Sidney Olcott | The Girl Spy: An Incident of the Civil War / 1909 || The Further Adventures of the Girl Spy / 1910 || The Bravest Girl in the South / 1910 || The Romance of the Girl Spy / 1910 || The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg / 1910 || To the Aid of Stonewall Jackson: An Exploit of the Spy Girl / 1911

rebel without a good cause

by Douglas Messerli

 

From 1909 to 1911, Kalem pictures featured a series of six short films, all directed by Sidney Olcott, written and starring Gene Gauntier about a girl spy, Nan, working for the Confederate cause during the Civil War.

     The films include The Girl Spy: An Incident of the Civil War (1909), The Further Adventures of the Girl Spy (1910), The Bravest Girl in the South (1910), The Love Romance of the Girl Spy (1910), The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg (1910), and To the Aid of Stonewall Jackson: An Exploit of the Girl Spy (1911).

      These shorts all feature Gauntier as a rough and tumble hero, willing to go through the most difficult of feats, and who at one point or another cross-dresses in order to achieve her goals. They were inspired by the real-life woman spy Belle Boyd. They were shot at Kalem studios near Jacksonville, Florida.

      The adventures are important, in part, because they were the precursors to the popular serial films in the 1910s starring Pearl White and Grace Cunard, which featured women able to take on their male counterparts; but also, in terms of LGBTQ+ history because they represented the first wave of US films featuring strong and daring women as cross-dressers, which included also The House of Closed Shutters (1910), The Red Girl and the Child (1910), Taming a Husband (1910), and Judith of Bethulia (1914), among others.

       Only three of these films remain available, the first held at the at the Library and Archives Canada, the second at The British Film Institute and The Library of Congress, and The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.

 

 

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coded messages

 

Gene Gauntier (screenplay), Sidney Olcott (director) The Girl Spy: An Incident of the Civil War / 1909

 

In this film Nan is portrayed in the latter part of the Civil War when the Union Army had pushed their operations deep into the South. In an early scene we see the Union soldiers arrive at her house, ransacking the place for food and stealing her hen, with Nan, dressed as a Southern Belle, trying to fight them off and angered by the event.

 

   Secretly, however, the motherless girl, dedicated to the Southern cause, along with her boyfriend have been ordered to tap the telegraph wires and listen in to the code of the Union Army messages, reporting them back to headquarters. The first two minutes of this film, when Nan receives her orders has been lost, and the film picks up with the scene I describe above with the arrival of the Union Soldiers on a raiding mission.

      Immediately after, we observe her boyfriend shinnying up a local telephone pole, where he cuts both wires and hooks them up to his own listening device. He listens in as we seen the Union soldiers receive an important message which their specialist telegraphs, as he jots down the messages from the Morse Code.

 

    Suddenly observing a small group of Union soldiers in the near distances, he runs off, returns home and hands the message to Nan, to hide himself jumping into an empty water barrel situated next to the house.

     The Union soldiers have followed him home and, as they begin to search the house, Nan, now dressed as a man, sneaks around from the other side of the house and rides off on one of their horses. They ride after her, leaving only the one horseless soldier behind. As he shoots at the escaping Nan, the hidden boyfriend rises from the barrel, clonks the soldier over the head, and strips him, putting on his Union uniform.

      Nan, meanwhile, attempts to outrun the pursuing four soldiers, fording a small stream, and, in what the intertitles suggest is “a clever use,” jumps off her horse and behind a tree pulls off her male garb to transform herself back into a woman who points out the direction to the passing soldiers in which she claims to have seen the Confederate ride. 

       Eventually, they come across their stolen horse, realizing that they have been tricked.

      At Edward’s Road House, in the meantime, the now drunken group of drunken Union soldiers sit drinking. Nan arrives on the run, and seeing the soldiers has no choice but, in her womanly garb, to sit down to a table and order up something, served predictably perhaps but also somewhat ironically by a black man given the Union attempt to “free” the slaves. The Union men, presented in this Southern version of reality as monsters, all begin to manhandle her.

