seeks the “excitement,” and “thrill” that has been formerly
missing from her sheltered life; while in Jerry, Joe is looking for something
more refined and better than the world in which he has previously existed. In a
sense, both are seeking out a kind of security not currently available to them.
Jerry’s family money has evidently been lost over the years so that she is
considering marrying a man she doesn’t genuinely love, Dick Bolton (Louis Calhern);
Joe, stuck with
the coarse, jealous gun-carrying Iris Dawn (Wynne Gibson) is looking for a way
out of the dangers he daily encounters to a life of “vision,” a world that
instead of being simply lived day by day, includes a picture of a better future
in it. He has the money—particularly when he sells his business—and she has the
refined sense of life that together might make them the perfect couple, if only
they can escape their own misconceptions and prejudices. If this sounds
familiar, it might almost read in these pages as yet another “coming out
story,” as indeed it is.
Night
After Night is a kind of heterosexual “coming out” or “coming of age” yarn,
where the two lovers have to escape the restrictions of their births, “family”
(in this case read friends), and education or lack of it have created for them in
order to realize that they might live in an otherwise challenging world as a
happy couple.
Just as Maudie helps Mabel Jellyman get rid of her inhibitions to
discover a whole new life for herself, or as Leo will surely discover in giving
up his role of petulant companion to become a trusted friend, so does the
interruptions of the outside world —in this case in the form of extreme
violence—help Joe and Jerry to finally reveal at work’s end their true selves
and, in the process, come to realize that being the odd couple they are they
can surely teach one another how to survive and stop being so very lonely in
their lives.
If
on the surface, this short feature might appear to be a strange work that
doesn’t quite fit any of the genres it toys with—noir, gangster film,
screwball comedy, class melodrama—it, nonetheless, finally becomes something
all its own, a kind of “coming out” dramedy for straights.
Los Angeles, July 12, 2021
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and
World Cinema Review (July 2021).
