Walt Disney | El Terrible Toreador / 1929

toreador and bullfriend

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ub Iwerks, Burt Gillett, Wilfred Jackson, Les Clark, Jack King, and Ben Sharpsteen (animators), Walt Disney (director) El Terrible Toreador / 1929

 

It seems strange perhaps to include a film whose major homosexual expression is limited to a toreador and a bull, but then cartoon figures are often so anthropomorphized to become, at least momentarily, indistinguishable from human beings; moreover, as I hope my essays have already made clear, being queer in a film does not necessarily mean that it has anything do with actual sex.

      This short, animated cartoon version of Carmen begins at a bar instead of a cigar factory, and the Carmen of this variation is a waitress serving up beers to over appreciative Spanish soldiers, one of whom attempts to manhandle her and regularly provides her with tips so that she might pull out her blouse to drop the coins between her breasts. I love how dense the contributor to Wikipedia on this film was about most of the film’s events, but in this case, it’s almost funny as she or he notes: “The man gives her a coin, and she modestly puts in her shirt.” Even Walt Disney on a Sunday family picnic is sexier than this description of events!

       The toreador, however, has her heart and saves her from the clutches of the soldier. She even has a special seat in the arena so that she might bring luck to her handsome lover.

       But the toreador’s heart, we soon realize, actually belongs to the bull ring itself wherein he and his bullfriend dance out hand-in-hand to the cheering crowds, before playing a few rounds of a boxing match and catch-me-if-you-can. When the bull knocks the Toreador onto his back, the bullfighter successfully balancing on the bull’s tail (or is it tale?) the crowd goes wild. As the applause continues the two enter into a cloud of thunderous dust which, when it clears, reveals the two playing patty-cake like two little queer boys.

     And after a few pats on the bull’s rump, our now aroused bull—aroused evidently in a manner we had not expected—immediately turns into a dancing pansy, flailing his arms and turning his hands into a flutter. The toreador quickly follows him as the two dance a pansy dance a year before the real cinematic “Panze craze” that began in 1930 and lasted until Joseph Breen of Motion Picture Production Code closed it down in late 1933 and 1934.

 

    Here the audience is most agreeable until the villainous soldier puts pepper on Carmencita’s bouquet of flowers which, when she tosses it to her lover and his bull sets them off into a sneezing fit that ends, inevitably, in violence, our formerly friendly bull fighter finally turning his former buddy literally inside out—proving, yet again, critic Vito Russo’s thesis, that all gay beings, human or animal, had to die in films made before 1990.

        Our not so eloquent Wikipedia scholar demonstrates how any and all “gay” behavior goes missing or is whitewashed away: “Then another scene opens with a bullfighting ring and the bull (strangely reminiscent of Clarabelle Cow) and the toreador walk in together. Followed by a few gags and musical performances, the toreador finishes up the scene by pulling out the bull's insides.”

        For years this episode was not released because of its graphic scene of violence; it was released finally in 2006, on Walt Disney Treasures “From the Vault” section.

 

Los Angeles, October 21, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Ella Shields | I'm Not All There / 1937

pretending madness

by Douglas Messerli

 

I’m Not All There / 1937

 

The best of these films is the last from 1937, when Shields performs a narrative monologue “I’m Not All Here.” Finally, the performer suggests a strategy for her male persona, pretending a kind of madness for those around her that gives her all sorts of permissions that culture would otherwise not allow her/him. Here finally, the male impersonator escapes the female in drag, suggesting a much more covert position behind her/his impersonations. The lyrics are telling, and given they are all spoken instead of sung, hint less at the patter of the lyrics than a dialogic encounter that puts Shields squarely in the position of the great English diseuses and monologuists such as Anna Russell, Joyce Grenfell, and Ruth Draper. 

 

Chorus: I'm not all there

There's something missing

I'm not all there

So the folks declare

They call me Loo by Loo by

Nothing but a great big booby

Point and say, 'That's where you want it,

And that's just where I've got it'

I know they think I'm slow

But let them think, let them think - I don't care.

 

Sometimes I run errands for the folks up at the Grange

With a five-pound note they trust me, perhaps you think that strange

But they never fetch a policeman when I say I've lost the change

Cos I'm not supposed to be all there.

 

Courting couples in the Park on any night you'll find

If you stare they break away, for love's not always blind

But they let me stand and watch them and they never seem to mind

Cos I'm not supposed to be all there.

 

Fellows kissing other fellows girls are in for it

Ten to one they'll be a fight and someone will get hit

But when I kiss other fellow's girls, they never mind a bit

Cos I'm not supposed to be all there.

     What these four shorts reveal is the remarkable talent of a now forgotten male impersonator who clearly got away it simply because of her charm and refusal to back down from her role-playing. As the London Times wrote, upon her death in 1952:

“With wavy auburn hair and dressed as a young man in evening dress, nervously fingering his white tie, she made a very charming and gay figure ... and though she adopted the tattered clothes and worn top hat of the traditional "broken down swell" act she did so with a difference, making of what might have been ordinary broad comedy something delicate and, in its way, almost moving.”

 

Los Angeles, November 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

Ella Shields | Miss Ella Shields: The Ideal of Ideals / 1930

 

a phone line to sweet adeline

by Douglas Messerli

 

Miss Ella Shields: The Ideal of Ideals / 1930

 

In 1930 the Pathetone Weekly issued another of Shields’ performances, subtitling it “The Ideal of Ideals,” although whether they meant that literally or sarcastically is not clear. Beginning the song on the phone, Shields moves from wanting a telephone line to her singing about going back to her sweet Adeline. The song is charming and forceful, but not nearly as clever as the previous short, although her voice is quite wonderful, her dance gradually turning into almost an early version of the Michael Jackson’s “moonwalk” done to tap. Nothing quite so astounding, but still very memorable.

