Stephen Roberts | Star of Midnight / 1935

without a clue

by Douglas Messerli

 

Howard J. Green and Edward Kaufman (screenplay, based on the book by Arthur Somers Roche), Stephen Roberts (director) Star of Midnight / 1935

 

Hot on the trail of MGM’s successful comedy-mystery of 1934, RKO Pictures released a kind of follow up, this again starring William Powell, this time playing Clay “Dal” Dalzell, but with Ginger Rogers replacing his Nora Charles partner, Myrna Loy. Although the transformation is not entirely successful, Rogers as Donna Mantin certainly gives it a good try, working rather nicely when trading wit and clever comebacks with Clay. In this film, she is not yet his wife but has every intention of marrying him.

     Indeed, throughout most of the film, Clay spends much of his time eluding the grips of Ms. Mantin, who keeps popping up in his posh art deco apartment at hours of day and night and often when least expected out of doors, a place which it is hard to imagine that she has been.

     As the future Mrs. Dalzell, Mantin takes care of Clay the moment his real caretaker, his constantly worried butler Horace Swayne (Gene Lockhart)—who just a couple of years earlier might have had a few more effeminate characteristics and fussed over his “master” even a bit more attentively—bows out of sight. With the pansies banned, however, Swayne is bemused and at times even makes nice with and joins in the machinations of Mantin.

     What the two, Mantin and Clay, have in common other than a strong appetite for all sorts of alcoholic beverages I haven’t a clue; at one point, Mantin intimates that she is very wealthy, although Clay, employed as a lawyer doesn’t exactly appear to be in financial trouble.

      If nothing else, she’s certainly determined, having already planted her marriage plans in the major newspaper through gossip columnist Tommy Tennant (Russell Hopton), a story Clay immediately squelches. But that doesn’t stop her from involving Clay in another of her plots, asking that he find a way to get back letters she’s written to a local mobster, Jim Kinland (Paul Kelly). Quite inexplicably Clay just happens to have a copy of a cancelled check signed by Kinland which suggests that the gang leader has not properly been paying his income tax, so he’s able to retrieve the letters, which she later admits, belong not her but a close friend. 

      Meanwhile, all of Clay’s friends are under the mistaken impression, much as with Nick Charles, that he is really a detective since in the past he has solved some interesting police cases. Accordingly, an old friend of his shows up from Chicago, Tim Winthrop (Leslie Fenton) seeking help in tracking down his ex-girlfriend, Alice, who has disappeared. Refusing to become involved, Clay invites Winthrop along for a midnight showing of a now popular musical performance starring Mary Smith, a singer/dancer who wears a mask while performing, who has become the hottest ticket in town, the “star of midnight.”

       It is during the performance when Clay gets word of Kinland’s readiness to meet, and so he leaves the show midway, while in his absence perhaps the most important event of the film takes place without us getting even witness it, since Robert’s camera has trotted along with Clay to see Kinland.

      Evidently, in mid-performance Tim recognizes Mary Smith, despite her mask, as being Alice and screams out her name. Terrified by the recognition, Mary finishes her number and abandons the stage never to be seen again, the musical forced to close down and her fans leaving the theater in wonderment.

     Tim, startled by the turn of events, returns to Clay’s apartment, but when the columnist Tommy Tennant shows up at his door, Clay hides Tim in his bedroom. After some introductory chit-chat, Tennant suddenly begins to explain that he knows the “truth” about Mary Smith. At that very moment, however, Clay’s bedroom door is opened from wherein a gun shoots Tennant dead and grazes Clay in the hip, the gun tossed back into the living room, where Clay reaches for it, manages to stand, and checks out his bedroom, finding his friend Tim missing with his window wide open.

     If I already seem to be running out breath and verbs in describing the plot, I have to report that what I’ve expressed so far is simply the surface of such a labyrinthine plot that at several moments in the movie even Clay gives up his search for answers between drinks. I won’t even bother to attempt to describe the entire story, at least at this point. Let’s just say, before you can blink Mantin has returned and the police are called in to investigate Tennant’s murder, for which Clay himself is now a suspect.

       Luckily the writers have kept in enough encounters between Mantin and Clay to hold our attention for a while, but alas even the most attentive of whodunit addicts couldn’t have come up with a solution as convoluted as that created by the usually brilliant writer Howard J. Green and his associate Edward Kaufman.