 

     At nearly the same moment, her boyfriend, dressed in Union regalia arrives and orders the men to leave her alone. As they move inside, he quickly hands Nan a gun, and at that very moment the man whose horse she has stolen suddenly arrives, recognizing her. She has no choice but to shoot him dead, telling the other soldiers who rush out of the road house that a stranger has just shot him and ridden off.

     Nan and her Confederate soldier run off again, the four Union soldiers behind them. Nan’s boyfriend turns, attempting to shoot them, but is himself shot instead. Terribly wounded, he hides Nan in a large bunch of rushes as, pulling off his fake beard and moustache, he pretends to be another Union soldier pointing out the way of the escapees to his pursuers.

     In front of her, he pulls open his shirt, revealing his wounds, falls down, and dies, Nan rushing to his side, briefly hugging him to her before continuing on her own escape.

      In the last frame, she finally reaches her Confederate base, handing over the secret messages where she is lauded for her brave feats.

 

Los Angeles, July 3, 2023

 

 

 

 

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through an open window

 

Gene Gauntier (screenplay), Sidney Olcott (director) The Further Adventures of the Girl Spy / 1910

 

While Nan is visiting with several of her female friends, a peddler arrives pretending to sell his wares, but sneaking a secret message to her: she is wanted at Confederate headquarters.

     She quickly rides there and receives her orders. Infiltrating a known Union meeting place, Miller’s Tavern, she observes three men meeting in a back room and, from the outside, carefully lifts up the window a bit to listen in to their conversation.

 

     However, one of the soldiers observes that the room has become far windier and perceives that the window has been risen. He goes to check out the situation and there finds Nan scribbling down their discussions concerning their secret plans.

      Hearing his arrival, she pulls out a gun and shoots, the two remaining within quickly moving to the window and themselves shooting, only to finish off their fellow soldier as Nan runs off. Once more a foot pursuit follows, with the two armed men close behind her. She returns home, lifts up of the bucket and drops herself in the well, the two men arriving puzzled by her sudden disappearance.

       But the woman of the house, either mother (which the documentation has told she doesn’t have), an aunt, or servant, brought out by the soldiers immediately calls for the help of an older man once the soldiers have left; realizing where Nan might have disappeared to, they gradually wheel up the heavy bucket upon which she is still standing, finding her soaking wet.

      Nan, now dressed as a boy, is put into a gunny sack by the older man and placed on his wagon with several sacks of apples, evidently meant as provisions for the Union Army. He drives through enemy lines, one of his bags inspected, and when safely into enemy territory opens up the bag from which the boy Nan emerges.

       The boy climbs high into a tree beneath which two Union men come to rest or evidently picnic. But as soon as they have sat down and opened their sack of food, she jumps from the tree onto one of the horses and rides off.

       She speeds off the Confederate camp and proudly delivers up the Union secrets.

       This second work in the series is not nearly as interesting or unpredictable as the first, and the fact that her scenarios were pretty much made up as the filmmakers went along becomes fairly apparent.

        By the time of the fifth extant film the series had grown much more sophisticated.

 

Los Angeles, July 3, 2023

     

       

 

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riding the rails

 

Gene Gauntier (screenplay), Sidney Olcott (director) The Bravest Girl in the South / 1910 || lost film or unavailable

 

There is no evidence that this film is still available and it is likely a lost movie. But a synopsis does appear on the IMDb site, attributed to Bruce R. Bardarik, without providing any information of who he is or how he came to see this movie. It reads:

 

“Worn out and wounded, a Confederate messenger crawls up to the house of Nan, and gives her a dispatch for delivery to another agent fifty miles distant. Ostensibly bound for market, she rides through the Federal camp, but is suspected and hotly pursued. By taking shelter in a log shanty, she temporarily evades the soldiers, but they get on her track again, and another thrilling chase ensues. Reaching the railway, Nan invokes the aid of a friendly engine driver, and has the satisfaction of outdistancing her pursuers and delivering the all-important document.”

 

Los Angeles, July 3, 2023

 

 

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in bed with the enemy

 

Gene Gauntier (screenplay), Sidney Olcott (director) The Love Romance of the Girl Spy / 1910 || lost film or unavailable

 

Evidently this fourth of the girl spy series was to have been the last of the series. It would seem a good ending, since the Confederate spy, oddly enough, falls in love in this picture with a Union soldier, Captain Wilkins, who after the War claims his Rebel sweetheart.

