Joe Rock and Harry Sweet | The Sleuth / 1925

sherlock as a vamp

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tay Garnett (screenplay), Joe Rock and Harry Sweet (directors) The Sleuth / 1925

 

It appears, at least superficially, that Frederick Kovert’s role as a detective in drag in The Reel Virginian (October 1924) was of interest to Stan Laurel and others involved with his productions, since in his June 1925 film The Sleuth Stan plays a detective who also crossdresses, twice in the same movie, and in July of that year directed Kovert in the same kind of role in Chasing the Chaser. Surely this wasn’t all coincidental.

     But on the other hand, The Sleuth has little relationship to either of the other two films except for Laurel’s drag appearances. Apparently this work has been perceived as one of Laurel’s weakest films simply because of his outrageously absurd gags and the absolute discontinuity of the movie’s narrative. But in fact, I would argue, this work is one of the most remarkable of US films of the day in its forward-looking leap into surrealist-like incidents and into an overall sense of absurdity that truly places it in the context of the 1950s and 1960s Theater of the Absurd.

      How could any film commentator working within the context of most of the films from the beginning of cinema until the end of the 1920s have expected a US short of 20 minutes to function more in the manner of Luis Buñuel’s Un chien Andalou (1929) or the 1930s films of the Marx Brothers. Certainly, we might look to the influences of Buster Keaton, but even his absurdist attitude toward life remains within the bounds of comedic possibility, larger-than-life events being created by hurricanes, war, and general distress.

      This little gem, directed by the team of Joe Rock and Harry Sweet, however, makes utterly no attempt to attend to the rational world. Given Joe Rock’s early teaming with comedian Earl Montgomery in the series of alliteratively titled shorts the duo made in late teens and early 1920s—Hash and Havoc (1916), Stowaways and Strategy (1917), Farms and Fumbles (1918), Harems and Hookum (1919), Zip and Zest (1919), Vamps and Variety (1919), Rubes and Robbers (1919), Cave and Coquettes (1919), Throbs and Thrills (1920), Loafers and Lovers (1920), and Sauce and Senoritas (1920)—we certainly might have expected the emphasis of his work with Laurel to be on the immediate comic moment rather than any narrative continuity. And the 6 films he made with Laurel before this one— Mandarin Mix-Up (1924), Detained (1924), Monsieur Don't Care (1924), West of Hot Dog (1924), Somewhere in Wrong (1925), Twins (1925), Pie-Eyed (1925), The Snow Hawk (1925), and Navy Blue Days (1925) could hardly be said to have focused on coherent plot.

       The Sleuth, however, is still something quite different. It begins not unlike Laurel’s Chasing the Chaser, with the detective, Walter Dingle (Laurel) sitting at his desk awaiting a client. But even here, before any possible narrative even begins, Laurel establishes his own incompetence for the job, with his sign reading, “solving puzzles” as he struggles to separate the parts of an interlocking ring, a task which his delivery boy easily solves. When someone enters the room he immediately pretends be busy on the phone, which quickly realize has been disconnected, probably for non-payment. Yet these scenes at least display some logic.

       The rest of the film transfers us into a maniacal land of meaningless actions, beginning with the visit of an actual client, the Wife (Alberta Vaughn) explaining to him through a brief cinematic scene why she is seeking out his services.

        The wife reveals, through the film’s cinematic representation, that just as they were about to sit down with guests to the dinner table, her husband took out his watch and explained that he had a meeting, immediately thereafter leaving the house. Meanwhile, her daughter entered, insisting that she accompany her into the next room. When then entered that room, the daughter gestured that she open yet another door. When the wife did so—revealing a room that was still evidently in their home, but not somehow directly connected with the other rooms—she discovered her husband standing with three other men and a woman at the head of a line.

      The wife appeared to have little curiosity about the event, nor even demanded an explanation. We only know that she has found it distressing because she has shown up in the detective’s office.

      The detective, meanwhile, seemingly dressed in casual wear, suddenly begs her to excuse him and reenters the room—in what I shall call “cartoon duration”—now dressed completely in his detective dugs while carrying an enormously outsized pipe in the style and manner of Sherlock Holmes.

