Scott Sidney | Madame Behave / 1925

polyamorous porpoises

by Douglas Messerli

 

F. McGrew Willis (scenario, based on Madame Lucy by Jean Arlette), Scott Sidney (director) Madame Behave / 1925

 

Julian Eltinge had become a huge success a decade earlier on Broadway for his performances in The Fascinating Window (Liberty Theater, 1911), which ran only 56 performances in New York but toured the US to great success; The Crinoline Girl (Knickerbocker Theatre, 1914); and Cousin Lucy (George M. Cohan’s Theatre, 1915), all which were made into the shorter films reviewed in my earlier volume of My Queer Cinema.

        In 1918, after appearing in those films, Eltinge returned to Broadway touring with the vaudeville group, “The Julian Eltinge Players,” appearing at New York City’s Palace Theatre, where he was paid one of the highest salaries in show business at $3,500 a week.

      In most of these works Eltinge did not perform as a male imitating a woman, but simply in female attire, often surprising his audiences at performance’s end by pulling of his wig, in the style of the various versions of Victor/Victoria, to reveal his true gender. So successful were his female impersonations that he was invited to perform before the British King Edward VII.

      In 1914, he performed on film in a version of his stage role in The Crinoline Girl, apparently a lost film. But Eltinge’s film career truly began in 1915 when he played a cameo role in How Molly Malone Made Good. In 1917 he had a double success in Donald Crisp’s two films of that year, The Clever Mrs. Carfax and The Countess Charming, the latter in which he played as both a male and female.

      By 1920, the impersonator was living as a wealthy man in the lavish southern California mansion Villa Capistrano. He appeared in 1920 in the film An Adventuress (The Isle of Love in the US), co-starring Rudolph Valentino, reviewed above. And in 1925, just a few years before the US national crackdown on public crossdressing performances—purportedly to deter homosexuality, although the vaudeville, stage, and film performances of crossdressing stars were not attended exclusively by homosexuals nor did they advocate homosexual behavior.

       As I have observed previously, offstage Eltinge, even if he may have been a gay man, purportedly created a super-masculine facade in order to deflect rumors of homosexuality, leading the Chicago Tribune drama critic of the day, Percy Hammond to describe him as “ambisextrous.” Milton Berle, who briefly worked with Eltinge, believed he was a gay man.

       Perhaps his best films were his last, Madame Behave, directed by Scott Sidney in 1925, and, in the same year, The Fascinating Woman, evidently a lost film, whose director we do not know.

        Like so many show business figures, Eltinge lost most of his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, and by the 1930s with the closure of live drag theater and a significant change in film interests, his career quickly declined. In February 1941, while performing at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe nightclub in New York City, he became ill, dying of a cerebral hemorrhage 10 days later.

      Sidney’s film Madame Behave fortunately leaves behind a marvelous testament to Eltinge’s comedic and crossdressing talents. This film, moreover, retains most of its humor even today.

      If the plot, like almost all such comedic drag performances, represents basic farce, a mad confusion of who desires who and which one is hiding from which other, all made even more dizzying since even the gender of the various lovers is uncertain, the performances, in this case by Eltinge as Jack Mitchell and Madame Brown, his roommate Dick Corwin (David James), his elderly male pursuers, Seth Corwin (Lionel Belmore) and Henry Jasper (Jack Duffy), and Jack and Dick’s girlfriends, who suddenly find themselves both attracted to the Madame Brown, Ann Pennington (Gwen Townley) and Laura Barnes (Evelyn Francisco), as well as the boy’s hilarious black servant, Creosote (Tom Wilson).

      Any attempt to actually describe the plot would simply confuse the reader who has not witnessed the hilarious goings on, so I shall just outline the basic situation by explaining that Jack and Dick, the later who has already wasted an inheritance and the former who works as an architect who has sold a design but not yet been paid, find themselves at the mercy of their landlord Jasper, who plans to throw them and their servant friend out of their comfortable apartment by the end of the day.