      Accordingly, we also do not know if this film, about falling in heterosexual love, has any LGBTQ content. I can find no pictures of the movie. But we do still have “The Moving Picture World” synopsis, which reads as follow:

 

“This is the fourth and last of the Kalem Company's celebrated series of productions relating the fascinating adventures of Nan, the Girl Spy. In this is shown how Fate played a trick on Nan; how she found the man to whom she entrusted herself and her future happiness in the army of the enemy she hated so bitterly.”

Scene I. The End of the Battle - Nan Meets the Wounded Union Officer.

Scene II. One Mouth Later - Love's First Awakening.

Scene III. Captain Wilkins Bids Nan Farewell.

Scene IV. The Girl Spy Is Captured.

Scene V. The Escape.

Scene VI. Nan Tells General Lee of Her Failure.

Scene VII. After the War Captain Wilkins Claims His Rebel Sweetheart.

 

     It would have been wonderful, if nothing else, to know how Gauntier and Olcott brought the two warring sides together and justified the girl spy’s Confederate betrayal, her support of slavery, and her previous murder of so many Union soldiers.

 

Los Angeles, July 3, 2023

 

 

 

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deeper waters

 

Gene Gauntier (screenplay), Sidney Olcott (director) The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg / 1910

 

In this 5th installation of the girl spy series, gay actor and director Robert Vignola plays the role of the Confederate General, with Australian actor and director J. D. McGowan as his handsome assistant. The only copy of the film that remains is held at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam which explains its Dutch intertitles, translated in the version I saw into English.

 

     This spy story is quite simple. A Union powder wagon is making its way across the country guarded by mounted Union soldiers. Without men he might detach to destroy the wagon, the Confederate General is forced to call upon his own daughter, Anna (Gauntier, her character called Nan in other sources and the credits) who, dressed in a Union military uniform, rides to the Union unit with a fake declaration, telling the group to move in another direction. They believe not only in the paperwork but that its messenger is one of their own and a male. Evidently, they are quite easily duped.

     As they prepare to turn about, Anna knocks out the young guard who is attending the wagon and takes his place. As they begin to move forward, she plants a dynamite cartridge under the wagon, lights the fuse, and hurries away from the danger.

 

    The wagon explodes into what the publicity sheet described as “a heap of charred embers.” As Anna rushes off, she is followed closely by Union soldiers, escaping as she leaves her horse and dives into a river, pretending to swim off. The soldiers follow her, swimming out of the frame. Meanwhile the camera holds still, focusing on the rather still lovely scene of the river without seemingly a soul in site—until suddenly Anna rises from the deep waters, having escaped her pursuers by remaining there for a rather long period of time.

 

 

      She returns home to find her mother, frantic at her absence, kneeling in prayer.

      The scenes with the Union military, the ammunition explosion, and particularly the river scene are all quite wonderfully filmed by cinematographer George K. Hollister.

      Too bad the film, like Griffith’s before it, celebrates heroism for a cause that was determined to keep blacks in slavery. It is notable that in this film, the original driver of the ammunition wagon is a black man, not a white in blackface.

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2023

 

     

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marching to the rear

 

Gene Gautier (screenplay), Sidney Olcott (director) To the Aid of Stonewall Jackson: An Exploit of the Spy Girl / 1911 || lost film or unavailable

 

The final episode of the spy girl series may have been closer to a feature film, although again we cannot know whether or not it as any LGBTQ content. This time we do have a photograph from the production and a longer “Moving Picture World” synopsis.