       Let’s just say, that in the midst of our confusion, Clay, much as Nick does in The Thin Man, invites everyone for a get-together, although this time with a hitch. He tells all his suspects that he’s found Mary Smith in a Washington Square Apartment, but asks them to meet him back at his own apartment to where he is immediately taking her. His presumption is, for some reason, that all the innocents will rush to his apartment, while the guilty party will hurry off to the other address to kill them him and Mary off before they can reveal the truth.

     That truth involves yet another woman with whom Clay once had an affair, Jerry Classon (Vivien Oakland), who since their long-ago liaison has had dozens of boyfriends and handful of husbands, the current one of whom is Robert Classon (Ralph Morgan). Among her ex-boyfriends, it turns out, is a murdered man and another man under arrest for his murder, whose lawyer just happens to be Jerry’s current husband Robert. The missing Mary, formerly Alice, we discover blames her father’s downfall on one of them and has been manhandled by the other, going incognito for no other reason that she doesn’t want to have to testify in court with regard to either of these monsters.

     Meanwhile, back at the house where Clay hasn’t really found Mary, but plays a record of her singing from another room, his friend Tim shows up, desperate to find his Alice. A strange woman also appears, gun in hand and ready to shoot both Clay and Ms. Mantin dead if they don’t immediately reveal Mary’s whereabouts. Fortunately, Police Inspector Doremus has also decided to attend the wrong address, saving Clay’s life by shooting the strange female intruder dead.

     And who is this strange woman? Why, of course, Robert Classon, dressed totally in drag and wearing a complete latex head piece—just like the one Robin Williams wore years later in Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)—to match his other female apparel. He is, so the logic goes, out to kill both of his current wife’s former lovers for reasons for which I haven’t a clue. Why he dresses as a woman I have no clue. And why, near the very end of the film, when poor Tim is about to leave empty-handed, Clay tells him that he has found Mary/Alice who is waiting for him at the police station, I haven’t a clue, particularly given Clay’s explanation of how he found her address apparently through her bank accounts—since earlier in the story, the theater director makes a point of telling us that she demanded to paid only in cash. In fact, there so many open holes in this movie of which I haven’t a clue that I might be tempted to start up the process to solve the mystery all over again.

      Why do we never see Mary? Might she have actually been Robert Classon? Might Clay be lying to his best friend, having never tracked down his Alice, our mysterious Mary. Did Alice, in fact, ever exist? These are all absurd questions obviously. The film has declared that the mystery has been solved without resolving the clues.

     Moreover, by film’s end, we discover that without our even knowing it Clay and Donna Mantin have finally married, she calling her father to tell him she’s staying overnight in Clay’s bed. So despite the sudden appearance of a seemingly LGBTQ scene, a drag queen dragged into the story for no reason than the writers thought it might be fun, Star of Midnight proves itself to be a solid heterosexual story after all. The LGBTQ figure, Classon momentarily at least appearing as a transsexual man, has justifiably been done away with. And Breen has won another battle in his war against queers. 

 

Los Angeles, April 13, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

 

 

Ub Iwerks, Shamus Culhane, and Al Eugster | Mary’s Little Lamb / 1935

applauding percy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shamus Culhane and Al Eugster (animators), Ub Iwerks, Shamus Culhane, and Al Eugster (director) Mary’s Little Lamb / 1935

 

Animators Shamus Culhane and Al Eugster, in particular, were pernicious in their apparently near-homophobic attitudes toward effeminate male figures and gay men in general. Not only were their part of a larger team of Ub Iwerks cartoonists that worked on the Flip the Frog sequence Soda Squirt which I describe above, but in 1935 inked the nursey rhyme-inspired animated short Mary’s Little Lamb which satirized not only the idea of a lamb—the true hero of this cartoon skit—for following Mary, clearly a rule-abiding teacher’s pet (she plays the piano for a couple of the last day of school performances, including the teacher’s strange gyrations) but for desiring to go to school, where the poor students serve merely as bobble-heads to the teacher’s empty-headed antics. It is only the lamb (voiced by Jack Mercer) that shows any humility and embarrassment for the perverse classroom antics—he blushes twice—and Mary’s little lamb not only gives the best of the musical/dancing performances but ultimately gets the better of the straw-headed authoritarian by transferring all the coal-dust it has acquired in hiding in the school’s coal stove onto the teacher and, in what surely might be interpreted as a racist ending, turning the schoolteacher black, one of many cartoon comedies’ depictions of blackface performers.