 

      Dick can surely ask his rich uncle for a loan, but it so happens that his uncle Seth is also appearing in court that day for having crashed into their landlord’s Mercedes some time earlier. The two men, Seth Corwin and Henry Jasper have long been enemies who habitually describe one another in terms of a mix of alliterative animal and human behavior (“babbling beaver,” “menacing monkey,” “bloated baboon,” and the like) before challenging one another to fisticuffs.

     In this case the only evidence of the crime exists in Jasper’s “garrulous gorilla-like” (my own words) garbles of the incident. Although an unknown woman has observed the crash, neither of the gentlemen know of her whereabouts, forcing the judge to postpone the hearing until they find the woman to testify.

   Corwin’s lawyer tells his client that he must seek out the woman’s whereabouts immediately and marry her, thus making sure that she cannot testify against him. In order to get the loan for his rent, Dick promises his uncle that we will deliver up the missing woman as soon as possible, handing over the money to his roommate to return back to the apartment and pay the “barking blister beetle” Jasper their late rent.

   When Jasper gets wind of Corwin’s intention to find and marry the missing witness, he vows to do the same, and the race is on.

   Coincidentally, Jack’s girlfriend Gwen is under the care of Corwin and living in his mansion along with her friend, Dick’s girlfriend Laura. Corwin, who doesn’t think much of his nephew’s penniless roommate Jack, has promised Gwen in marriage to the wealthy sissy-boy Percy Fairweather (Stanhope Wheatcroft), demanding that Gwen get engaged to him that very afternoon.

   Sizing up the situation, Jack feels his has no choice—particularly when Percy offers Gwen a pearl necklace—but to take the rent money and buy Gwen a ring so they might be married.

   In the meantime, Jasper has thrown the boys out of their rooms, leaving the packed bags and numerous unpackable possessions in the hall under the protection of Creosote. Fortunately, the woman who lives across the hall, who has been having her own marital problems and is determined to leave her apartment for a week or so, offers her abode to the boys until things get settled, leaving Creosote to drag all the bags and sundry possessions into her apartment.

 

       Having noted Jack’s attentions to his charge, Seth Corwin orders the boy to be banned from entering the mansion. When Jack returns with the ring, accordingly, he finds the Corwin butler blocking all the entrances. Forced to climb up the trellis in order to reach Gwen’s room, Jack is spotted by old man Corwin who quickly reports to the police that he is being robbed, the entire police brigade, believing it is a “second story man” who has plagued the neighborhood, chase him down as, on the run, Jack leads them back to his own apartment only to find that he and Dick have been locked out of their rooms.

        Fortunately, Creosote sees him as the police move in, pulling him into the neighbor’s rooms and demanding that Jack hide himself by donning the owner’s wig and one of her dresses. After a ridiculous series of Jack pulling off and putting on his drag costume, the police arrive and go in search of his whereabouts. Jack realizes that he’s now destined to remain dressed as a woman, particularly when, after having followed the cops both Corwin the younger and elder show up, Jack’s roommate introducing his new female friend as none other than the Madame Brown, the witness to the accident he has promised to produce.       

    Discovering what Jack has done with the rent money, Dick takes the ring and sells it to his uncle in order to pay the rent. But even before he can do that the landlord Jasper also shows up, and the entire gang returns to the Corwin mansion, Seth introducing the beautiful wild woman as his future wife, Madame Brown taking such a liking to his young female guests that she cannot help but profusely kiss them both—the girls, if momentarily being a bit taken aback, finally determining that they love the female attention. Just at that moment Jasper shows up, leading obviously to an endless chase of Madame Brown / Jack throughout the mansion and its lawns for the rest of movie, along with regular partying, dancing the Charleston to Creosote’s piano renditions, and generally flirting and making out with everyone in the house including Percy.

      The film ends with everybody in somebody else’s arms, including Jasper and Corwin, who  team up to do battle the neighbor’s returning husband who mistakenly believes that Madame Brown is his own wife. Jasper and Corwin become fast friends, hugging one another before returning to their alliterative name-calling.

       But the version that remains on file in the Library of Congress is evidently incomplete, and in the original, so the script declares, they speed off to be married—although, as in Mozart’s Così fan tutti, we are not quite sure who marries who, since this film along the way has hinted at male homosexuality, lesbian attraction, and made apparent that everyone except for Dick (Jack’s long- time roommate, which puts the two also in a strange relationship given their ages) who has fallen for the female incarnation of Madame Brown. Polyamorphism is evidently nearly everyone’s choice. Surely, with the exception of Bernard Natan’s Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly (1920), this is the wildest LGBTQ-themed work of cinema up until G. W. Pabst’s Lulu of 1929.