“Monday, while the girl spy is visiting relatives, General Shields, of the Union army, and his staff, take possession of the house for the night. Nan, seeing an opportunity to employ her professional talents, makes an effort to learn the Union officer's plans. She finds the General's room guarded, but discovers another way to overhear the conversation. Retiring to her room on the second floor, she crawls out of the window on to the roof of the gallery, lowers herself down to the ground and takes up a position at the window of the General's room. Hearing the officer say he would attack Jackson at daybreak, Nan thinks of the doughty General and his Confederate army one hundred miles away. Starting on her journey, Nan rides at top speed with her important information. Tuesday night, Nan has twenty miles more to go and her horse is fagged out. This forces her to rest at a nearby town, where she unwittingly runs into danger and is suspected of being the girl spy. The loyal keeper of the tavern warns Nan of the suspicion aroused against her and an hour later Nan escapes from her room, goes to the barn for her horse, which she mounts and rides off. As she passes the tavern door the Union soldiers, hearing the sound of her horse, all rush out and readily recognize the spy is trying to escape. They quickly mount their horses and follow in pursuit. Nan, however, being thoroughly familiar with the country, fools them. Finally reaching the Confederate lines, she asks that she be taken to General Jackson, whom she informs that Shields will march at sunrise Wednesday morning and before noon will attack Jackson's flank. The doughty General of the Confederates replies, "We will march immediately and surprise General Shield's rear."

 

Los Angeles, July 3, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).

Walfrid Bergström | Skilda tiders danser (Dances Through the Ages) / 1909

the boston glide

 

Walfrid Bergström (photographer) Skilda tiders danser (Dances Through the Ages) / 1909

 

The short three-minute film “‘Skilda tiders danser,” released by the National Library of Sweden, is actually part of a larger work from 1909 titled in English Dances Through the Ages which also included evidently a gavotte, a minuet, and another unnamed dance.

 

    The extant piece was described as “a soft, gliding Boston” as danced “in a modern salon.”

     The reason why this film, other than its excellently performed “Boston Waltz,” is of interest is that it consists of two women, one all in white, Rosa Grünberg, described as “the lady,” and Emma Meissner as the “cavalier,” costumed, as Laura critic Horak describes it, with “hair pinned up, in black tails, trousers, and a white bowtie....” Both were leading stars in operettas of the day, with Meissner performing as the lead in over 100 operettas. Grünberg was rather famous for her opera recordings. And the two later performed together in the operetta Eve in 1911.

      Horvak describes their rather complex interchanging positions as follows:

 

“When this three-minute scene begins, Meissner sits coquettishly in front of a black curtain on the left side of the frame, looking happily over to Grünberg, who stands in front of a light-colored wallpaper on the right. Grünberg walks over and bows, Meissner stands and curtseys, then Grünberg takes her partner’s hands and sweeps her into a waltz. As they turn, the women switch places in front of the dark and light backgrounds – first they contrast with the background, then blend in, then they contrast again. While the dark- and light-colored backdrops initially suggest a strict binary, the movement of the dance confuses this distinction. They change places again and again, suggesting that this simple binary between light and dark, cavalier and lady, man and woman, is insufficient.”

 

      It was not uncommon in the first decade of the 20th century—as we have witnessed in the female pairing of dancers in the films of 1900 by Alice Guy Blaché—for such cross-dressing encounters, so audiences would have easily accepted these images. However, as Horak adds, “...the performers’ obvious pleasure may have suggested intriguing possibilities to women who were attracted to women and people assigned female who were masculine identified.”

     And, in any event, female cross-dressers became far less common in Sweden throughout the decade, those kinds of roles begin increasingly reassigned to male performers such as Eric Malmberg’s Agaton och Fina (1912), in which actor Victor Arfvidson played the female role. And other examples exist in the American short comedies centered around Sweedie, the maid, performed by Wallace Beery. It was not until the 1940s before such roles for females were again witnessed in Swedish film.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).

J. Stuart Blackton | Oliver Twist / 1909

the trophy

by Douglas Messerli

Eugene Mullin (scenario), J. Stuart Blackton (director) Oliver Twist / 1909

 

Ever since reading Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist in my junior year of college, I have always felt that Oliver’s entrance into Fagin’s den is very close to an immersion into queer life. Of course, in this rowdy and violent world of “prigs” (thieves) life is very queer, “odd and peculiar,” in the more traditional meaning of that word. But it is also a homosexual world and, with Fagin playing the role of the titular “den daddy” to the boys within the darkened and decaying structure—not so very different from James Whale’s Old Dark House—it is most definitely a pedophilic paradise wherein Fagin’s epithets of “my dear” “my pet,” and “my lovely” mean something far more than ironic niceties bantered in an attempt to keep the boys close to home. If Fagin’s nearly salivating endearments are ironic (and they are), they also are contextualized within an inverted society that Dickens deeply sexualizes. 

