Rowland V. Lee | I Am Suzanne / 1933

two men claiming a female identity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edwin Justus Mayer (screenplay), Rowland V. Lee (director) I Am Suzanne / 1933

 

I Am Suzanne, Rowland V. Lee’s 1933 film, has got to be one of the queerest films ever made—and this time by the word “queer” I also mean odd, out of the ordinary, just plain weird. First of all it’s a dance-based musical primarily with puppets, and the story builds up as a kind of double-humped beast of two parallel tales, both of them involving a dancer, Suzanne (Lilian Harvey), who is treated like a puppet, first by her subhuman manager, Adolphe “Baron” Herring (Leslie Banks) and her ballet teacher Mama (Georgia Craine), and in the second part by her would-be-human lover, the puppeteer Tony Malatini (Gene Raymond) who lives in a world of puppets who although he falls he love with the real dancer, may in fact prefer his puppet recreation over the real being.

       In both of these versions of patriarchal manipulation of the young and still quite innocent Suzanne, the males are incidentally queer in the gay sense, although strangely both pretend their love for Suzanne, the Baron in order to continue to control Suzanne from who he not only gets an agent fee but also steals a great part of her weekly paycheck; Tony because he is attracted to her beauty and fragility.

       The Baron would clearly prefer to steer clear of the company of women were it not his business to take rather ordinary girls and mold and shape them much in the Pygmalion manner into successful stars. Tony also uses females as models for his puppets, fantasy figures who, in his own way, he also molds through this literal creation of them by carving them out of wood and continues to mold and shape their actions by literally pulling their strings, much in the same way the Baron achieves similar results through his emotional chicanery.

       One might well argue, as internet correspondent Luis Samra has hinted, that I Am Suzanne is a precursor to both Michael Powell’s films The Red Shoes (1948) and Peeping Tom (1960), the Baron performing the role of the entrepreneur Boris Lermontov (read Sergei Diaghilev) and Tony playing the role of the mentally disturbed young man Mark Lewis. The Baron, as in Powell’s and Pressburger’s film would simply control her life, while the likeable Tony may actually kill her in his preference of the doll image over the real-life being. In both instances, however, Suzanne is nearly killed off, her identity taken over by males who each utter to those seeking to speak directly to the dancer, “I am Suzanne,” and her body tortured and nearly destroyed by the Baron who forces her into endless daily dance exercises and the the requirement that she enter the stage by skating down a high rope from the balcony (Suzanne, we are told, began her career as a tightrope walker) into  the arms of her fellow dancers on stage.

       Having been cornered into accepting a marriage proposal from the Baron—who has pretended his love to prevent her from falling in love with the visiting puppeteer—and again encountering the puppeteer in the balcony audience who mutters to her as he prepares for her stage entry that she must not marry the Baron, Suzanne loses her balance and falls into the orchestra pit damaging her legs so severely that she is unlikely to again walk, let alone dance.

      From the perspective of the Baron’s shady theatrical dealings with her, Tony appears a bit like a lovely courtier, particularly since he and his puppet-producing family take her in and he—finding a specialist known for his success in helping the disabled return to their former mobility—nurses her to health. But even the naïve Suzanne quickly begins to perceive that the loving and caring puppeteer prefers her in her puppet reincarnation rather than in the flesh and blood, apparently because he cannot imagine the real dancer entering his and his family’s fantasy world.

      But as she suffers through her therapy, Suzanne is able to take her role within her new world as a puppeteer and, along with Tony’s updating of their scenarios centered around the puppet figure of Suzanne, even bring the family some sense of fame. But at the moment when she actually does begin to recover, possibly able to dance again, and may return to the stage under the Baron’s direction, Tony rejects her as his real lover, reverting back to his fantasy preferences.

       Just as the Baron has previously almost left her a cripple, so now does Tony leave her spiritless as a dancer; although able to go through all of the choreographed movements, Suzanne is just as lifeless as she was after her accident.

       The producer is ready to cancel her contract until the wily Baron, terrified that he will now truly go hungry with no star’s financial help to provide him with his life of caviar and champagne, convinces the now bitter Tony to provide a puppet story against which the dancer herself will be pitted, particularly since she had turned on the puppets when Tony showed a preference for them over her.

       That surreal story, now laid over the two already horror tales of men who attempt to control her, becomes even more horrific as, exhausted, she naps just before her performance, dreaming of the early puppet scenes in which she is brought to trial and judged for her crimes against the puppet world, forced to dance in the second part to prove her superiority as a human.

        In the puppet cosmology Satan (Lionel Belmore) sits Buddha-like behind the action as the puppets judge other visitors to their world, including a lesbian who admittedly preferred male attire—she’s sent straight into the flames below. When the puppet version of Suzanne appears she is put immediately on trial. In her dream the puppets torture her, convinced of her guilt, and choreographically ganging up on the poor dancer, threaten her life more than even the flames of hell. Suzanne awakens traumatized by the dream and terror-stricken about her real-life performance as she is suddenly called to stage.

      Given the logic and structure the film to this moment, it is quite apparent that the poor girl is doomed to have a public breakdown, representing her clear destruction by both the woman-hating males in her life. Both have simply far more strength than any female, in this misogynistic world, could possibly muster up.

       But Suzanne has already reclaimed her name, shouting out previously to Tony and his would-be producers, “I am the one and only Suzanne!” And the writer and director obviously could not take the film in the direction that it was leading, in which two gay men win out over the frail dancing princess. Tacking for the prevailing winds of normalcy, the script asks Tony to realize the error of his ways and to recognize that he truly loves the dancer in the flesh, taking her aside just before her entrance to tell her that he loves her and to insist that she dance as brilliantly as before her accident to win over the audience in her favor.

       And, of course, she does just that, assuring not only the Baron and Mama can continue to dine on caviar and champagne but that Tony and his puppeteers will be also be made famous as the show goes on the road to Europe given its great success in the city of dreams.

       In a last minute break-through, fantasy has been overcome by the real, the heteronormative has won out over the queer men—both of whom, after all, have claimed a female identity—who attempted to implant their own false visions of sexuality. End of movie.

        Act III: Tony and the Baron, on a drunken night on the town, fall into one another’s arms and lament the end of the good old days when they ruled the world free from domesticity. Together they trot off to a drag show, both of them shouting, “I am Suzanne” at the top their lungs.

 

Los Angeles, January 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).