 

Los Angeles, January 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 19, 2022)

 

Alfred Hitchcock | The Pleasure Garden / 1925

the innocents

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eliot Stannard (screenplay, based on Oliver Sandys’ The Pleasure Garden), Alfred Hitchcock (director) The Pleasure Garden / 1925

 

The silent film The Pleasure Garden of 1925 represents Alfred Hitchcock’s first work as a film director, and although there are some quite remarkable moments in this film that might remind us of the best of the numerous good-girl / bad-girl roommate movies, of a female version of The Flesh and the Devil (1926), and even call up elements of William Wyler’s The Letter (1940), this early work has very few of true Hitchcockian moments, despite critic Dave Kehr’s arguments that it serves as a “clip reel of Hitchcock motifs to come.” Kehr sees Vertigo even in the radial procession of young chorus dancers descending a staircase, but such a reference appears more to me as a sort of art-historical like imposition upon a scene played out dozens of times in movie musicals. And the fact that a man raises his opera glasses to get a better look at a chorine’s shapely ankles does not, for me, immediately call up Rear Window.

 

     On the other hand, one might argue that Hitchcock is far more successful than many other directors of the day in turning melodramatic moments into truly high, almost tragic theater, particularly in the last scenes when the nice chorus girl Patsy Brand (Virginia Valli) travels to Burma to visit her sickly husband Levet (Miles Mander) only to discover him in the arms of a native girl who serves his colonial needs as a lover. His sudden pushing away of the beautiful and subservient child (Elizabeth Pappritz) may be highly melodramatic, but when, soon after, she wades into the ocean with the intent to drown herself and he follows in order to make certain that she suffers her fate with a strangled neck, we recognize that from the very beginning of his filmmaking Hitchcock was utterly fascinated by true evil, often unperceived by innocents such as Patsy and her ex-roommate Jill’s fiancée Hugh Fielding (John Stuart) who is Levet’s business partner in Southeast Asia.

      And in that scene alone Hitchcock reveals the horrors of which Joseph Conrad (to whose work Hitchcock would later be attracted) and so many others had warned about European colonialization.

      Jill Cheyne, Hugh’s sweetheart, certainly begins the film as a kind of innocent, her money and references all stolen almost the moment she gets off the train. And Patsy, just as we are encouraged to, clearly perceives her that way, offering up a small room and half of her bed for the displaced newcomer. But by the next morning we realize that Jill can twirl even the most hard-hearted men such as Oscar Hamilton (George H. Schnell), the theater director, around her lithe body. Within a week, so it appears in Hitchcock’s compressed cinematic tale, she is being offered a plush suite by the director and a possible marriage to Prince Ivan (Karl Falkenberg), playing off one against the other.

      As quickly as that, Jill moves out of Patsy’s chorine poverty and into the lap of 1920s luxury, forgetting all about her handsome dog-loving boyfriend, Hugh. And it takes the entire movie and Hugh almost losing his mind in a fever before Patsy realizes that it is he—who she first met in her dreary apartment while Jill was out having a costume fitted—who she truly loves, and not Levet whom she married out of sheer loneliness.

       Basically, however, the few paragraphs summarize the entire 90-minute narrative, except perhaps to mention Patsy’s kind and caring landlords, the Sideys (Ferdinand Martini and Florence Helminger) who, when Jill refuses her a loan so that she might travel to Burma, offer her out of their life savings. There are some beautifully composed scenes of Levet and Patsy, moreover, at Lake Cuomo during their honeymoon.

       The problem is that the rest of the film is made up of long pauses, the way so many late silent films behaved, as if they were waiting to fill the empty frame with words they had yet discovered how to successfully convey, yet knew would soon be on their way.       