 

      Consider for example a single paragraph where Oliver is taken with the Dodger and Master Bates—the names alone are sexually charged, “dodger” being a British street term for someone who doesn’t swallow sperm during fellatio and, obviously, the other suggesting the sexual self-pleasure of masturbating—introduce the “green” (ignorant of nearly all life experiences) Oliver to Fagin. 

 

“The Jew grinned; and, making a low obeisance to Oliver, took him by the hand, and hoped he should have the honour of his intimate acquaintance. Upon this, the young gentleman with the pipes came round him, and shook both his hands very hard—especially the one in which he held his little bundle. One young gentleman was very anxious to hang up his cap for him; and another was so obliging as to put his hands in his pockets, in order that, as he was very tired, he might not have the trouble of emptying them, himself, when he went to bed. These civilities would probably be extended much farther, but for a liberal exercise of the Jew’s toasting-fork on the heads and shoulders of the affectionate youths who offered them.”

 

       On the surface, obviously, beyond their apparently friendly greetings, Oliver is being properly shaken down by the pick-pocketing youths who are checking out his pockets and traveling pack for anything of value, with Fagin attempting to keep them in order by knocking them over their noggins with his toasting fork.

      Yet the passage is utterly filled with sexual double entendres. From Fagin’s disingenuous curtesy which suggests a different kind of “intimate acquaintance” than a mere friendship, to Dodger’s “very hard” shaking of his hands (which is suggestive of masturbation) with particular attention to the boy’s “little bundle” (his penis and testes). Another boy hanging up his cap (a “cap” in British slang meaning a lie) hints that they are anxious to reveal the “real truth of their attentions” to him, while yet another literally feels him up by putting his hands in the Oliver’s pockets. Only Fagin’s “forking” them (meaning anal sex) keeps these affectionate youths from extending their further “civilities” to the innocent newcomer. It’s ironic that if in the world outside of Fagin’s den, Oliver is a being of utterly no value, within he has become an important commodity, a body which the others all covet almost as a trophy.

      And that’s just one scene among many throughout the novel.

      This extended aside only serves the purpose of arguing that the very first film containing cinematic representations of Dickens’ novel, J. Stuart Blackton’s Oliver Twist of 1909, is not as innocent with regard to queer sexuality as it first might appear.

      Blackton’s 14-minute version does not attempt to tell the full story of the fiction, but assuming its early 20^th century audiences have read the popular book, presents them with various tableaux vivants that may have been based etchings in repeated editions of the book.

      In this cinematic rendering we see Oliver’s mother give birth and die, and witness Oliver’s attempt to ask for “more” food in the workhouse, for which he is severely beaten, much more harshly punished than in subsequent versions in which he is more chased than physically chastised.

     We also briefly meet Beadle Bumble, but the film then utterly drops that thread, immediately leaping ahead in time to Oliver’s meeting up with the Artful Dodger on the road to London and his introduction into Fagin’s den.

     Here Fagin (William Humphrey) not only drools over his newest sexual pigeon, but shoos off his other apprentices, and—as Oliver, almost starved from his long voyage, falls into a faint—picks him up and hurries him off to bed, there being little question here about his ultimate if not immediate intentions.

     Blackton and his scenarist Eugene Mullin dodge the homo-pedophilic implications of this a bit by choosing Oliver to be portrayed in their film by a woman, Edith Storey, just 17 years of age during the shoot.

     Indeed, Fagin is not the only one who rapes (in the sense of picking the boy up and carrying him off) Oliver, but almost everyone who one meets the boy does so, including the well-intentioned Mr. Brownlow. In Mullin’s and Blackton’s telling, Oliver is represented less as a parish boy whose life is in progress than a kind of trophy bandied back and forth between Fagin and Brownlow. He is a thing with little will of his own—which I would argue is very much as Dickens portrays him in the novel.