       From there on the film gets even stranger, as Dingle, evidently assuring her that he is the man for the job—whatever that job may be—proves his worth by revealing, under his coat, a small detective badge.

  

     In the very next frame Dingle knocks on the door of the couple’s mansion, irritating the husband who is forced to get up and open it, but is delighted to see a new housekeeper, dressed a bit like Mary Poppins, whom he profusely greets and with whom he immediately begins to flirt.

       If previously, the wife had seemed a bit dowdy, she now sits in a pajama suit, smoking a cigarette from an enormously long holder. Dingle, appearing as Laurel generally does in drag as a not truly convincing female, feels it necessary several times to flash his badge to the wife to make it clear he is in “costume.”

     She, however, not only seems hardly to care, but immediately leaves the room, allowing her husband, as Dingle, again in cartoon duration, suddenly appears in a maid’s outfit, rolling out a cart of tea and sandwiches. Almost immediately the husband begins to sexually paw her, putting his arm around her shoulder, an act which she punishes by breaking a dish across his crown and soon after, when he attempts it again, pouring tea on his lap. But nothing stops him, as he invites her to sit next to him to share a sandwich and tea, she encouraging his flirting, then punishing him, before acting coy all over again.

       Finally, he begins to chase her about the room, the two running into another room as well, past the still seeming disinterested wife.

       Without any explanation, Dingle is now dressed in his detective attire, with a Sherlock Holmes-like cap and a magnifying glass, his feet planted in white power which he tracks across the room implanting his prints on the carpet. He disappears for a second, reentering from another door, and observing the prints follows them, making even deeper imprints upon the carpet. He repeats this a number of times until the wife enters to observe him, as he speeds up the process of exciting and entering from another door, repeating the pattern again and again the way Harpo and Chico Marx often repeat their actions until they become almost boringly banal, but taking it even further until the action once again seems so absurd that that forces us to laugh. By the time he finishes the trek between exiting on the left and returning from the right, the frame has sped up almost to the animated blur of Roadrunner in the Wile E. Coyote cartoons.

       To attempt logical discussion beyond this point is ridiculous. The movie has become an absurdist dream. All one can explain is that at some point Dingle begins to wear various hats and beards, at moments appearing as a Hassidic Rabbi, and at another a mustachioed villain, and yet another instance seemingly costumed as a young Talmudic student.

        At one point, the husband sits him down, offering him a glass of brandy, which Dingle observes out of the corner of his eye that the host has poisoned. When the husband isn’t looking, Dingle exchanges the glasses; the husband, noticing the exchange pretends to change them; and Dingle, observing the fact, changes them again. They seem to change places yet another time, but finally the men are forced to toast, and Dingle drinks his down, pretending to die. In self-congratulation, the husband drinks his glass and falls to the floor. Dingle rises and escapes, but when the husband’s gang enter, a little seltzer spritzed into the husband’s face immediately revives him. In short, despite the poison in at least one of their glasses, neither of them dies.

        On another occasion Dingle also encounters the “other woman” (Anita Garvin) and the three men, along with them the client’s husband, evidently up to something since they are at one point appear to write out a document and at another moment are rushing about house with the message in hand. However, the door soon closes, with Dingle again responding by appearing in various and hats and beards which are quickly snatched from his head and face as a small panel in the door opens, something inside evidently pulling them away as fast as he can replace them.

        Many of these activities take place with the couple’s bedroom with the Wife looking diffidently on, but at other moments the action shifts to other rooms in a home that seems to have an endless number of ornately decorated and paneled suites more like a hotel. Time and place are constantly being disrupted just as identity is always in total flux.

       No sense in the film is to be made by the characters’ motives or actions. At one point they simply start breaking vases over each other’s heads. At some moments the three men and one woman gather in a seemingly sinister manner, only to a few seconds later scatter.

     Finally, the “other woman” seems to disappear while the three men and the husband move menacingly into a room at the back of which is a collapsible screen. When they pull it away Dingle sits on a rug now dressed as like a modern vamp in a black gown with back cut- away to reveal the wearer’s flesh. One by one the four men approach this beauty with lust in their eyes, the whole bodies almost heaving with the intensity of their promised pleasure.