       Some of the space was filled up with short dancing numbers and costume poses, neither of them being Hitchcock’s forté. Yet even in his very first film the great director showed his commitment to representing homosexual figures, something he would do in numerous of his movies in a manner that few other major directors of early cinema—with the exception perhaps of G. W. Pabst and William A. Wellman—chose to. 

      In the beginning, clearly, they were part of his presentation of the dark and dangerously worldly environments into which his innocents seldom ventured. In this case, he presents an unnamed and uncredited dress designer as a sissy much in manner of the endless parade of pansies of the early 1930s movies. But he gives him two long sessions in which to wave his arms about, throw his head and shoulders into frustrated perturbation, and generally reveal just how fed up he is with his woman customers who never fully recognize his genius.

      In the 1920s cinema, when the code had not yet begun to close down on all homosexual representation and in which crossdressing as still fairly popular along with the far more complex explorations of LGBTQ figures that were beginning to appear—in films such as F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Mikaël (1924), Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), Louis J. Gasnier’s Parisian Love (1925), Clarence Brown’s Flesh and the Devil (1926), William A. Wellman’s Wings (1927),  John Ford’s Upstream (1927), Wellman’s Beggars of Life (1928), William Dieterle’s Sex in Chains (1928), Frank Capra’s The Matinee Idol (1928), Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher) (1928), Jean Epstein’s Finis terrae (1929), and G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929)—the stereotyped role of the sissy, with a few noted exceptions, had not yet come to dominate cinematic gay depiction.

     Within a year, even Hitchcock in The Lodger (1927) and in later films of decade such as Downhill (1927) and Murder! (1930) would explore gay sexuality in a more complex manner. All of those early attempts to represent non-heterosexual behavior were, of course, thwarted by even the early threats of the Hays Code, forcing US film directors and continental filmmakers interested in the US market to join in what has been called as the “pansy craze,” evidence of which we have even in this early British film of Hitchcock’s.

 

Los Angeles, April 8, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).

Terry Raymont | Understanding / 2016 [commercial advertisement]

the snapshot

by Douglas Messerli

 

Terry Raymont (screenwriter and director) Understanding / 2016 [3 minutes] [commercial advertisement]

 

In a short three-minute Kodak ad of 2016, Terry Raymont created a gay semi-melodrama that parallels so many longer gay coming out movies that preceded it.

     Two young boys, Dylan (Taylor Turner and Nolan (Jaz Goodreau) who together play on the local baseball team, return home to Nolan’s house after a game, retreating immediately to his bedroom.

     Nolan’s little sister, Claire (Reiley Trombetta) inexplicably comes racing up the stairs and opens her brother’s bedroom door at the very moment that the two boys are kissing.

      A few moments later we hear Nolan’s father (Adam Harper) calling out to him to come downstairs. Claire has obviously told him what she has seen.

      Suddenly walking down the halls of his school, Nolan feels as an outcast. And later in his own yard we see him throwing stones instead of pitching a baseball. He’s clearly hurt by being outed, and feels obviously lonely. During the baseball game, attended by his parents, he feels their disapproving eyes on both him and his fiend Dylan.

      His wheelchair-bound father, however, has other plans. Sneaking into his son’s room he finds a photo in his son’s bedside bureau.

      In the very next scene it is Nolan’s birthday, with his grandparents at the table and his sisters racing around the room. He blows out the candles, and a large rectangular package is handed to him.

     Interspersed between these scenes we see the two boys together in the days in which they first began enjoying each other’s company, with Nolan pulling out his Kodak camera and snapping a selfie of the two of them.

       The birthday package is unwrapped, wherein he discovers his father has matted and framed the photo. Nolan moves to his father, who momentary stands as the two hug, Nolan realizing that despite his gay sexuality, he is still very much loved.

       One of the Kodak memes, “The moments that capture your love” appears in the final frame.

     The famous Kodak logo follows, with presumably our tears and applause. Alas, just a few years later, the famed Kodak camera and snapshots would disappear thanks to digital technology.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).  

Christina A. West | Narcissus / 2020

here’s looking at you

by Douglas Messerli

 

Christina A. West (director) Narcissus / 2020 [7 minutes]

 

Sculptor and installation artist Christina A. West’s recreation of the Narcissus myth does little to expand or reinterpret the original. A naked model/dancer stands over a mirror laid out on the floor and through positioning his body in various angles and sometimes quite awkward stances attempts to see and kiss his own image.