      Fagin’s desperate attempts to regain possession of this trophy seem, in this instance, a result not only for his fears of the boy telling the authorities of his actions and whereabouts, but suggest a deeper desire for the boy’s body, as he outrightly accuses Nancy of working against his attempts to keep the boy in his clutches. This Fagin, very much as in etchings of the scene, personally spies on her secret meeting with Brownlow in his attempt to regain control of the boy.

 

       The scene in which Bill Sykes kills Nancy as portrayed in this motion picture premier of a story that will be revived numerous times, changed the way her character would be portrayed in almost all of the following films and is said to have made Nancy’s role (realized by stage actress Elita Proctor Otis) “famous throughout the world,’ later coming back to life back like a ghost out of A Christmas Carol to terrorize Bill Sykes.

        Unlike most the later versions, this 1909 telling ends with a scene from the novel in which Oliver with Mr. Brownlow, visits Fagin in prison, unintentionally confirming that Fagin was guilty of his internment in the den of prigs.

 

Los Angeles, December 16, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).

Søren Green | Oktober Dreng (October Boy) / 2018

the gay gaze

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tomas Lagermand Lundme and Søren Green (screenplay), Søren Green (director), Oktober Dreng (October Boy) / 2018 [29 minutes]

 

14-year-old Thomas (Elias Buddde Christensen) begins his first days in his new Copenhagen school, having just moved to the city with his mother. He soon meets up with Emma (Esther Marie Boisen Berg), who notices he likes to draw and suggests they might spend some time together sketching—a clever way to meet the new boy.

    Mads (Noa Risbro Hjerrild) also meets the new boy in the locker room where, watching him sketch a drawing on his wrist, asks him if he might give him a temporary tattoo on his arm. Just out of the shower, his arm isn’t entirely dry yet, and he asks Thomas to blow on it. Little does Thomas seem to recognize that the battle for his attention is already underway.

     When they meet up to share drawings, Emma wants an arm drawing as well, but Thomas claims he doesn’t have his proper pens, she asking him to visit her again when he can do the tattoo.

      But it’s when Thomas meets up with Emma’s older brother Mikkel (Jacob August Ottensten), a young artist whose drawings Emma has borrowed to show them as her own to Thomas, that things truly begin to change for the 14-year-old. Danish director Søren Green’s camera makes it clear that the younger boy is immediately attracted to his crotch and the hair around Mikkel’s navel. And when the older boy invites him to the Academy, after praising Thomas’ drawings, Thomas is drawn into new possibilities without him perhaps even being aware of it.

 

     Even a trip to the bathroom, after which he spots the naked Mikkel pulling on his pants, clearly sends him head reeling, although actor Christensen deadpans the entire situation, only his eyes widening with the wonders he observes.

       In his bed, he now has images of Mads, and he soon becomes best friends with the cute boy of his own age. But eventually he does draw an image on Emma’s arm as well, while she vaguely describes a childhood transgression of her and a friend watching “13 Reasons ‘Why,’” an episodic film evidently which her parents might not have permitted. He kisses the girl, perhaps more out curiosity or an attempt to prove his heterosexuality than any attraction. They fall onto the bed, but Thomas quickly turns away, perceiving the girl is not what he really wants.

      Surely, she recognizes it is a lost cause when he asks, “Can’t we just lie her for a bit?”

     Meanwhile, however, word has gotten out that he’s “been with Emma,” presumably suggesting that he’s had sex with her, making him somewhat popular, at least with Boas. Conflicted as he is, Thomas says nothing to deny it, which gets him an automatic invitation to the party of Boas’ house when his parents are out of town.

    While having a reputation of having slept with Emma makes Thomas popular with the boys, however, Emma is described as being “slutty” by her girlfriends and finally confronts Thomas believing he was the one who spread the rumor. Soon after, Thomas quickly leaves the party.

      The several images that Green flashes of a train in motion convey not only Thomas’ own trip from the party to his home, but the sense of changes he is inwardly undergoing, the blur and confusion of his own emotions.

      Mads finds him sitting in the subway station drunk, and helps him home.