      A rose in her mouth, she throws it at the men who wrestle for it, diving in upon one another before her, she taking up a vase and hitting over the head one by one, knocking them out.

      The wife suddenly appears, perhaps startled by seeing the woman crouched before the several male bodies. Dingle stands, pulling off his wig, as if expecting applause. But the wife merely takes up another vase and hits him over the head, he falling to the floor with the others. The End.

      The Sleuth is less a cinematic narrative about the activities of a detective than it is a kind of satiric cinema tone-poem mocking all the works about sleuthing previously filmed. Here there is no true villain, no real crime, nor apparent victim; the clues are only what the detective introduces into the case, and motives are simply the clumsy male attempts to touch and stroke female flesh.

      In hindsight, it now seems rather remarkable that of all the early film comedians who explored crossdressing as a way to get laughs, Roscoe Arbuckle, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Oliver Hardy, and so many others, Stan Laurel probably appeared in drag more often, but without even shrugging over the necessary transformations demanded of him for his character’s survival and simply as part of his various modes of employment. If for the others it required female imitation, an affectation of gender differences, or a contortion of the body away from their male identities, for Laurel it seemed quite natural, something not even to get excited about. Stan remained himself even as a vamp.

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2022 / Reprinted by World Cinema Review (July 2022).

Stan Laurel | Chasing the Chaser / 1925

getting her man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stan Laurel, James Parrot, and Rob Wagner (screenplay), Stan Laurel (director) Chasing the Chaser / 1925

       

Two women, a wife (Marjorie White) and her busybody neighbor appear at the office of an attractive female detective (Frederick Kovert) who, when they ask to see her boss, pulls off her wig to reveal she is in drag—a surprise I’m certain to most of the audience of Stan Laurel’s short 10-minute film, Chasing the Chaser (1925).

    We’ve seen the husband for ourselves on a simple walk down the street where he is tempted, time and again, by the sight of the feminine form, following first one and then another. A nursemaid he finally follows to a drugstore (Fay Wray of King Kong fame) hands him the baby to care for while she enters the establishment. The baby inevitably creates chaos for the unsuspecting womanizer.

     The secret to discover the affairs of the husband, the detective assures the wife and her neighbor, is to hire a woman to test him out.

      The detective, pretending to be a new housekeeper puts the woman’s husband Gilroy (James Finlayson) through torture as she serves drinks, sits on his lap, and eventually gets him to make the move she is seeking so that she might blow the whistle calling forth the wife of nosey friend.

     Serving him a drink, dancing a tango, and finally pulling him down onto the floor with her, the detective gets her man.

      The husband, caught in the trap, is tossed out of the house by his wife, but at the last moment, realizing the tricks the detective has played on him—including his sudden perception that the maid was not after all a female—he suddenly comes to his USA patriarchal senses, pulling out a gun (as every red-hearted American citizen automatically does) pushes the detective out the door, while shooting at her through the now closed door in which her dress has been caught. The detective finally rips out of her skirt and runs off in her panties, her hips swaying as her heels hit the sidewalk.

      Sending the neighbor woman off as well, Gilroy turns to his wife, she making clear how sorry she is for having suspected him, but still pleading with him not to lay eyes on another woman again. He promises, as out the front window he catches a glimpse of another beautiful young girl.

     Finlayson, as always, is a joy to behold in his clumsy and ineffectual attempts at chasing and courting the female gender. But the real star of this early silent work is Frederick Kovert (sometimes known as Ko Vert), a true sex fiend determined to get her man—and her paycheck.

 

Los Angeles, June 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

Pedro Almodóvar | Volver / 2007

revolutions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pedro Almodóvar (screenwriter and director) Volver / 2007

 

I interpret the title of Pedro Almodóvar’s 2007 film not simply as a “coming back,” but as a return, a revolving, a kind of “revolution,” both in the sense of the planet’s trip around the sun and a change or turning in social and political events.