 

Los Angeles, November 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

Ella Shields | Ella Shields: The Captain of the King's Navy / 1929

sharing with the captain

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ella Shields: The Captain of the King’s Navy / 1929

 

     In the same year as “Burlington Bert,” Shields sang her famous patter song, “The Captain of the King’s Navy,” a work that surely owes its entire sensibility of Gilbert and Sullivan. In this work, as in many of her later works, the lyrics clearly put the male impersonator in the position of being a lesbian lech, who is after the women which, at times, she won’t let even the Captain share.

      One of my favorite stanzas includes an upbraid from the Captain of King’s Navy himself:

 

When alongside the old gay key

I slipped off conspiracy

Stayed on shore an hour more

And met two charming girls.

I slinked them all around the two,

Spent all I could afford.

But what a blooming row there was

When I got back on board.

And the Captain said straight to me

Well my lad this is mutiny

You had two girls, golden curls,

Slinking round all day.

And he cursed and swore for the crew to see

And whispered when they’d gone to tea

Next time you’ll save one for me

Or I stop you serving in the King’s Navy.

 

      Shields dances quite delightfully in a manner that might remand some of Popeye the Sailor Man.

 

Los Angeles, November 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

 

Ella Shields | Ella Shields: Burlington Bertie from Bow / 1929

when royalty gets hurt

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ella Shields: Burlington Bertie from Bow / 1929

 

The first of these short films, with Shields performing her signature song, is perhaps the least memorable. The full song, which has numerous stanzas, not all of them equally clever, ends rather successfully:

 

… I'm Burlington Bertie, I rise at ten thirty

And Buckingham Palace I view.

I stand in the yard while they're changing the guard

And the queen shouts across "Toodle oo"!

The Prince of Wales' brother along with some other

Slaps me on the back and says "Come and see Mother"

But I'm Bert, Bert, and Royalty's hurt,

When they ask me to dine I say no.

I've just had a banana with Lady Diana

I'm Burlington Bertie from Bow.

 

    The song influenced many other performances, including Julie Andrews’ performance of Bertie in drag in Star! and, more importantly, Irving Berlin’s “A Couple of Swells” performed most memorably by Judy Garland and Fred Astaire in Easter Parade (1948).

 

Los Angeles, November 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

Douglas Messerli | Ella Shields: A Quartet / 1929, 1930, 1937

ella shields: a quartet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Beginning in 1929, British Pathé released four short films featuring male impersonator Ella Shields.

     Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1879 and educated in South Bend, Indiana, Ella Catherine Buscher (her birth name), Ella Shields began her career in 1898 singing vaudeville song-and-dance numbers with her sisters. In 1906 she married songwriter William Joseph Hargreaves in Lambeth, London, and by 1910 was already appearing at the London Palladium as a male impersonator.

      Legend has it that attending a party in which several musical halls performers were asked to perform, half a two-man act was out sick, Shields standing in for the second trouser. After that performance she rarely wore a dress on stage again.

       In 1915 Hargreaves wrote the comic ditty about a penniless Londoner who effects the manner of a well-heeled gentlemen, “Burlington Bertie from Bow,” which quickly became Shield’s signature song. She performed it until her death, including with a very young Julie Andrews in 1940, who has suggested it may later have been an influence on her performance in Victor/Victoria. Indeed, the septuagenarian Shields died while performing the number in August 1952.

      Already by 1916 Shields had separated from her husband, Hargreaves, divorcing him in 1923. By that time, she was well known primarily as a male impersonator, her songs filled with lesbian references and double-entendres.

Douglas Messerli | Two Porno Firsts [Introduction]

 

two porno firsts

by Douglas Messerli

 

In the very last year of the second decade of the 20th century, according to movie lore, small audiences caught glimpses of what might be described as dubious first-time events, the very first gay porno film and the first sex porno animated movie. In both instances I doubt the claim of these particular works representing the earliest examples of their genres, particularly since already in 1920 Le Ménage moderne du Madame Butterfly displayed in a single movie, heterosexual, lesbian, and gay sex acts as well as male masturbation.

 

   But if you’re fascinated by the idea of being “first,” these two probably fit the bill as well as any others we might later discover. The works under discussion include the pseudonymous The Surprise of the Knight from 1929 or 1930 which is generally hailed as the first all-gay film; and Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure, what is probably the first pornographic cartoon to depict male on male sex.

  Clearly, they were not the last, although immediately due to the increasing pressure of studio heads fearing precisely what did happen, and the actual arrival by 1934 of a strict censorship code, such activities were not publicly available again to run through a public projector for several decades. Of course, such films continued to be made, but were sold not only “under the counter” and hidden away from the prurient prying eyes of anyone who might be even the least sympathetic to censorship or government sexual oppression. You might even go so far as to say that with the issuing of these two works, LGBTQ sex was banned from public consumption for the next thirty years, not to become available again until the 1960s, and even then, mostly in underground and foreign cinema. For many Americans, the horror of depictions of same sex relationships of any kind is still with us. As I will argue later in these volumes, even among the most liberal of LGBTQ supporters among heterosexuals, there is still very little interest in actually having to witness movies about queer relationships and sex, even though every queer movie goer has seen hundreds of heterosexual movies and probably enjoyed many of them for their depictions of love and love-making.

       Enough said. These movies tell their own stories.