     The next day, Thomas visits Emma to apologize for not having said something to the others, for not having denied what was clearly a rumor. Apparently, she accepts the apology and together they visit Mikkel’s show. The film ends with Thomas staring at Mikkel, the older boy appearing to recognize the younger boy’s gaze of desire—but whether he can or will or even wishes to respond is unknowable. What is clear is that Thomas has to come realize where from now on intends to look for love.

      For some years now, Green has been making small, quiet movies (An Afternoon in 2014 and An Evening in 2016) which deal with young adolescents trying to come to terms with and, more importantly, verbalize the queer feelings they suddenly encounter, fearful of expressing their new emotions to their closest friends, let alone sharing them with their peers in which might end in abuse. October Boy is the best of these to date.

 

Los Angeles, November 20, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (November 2023).

Alf Collins | How Percy Won the Beauty Competition / 1909

how to get ahead

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alf Collins (scenarist and director) How Percy Won the Beauty Competition / 1909

 

Gaumont Studios England was first located at what was called the Camberwell’s Dog Kennel, Hillywood in 1898. Eventually, after building a new studio years later, Gaumont bought out its French originator and become the largest studio in England.

      Among one of its earliest actors/directors was Alf Collins who did a series of films, many of them with him performing as a woman or, as in How Percy Won the Beauty Competition of 1909, as a man portraying a member of the female sex.

      The entire story and plot is quite conventional for early comic drag works, and lacks little subtlety or structure, although there are some excellent long shots and few surprises along the way that are not typical of US filmmaking.

      In this case the handsome Percy (Collins) begins the film by reading the newspaper and noting that there is a 100 £ award for winning a local beauty competition. Obviously he could use the cash, and immediately heads off to Fox’s wigs, coming out of the store looking like a handsome woman of the Edwardian era.

      In the very next scene, a group of women sit on chairs before the judges’ table, each of them numbered, as the camera carefully scans their faces. Most of the women are well dressed having given particular attention to their headwear, and several of them are quite handsome if a bit more elderly than one might have expected for a beauty pageant. What also seems to be out of the ordinary is that Percy is not the only male in the gathering, but two other men also appear in women’s attire.

      The judges call up each of the “women,” one by one, to the table, finally awarding the first prize, along with the sack of the 100 £ to Percy. The rest of the group are clearly ruffled by the judges’ decision and, as the winner attempts to walk down the stairs from the location of the contest, they await him on both sides of his path, one woman rushing him and pulling off his wig to reveal his true sexuality at the very moment that the judges also are exiting.

       Terrified of the consequences, our hero momentarily trips before he quickly stands and leaps into a run, all the others chasing after, irate about the circumstance.

       He jumps fences, travels down steep embankments, enters a house unbidden, exists it, and races down several streets, the others all following, the women taking several rolls while the two males in drag, following behind, who take more serious dives and pratfalls, at one point crashing into an outdoor café table, taking its patron with them, obviously unused to their female attire.

       At several points it appears that the group has trapped him, but time and again he escapes until suddenly he meets up with a high wall, an apparent dead end. He pauses, clearly fearful of having to hand over his winnings and perhaps being beaten in the process. But suddenly he moves out of the camera frame and returns with a tall ladder, placing it against the wall and quickly scrambling up its steps before, just as the others come into site, to pull the ladder up after him and toss it to the other side. Back on the ground now opposite of his pursuers he laughs in derision at their attempts. He was won through his beauty, his fitness, and wits, having bested them all. In the end, accordingly we do know how Percy has won the beauty competition but know very little about why.

       It appears that this film is he only one of Collins’ film to have been converted from celluloid to the internet or DVD format, and none of them appear to be available in the United States.

 

Los Angeles, January 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022). 

D. W. Griffith | Pranks / 1909

straight crossdressers interrupt gay lovers

by Douglas Messerli

D. W. Griffith (director) Pranks / 1909

 

D. W. Griffith’s short film ostensibly is simply what its title suggests, a series of pranks played out by two boys (performed Robert Harron and Jack Pickford) who while a fighting heterosexual couple are both out swimming in their own spots in a public park, enter their dressing cabins and switch the clothing, putting the male’s togs, belonging to Tom (Arthur V. Johnson) in Ethel’s (Marion Leonard’s) cabin and vice versa.