      Oddly enough the movie begins with an image of no change or, perhaps, a change one might describe as the ultimate one, death. For seemingly all the citizens of the small Spanish village in La Mancha, where Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) and her sister Sole (Lola Dueñas) have grown up, are at the graveyard, cleaning the headstones and replanting flowers nearby. The daughters and Raimunda’s child, Paula, have returned to this village to refurbish their mother and father’s grave, both of whom have died in a fire. The sight of all these devoted relatives polishing up the graves of their loved ones in the midst of the insistent winds of a mistral, is, as the camera pans over the cemetery grounds, one of the most absurd of Almodóvar’s images.  As the sisters prepare to leave, they encounter a neighbor, Augustina, who explains she has come to polish her own headstone—it is a comforting act, she explains—which Raimunda tells her daughter is customary behavior in this strange town.

      As they prepare to leave, they briefly visit their aunt. The aunt is nearly blind and hardly able to remember Sole, yet the house remains in order. The aunt survives, she explains, with the help of their mother Irene (the marvelous Carmen Maura), whom the townspeople, according to Augustina, claim has reappeared as a ghost. It is hard not to believe in this ghostly presence when Sole herself sees the image momentarily as she uses the bathroom and when the women are presented upon their leaving with canisters of prepared food, each with their name written upon it.

      The magical world of village life is countered by the stark poverty of the Madrid suburbs where Raimunda and Sole now live. It is a world of poor migrant workers and desperate women such as Raimunda’s Dominican neighbor, Regina, who works as a prostitute. As Raimunda returns home, she discovers her husband, Paco, drunk and, he soon reports, out of work. The next day she returns home from her job to discover her daughter waiting for her at the bus. Paula, it is clear, is extremely distressed, and as they reach the apartment, the mother discovers Paco dead in a pool of blood upon the kitchen floor. He has tried to rape Paula, and in her attempt to protect herself she has grabbed a knife to threaten him. Ignoring her threat, he “jumped” her and she, in reaction, stabbed him to death.

      Given the horrific scene and the acts behind it, Raimunda has little choice; she demands that Paula, if ever asked, must say that she had nothing to do with the murder, that she is to insist that her mother has committed the act. Cleaning up the blood, Raimunda methodically wraps the body, depositing it in the freezer of a small closed-down restaurant next door which she has been asked to watch while its owner is away.

       Almodóvar’s films are the closest thing we have today to the boulevard farces of the late 19th and 20th century French theater, and, in the manner of such topsy turvy theater, no sooner has Raimunda delivered her husband’s body to the freezer than she receives a call that her aunt has died; she is expected to return to the small country village. Unable to do so, she inexplicably sends the more superstitious Sole to the funeral in her stead.

      Meanwhile, a young man, discovering Raimunda in the restaurant, tells her he represents a film company that would like to rent out the restaurant for cast meals for the period of their filming in the area, a request the enterprising young woman perceives as a new source for much needed money. Borrowing special dishes and provisions from her friends, Raimunda scraps together an excellent dinner, paying back her friends out of her profits from the night before. Before long, she has turned the empty restaurant into a money-making business, transforming her desolate neighborhood into a temporary center of culture and pleasure.

      With the help of her Dominican neighbor, whom she pays as any man might by the hour, Raimunda trucks the freezer to a spot by the river—her husband’s favorite spot—where she buries Paco within the freezer as a kind of outrageous coffin. How very different from the film’s first scene is her act of quickly cutting a headstone into the bark of a nearby tree.

 

     The plot quickens as Augustina calls, reporting that she is in a Madrid hospital, dying of cancer. Sole meanwhile has returned from the funeral to find her ghostly mother has caught a ride back to Madrid in the trunk of her car. For a while, we are convinced, as in the fabulous stories of the South American fabulists, that Irene is truly a ghost, but as she begins to intrude into her daughter’s life, working as a Russian assistant in Sole’s illegal (but quite popular) hair salon, we begin to perceive that this woman is too hilariously corporeal to be a simple specter.

      Sent to her aunt’s while Raimunda visits Augustina and prepares a final cast dinner, Paula discovers her grandmother hiding under her bed, and the two quickly bond. Why has Raimunda been so unforgiving of her mother, Irene asks?