     The beautiful dancer is unnamed, but even watching with a such a nice piece of beefcake grows boring after a while, being, as he is, delimited even in his bodily movements as he attempts to fit it into the limits of the floor mirror.

      Later the artist expands this a little, permitting him to stand, the viewers apparently looking up at the mirror image; and finally, to two come together vertically. It might have been far more interesting to include a wall of mirrors or better yet, two facing walls, into and out of which he could dance, the image and reality fusing until we are uncertain which is which. But obviously, West’s budget did not permit such expense.

      Frankly, this performance piece doesn’t really offer much new except in its representation of frustration both for the nude performer and for voyeur.

      West later included this film in her exhibition titled “Looking at a Naked Man.”

 

Los Angeles, September 16, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Brandon Oelofse | Weglopers (Runaways) / 2023

forgiving endlessly

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Kearney and Brandon Oelofse (screenplay), Brandon Oelofse (director) Weglopers (Runaways) / 2023

 

Dutch director Brandon Oelofse’s Runaways is about three men, all of whom are addicted to rather unfulfilling relationships. At the center of three is Frank (Thomas Puvill), an attractive and seductive gay man who, seemingly in a permanent relationship with Daan (Olcher Molendik). Yet Frank has a severe problem; he can’t resist having outside sex, and evidently has a long history of relationships outside of his and Daan’s.

     Most recently, Frank, having met Robert at his local gym, has been having sex with him at regular intervals. Robert knows that Frank has a great deal of difficulty with emotional expression, but Robert is also needy, apparently never able to have a close relationship, even as a child, and which he has long been seeking. Although he knows about Frank’s boyfriend, he continues to imagine the possibility of replacing him, of possibly bonding with Frank through sex so that his friend might wish to runaway with him instead of remaining in what appears to be a safe but unfulfilling relationship with Daan.

    Although Oelofse spends most of the film in representing the quite explicit sex scenes with Robert and Frank—indicating by doing so that they are apparently sexually perfect for one another—the real crisis is when Daan returns home early to find the two in bed together.

      Unlike the numerous gay melodramas by young filmmakers, Daan does not scream and shout, threaten to leave, or even express a great deal of anger. Daan clearly knows of his lover’s long history of sexual trysts that last over a period of time before Frank ends them. And it Daan’s his passivity, not his clear frustration, that seems to truly indicate the problem. It’s clear that Daan is tired of coming home to find that his bed smells of another man’s cologne, or that, as in this case, Robert has actually stolen a small earring (a cross similar to the one worn by the singer George Michael) from under his pillow. But his lack of reaction, his ability to keep it under control is what makes it safe for Frank to remain in the relationship. Where else might Frank find someone who might permit him his sexual addiction and still find him there to support him when he needs him and again feels alone?

       This particular day also happens to have been Robert’s birthday, and he has abandoned an evening with friends to spend with Frank, hoping that he might finally be lucky enough to convince him to break free and join in a relationship truly built around sexual contact. But Frank is right; he isn’t his type, he would never, like Daan, be able to handle the dishonesty, the many nights alone, the full recognition that no one person can ever fulfill Frank because he has never fully been able to love anyone quite enough, to emotionally open up himself to another human being.

      Almost as a token, Frank awards Robert Daan’s ridiculous earring, telling him it looks sexy on him, despite the fact that Robert has openly wondered why anyone would wear such a symbol that has been behind so many centuries of gay oppression.. The consolation prize of the earring is what finally breaks the spell, Robert realizing as he leaves the house without a lover that their “pretend” relationship is over. He tosses the earring in one of Amsterdam’s numerous water channels and bicycles off to find whatever the future might bring.

      But that too might be seen as merely running away from situation, just as Daan weekly turns the other cheek, so to speak. “Am I enough,” Daan asks Frank, “Can you be happy with just me? Frank mumbles the perfect non-answer: “You are perfect for me.” But it clear that Daan is perfect only because he continues to accept the fact that his lover cannot share a deep love, no one person will ever be enough for Frank.

 

Los Angeles, September 16, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).