   

      Ethel has already chastised Tom for showing his affection publicly, which scandalized the two women who evidently keep the hotel in which they are staying. But now she is even more angered by discovering not only someone has taken her clothing, but has left behind Tom’s suit and hat. Of course, she can suspect no one else but Tom himself, just as he suddenly must perceive her as vindictively forcing him into her dress. Their frustration with one another is not established in the film, but we cannot help but sense it, nonetheless, in their angry looks and in their following behavior as they both rush, first Ethel and after her Tom, back to the hotel.

       It the movie were to stop here, with the two in their quick crossdressing runs, it would be yet another meaningless film in which drag behavior results in a few giggles by those who think such behavior is as audacious as the two matronly hotel ladies of Victorian USA feel about young people demonstrating their love in public.

      But Griffith goes beyond conventional drag humor, almost intentionally challenging his audiences to take everything a step further. Ethel first runs past a couple of women sitting together closely on a bench sharing a map or a brochure. There is no suggestion that these two properly dressed ladies are doing anything else but sharing information, perhaps planning a car trip or a hike, but they become aghast at the woman dressed as a man wearing a straw hat, and are even more startled by seeing a man in full woman’s attire including a sun hat, hats which neither of them needed have donned as part of their costumes.

       It is the next couple, however, that makes this 5-minute film so very fascinating. First Ethel almost trips on a pair of full-fledged pansies canoodling in the grass; they stand up, one waving his right hand in a stereotypical gay manner and responding to what he sees with words which although we can’t hear we can almost observe him mouthing, “Hey, come back!” delighted, quite obviously by what he recognizes as queer behavior.

       Both are even more stunned by the arrival of a man in drag, this time one of two “fairies” (Billy Quirk and Henry B. Walthall) crying out quite passionately, “don’t go!” They turn to one another in both pleased wonderment and startlement.

        Clearly, Griffith has gone far beyond the unspoken sexual barriers of cinema of his day, and now must right the situation by returning Tom to his proper heterosexual position as Ethel’s protector. A masher (the published synopsis describes him as a tramp), seeing obviously a miss who’s willing to take chances, tries to accost her, Tom coming across the struggling couple and knocking the masher/tramp out. The two, seeing each other in their own attire recognize what must have happened, quickly patch things up, and return to heteronormativity despite the fact that they remain momentarily in drag. 

        In her commentary on the film, Laura Horak argues that the importance of this film is in how it presents public parks as “a free space for expression,” arguing that while the men lying together in the grass are coded as pansies, “there’s no hiding or fear of them being queer in the park.” She contends that in this moment in queer history public spaces belonged equally to them before they were “kept inside and policed.”

     Frankly, I see that view as nonsense. At no time in the first part of the century would queer behavior have been openly allowed in a public park. And we have plenty of evidence in films such as almost all of Chaplin’s works, as well as those of Laurel and Hardy, and, in particular, in Hal Roach’s 1917 short, Clubs Are Trump, that the police in public parks were quite actively on the lookout for those who fell to sleep on benches or in the grass, men who seemingly bothered women, and, in particular, men who appeared to pay astute attention to others of the same sex. In Roach’s film, Luke and Snub are seriously pursued by the police for their friendly hugging, not even a gesture of gay love but simply a reaction to their mutual nightmares. And to my knowledge, gay behavior was as much against the law in 1909 as it was in 1950.

      That doesn’t mean, of course, that gay men never attempted to find an out-of-the-way corner just as the two homosexuals in this film have found; and at this river resort there appear to be no policemen. But certainly, the idea that there was no fear of hiding about being queer in public doesn’t to seem match the world I have read of and seen through movies. Indeed, had it been openly permitted, we might have seen many another movie about this very subject; yet to my knowledge, Griffith’s film may be the first and only open expression of gay love in public in the three decades of the 20th century I cover in this volume.

       The unusual absurdity of what happens in Pranks might almost be headlined as another kind of political prank: “Straight cross dressers interrupt gay lovers.”

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).