      Augustina also has a question to ask of Raimunda: what can she tell her of the whereabouts of Augustina’s missing mother? We soon suspect the answer to that and many other of the film’s mysteries when Augustina reveals her mother has disappeared on the very day that Raimunda’s father and mother burned to death in a country cabin.

       As Raimunda eventually discovers the existence of Irene (she smells the farts of the old woman in Sole’s apartment) we slowly come to understand the secret histories of their past: that Augustina’s mother and Raimunda’s father had long had an affair, that Raimunda herself had been raped by her father and, accordingly, been sent to her aunt’s house for protection, and that Irene (Raimunda’s mother) set fire to the cabin, killing her husband and his lover. 

     Now we comprehend the numerous turns or revolutions of this story. Paula is not only Raimunda’s daughter, but her sister, and her mother Irene’s act is not only one of jealousy but of revenge. As the women return to the small village to close down their aunt’s house, Irene chooses to “pay for her own crimes,” this time by living with Augustina, again as a ghost, caring for her until Augustina’s death.

     The two sisters and Paula will stay on in the village, perhaps to care for their own mother, ghosts of their own pasts, in their mother's last hours. Generation after generation of these women, apparently, seem unable to escape the destructive sexuality of their men and the consequences of their reactions to it. And in that sense, they are all trapped. It is, after all, a culture grounded in death. Yet in their caring for each other another kind of revolution may take place, creating a new world of deeper understanding and love among the grieving survivors.*

 

*It may be interesting to compare Raimunda’s world, in which these strong women take things into their own hands, with the world of the female characters in Polanski’s Chinatown—which also presents us with a daughter who is also her mother’s sister—in which they remain in thrall to the several evil male forces.

 

New York, January 18, 2008

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (April 2008).

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (April 2008).

 

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger | The Red Shoes / 1948 [dance only]

moira shearer, robert helpmann, and léonide massine

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, and Keith Winter (screenplay, based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen), Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (directors) The Red Shoes / 1948

 

When I first conceived of this series of short essays, I determined that, since I was most interested in how dance was used in film, I would not include cinematic representations of ballet. It would be as if I were to explore singing in film, and choose to include the many operas that have been committed to screen. Ballet transcription to film may be an interesting topic, but is not the one at hand.

     The more I wrote about the subject, however, I realized that I could not exclude Powell's and Pressburger's masterful The Red Shoes simply because it included real ballet dancers and had, at its center, a "real" ballet. The ballet, in this case, is completely integrated into the film, and the dancers are credible actors as well.

    Moreover, even though the great "Red Shoes Ballet" is a theatrical work that might just as easily have been performed on stage, so too is the whole a masterful piece of filmmaking, as Powell and Pressburger conjure up their highly artificed cinematic style, filled with lush and vibrant colors that parallel, at times, the works of Nicolas Ray and Douglas Sirk. Like those later films, The Red Shoes most definitely suggests what one has to admit is an exaggerated cinematic aesthetic that may or may not be related to ballet. In any case, The Red Shoes works as a piece of cinematic art before it serves to represent anything about dance.

     Having said that, the ballet, choreographed by Robert Helpmann and danced by three professional ballet dancers, Shearer, Helpmann and Massine, is surely the most balletic of my selections. But who can dismiss a work based on a tale in which, once the dancer has put her slippers on, she must dance in a frenzy unto death? The theme of the ballet is the same as that of the movie: despite her desire to live a normal life with composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring), Vicky Page (Shearer) cannot escape the imprisonment of Boris Lermontov's ballet except through death.

     At times sentimental, overly melodramatic, and fraught with a desire to mean more than it does, The Red Shoes is filled with brilliant dancing costumes and sets.

 

Los Angeles, September 9, 2011

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2011).

 

Charles Walters | Easter Parade / 1948 [dance only]

ann miller

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sidney Sheldon, Frances Goodrich, and Albert Hackett (screenplay), Irving Berlin (songs and music), Charles Walters (director), Easter Parade / 1948

 

 Clad in a yellow dress cutaway in front—so that all can keep their eyes peeled on her long, shapely legs—with a longer, knee-high train in back, Ann Miller, hands in air, smile frozen upon her face, is kept busy “Shaking the Blues Away” in Easter Parade. The cascades of her coiled hear on the top of her head echoes her frilly black bustier and the drapes behind her, all intimating something so close to kitsch that it is hard to take her seriously.

     Yet how can she dance, tapping her feet out as fast as a speed typist. Reputedly, the taps were fabricated by the sound man in most of her films, but she moves her gams so well that we are certain that her toes perfectly match those clicks.

     Throughout the film she is mad at Don Hewes (Fred Astaire) and jealous of his attentions to his new partner, Hannah Brown (Judy Garland). So that jackhammer of a performance might almost be interpreted as nails driven into his coffin (Hewes sits in the audience), or, at least, a kind of passionate dance of revenge. But then, Miller always seems to be giving her all, if a little ungainly at times, stirring a storm up to the rafters.

 

Los Angeles, February 28, 2011

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2011)

Busby Berkeley | The Gang's All Here / 1943 [dance only]

carmen miranda

by Douglas Messerli

 

Walter Bullock (screenplay, based on a story by Nancy Winter, George Root, Jr., and Tom Bridges), Leo Robin and Harry Warren (music and lyrics), Busby Berkeley (choreographer and director) The Gang’s All Here / 1943

 

At first glance, it may be hard to even imagine Carmen Miranda’s performance of “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat” as being described as a dance. Although Miranda had long before proven that she can dance—or at least smartly wave her hips—in pieces such as “Chica Chica Book Chic” from A Night in Rio, in The Gang’s All Here’s “Tutti Frutti Hat” we see her mostly from the knees up, and the movements she makes are almost all in her hands and eyes. The piece might best be described as a kind of choreographed performance, yet that doesn’t really do justice to Busby Berkeley’s giddily absurd number, which TV Guide once described as “a male hairdresser’s acid trip.” And, in the end, I feel that if this isn’t dance—which the Random House Abridged Dictionary defines, in its first definition, as “to move one’s feet or hands, or both, rhythmically in time to music”—I don’t know what we might call it. As ridiculous, moreover, as this particular dance may be, it is certainly one of the most strange and original of dances ever performed on the screen.

     Berkeley has always defined his choreography as being made up of numerous of the same things, usually beautiful chorus girls, moving in visual patterns, which this piece demonstrates fully. Supposedly performed on a nightclub stage, “Tutti Frutti” begins with the arrival of an organ grinder and monkey, who pass through the audience of the club (representing the audience as well in the movie theater), allowing his monkey to jump to the top of a banana tree, whereupon we discover several other matching monkeys and banana trees. Beyond the trees lies an island strewn with the bodies of chorus girls lying, again in a vague pattern of banana-like curves. A cart approaches upon which Dorita (Carmen Miranda) sits singing about her propensity to wear high hats, which she will not remove for anyone, including the many men whom she meets. The hat, made up of bananas and other fruits is truly “tutti frutti” in all the meanings of that word, and, as if to carry the metaphor into its fullest realization, the women bring forth a series of other banana and fruit-laced “things,” including a xylophone made up of bananas, upon which Dorita performs, along with, obviously, outsized bananas, which they wave up in down in patterns that suggest not just the ocean but, you guessed it, sex itself.

     In case the audience misses this obvious reference, the girls put their own bodies, shot from Berkeley’s famed crane shots, on the line, linking them below the camera’s gaze into kaleidoscopic patterns of delicious flesh and fruits. As Dorita turns to go, the girls again run to the edge of the island to wave their monstrous bananas (censors insisted they could hold their bananas only from the waist, not from the hip) in slow motion imagery.

     Panning away, the camera returns us to the audience wherein a long row of organ grinders now retrieve the several monkeys, disappearing from sight.

     The whole event is so hilariously gay, in all senses of that word (part of Miranda’s song reads, “Some people say I dress too gay, But ev'ry day, I feel so gay; And when I'm gay, I dress that way, Is something wrong with that?”) that it clearly defined the “camp” sensibility long before Susan Sontag even began to write.

 

Los Angeles, June 8, 2011

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2011).