      Just as obscene, moreover, is their capricious introduction into the school performances of another of the schoolteacher’s student “pets,” Little Percy, who saunters out like a swish and proceeds for 37 seconds, an eternity in cartoon time, to wave and flutter his hands about in the air, to curtsey and bow and generally turn his effeminate manners into a dance so engaging that even the cows, peeking in through the windows, swish up a short dance and the students at his meaningless performance’s end, all dip and dive in imitation of his pansy manners.

     This is an incredibly strange put down of an effeminate young boy given the fact that it means the animators had to spend long hours in drawing hundreds of images simply to bring him to life in a scene that even if one thought mocking youthful effeminacy were absolutely hilarious isn’t actually very funny after the first few seconds. If you can ignore its mean intentions, Percy’s hand dance is rather rhythmically charming, a bit like a conductor becoming the focus of the score he is leading which others to perform, in this case the cows and the final mockery of his fellow students.

     It almost appears, given their work here and in the earlier Flip the Frog film, that these two animators are obsessed by effeminate males and homosexuality in general. One wonders why both of these married men—Eugster married to his wife “Chick” (Hazel) for 61 years, and Culhane married 4 times, having two sons with his third wife, Maxine Marx (daughter of Chico)—were so utterly fixated on “sissies.”

    Soon after this work Culhane, who also went by the first name of Jimmy, served as the lead animator for the Walt Disney production of the animated classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), which became a seminal work for the gay British codebreaker and computer creator Alan Turing, who near his death told friends that he always imagined himself as Snow White, falling into the sleep called death to someday be awakened by Prince Charming, which now we might imagine as disguised in the mask of the not-so-always-charming computer industry which he imagined and longed for. Even later, working for the Walter Lantz company, Culhane helmed the group that created the ground-breaking Woody Woodpecker cartoon The Barber of Seville (1944). Eugster also worked on Snow White and was one of the creators of one of my favorite cartoon figures, Felix the Cat. It is simply inexplicable, accordingly, that these two brilliant creators so utterly enraged by the gay sissy stereotype that they would devote so many sketches to their creation and mockery.

     As Harvey Fierstein commented in the film The Celluloid Closet, he actually likes these sissy portrayals, suggesting that it’s better to portray gays in some form than in none. And we all know that it was the drag queens and transsexual figures who were at the center of the 1969 Stonewall Riots which helped to transform LGBTQ politics providing a new openness and sexual acceptance.

      An elderly figure interviewed in Albert J. Bressan’s important film of 1977, Gay USA commented on cross-dressers and the effeminate gay figures of his day on the anniversary of the first Stonewall march:  “There were always those among us who stood out as being what people describe as outrageously gay. We’d always say “So and so was not for ‘streetwear.’ You couldn’t be seen walking with them down the street. They’ve always been there and,” he admits, “gave us cover. We could stand on the side and say that’s what a gay person looks like. But today we can join them, march with them, and hold hands.”

     Ironically, the standard gay cry of “woo-woo” and applause his fellow students grant Percy at the end of his fluttering hand dance may be truly deserved if not genuine in the minds of the creators of this cartoon. Imitation is, just perhaps, one of the highest of compliments from this perspective, and the entire classroom’s imitation of Little Percy is just maybe the answer to the bigotry with which the same cartoon may have been created.

 

Los Angeles, July 25, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2021).

Ub Iwerks, Shamus Culhane, and Al Eugster | Sinbad the Sailor / 1935

oh hi-de-ho!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ub Iwerks, Stephen Bosustow, Shamus Culhane, Al Eugster, Ed Love, Grim Natwick, Irven Spence, Mary Tebb, and Bernard Wolf (animators), Ub Iwerks, Shamus Culhane, and Al Eugster (directors) Sinbad the Sailor / 1935

 

Sailing quietly on the serene seas, Sinbad the sailor suddenly spots a group of pirates singing and dancing a shanty. This short cartoon almost repeats parts of the 1932 Disney Silly Symphony work, King Neptune, with a quick switch of the frame to a lone queer with rouged cheeks, orange hair, and large hoop earrings, echoing their chorus of “Yo-ho-de-hi-de-ho!” Several knives are tossed at him, pinning him to the doorway, just as the Hays Code might have, but somehow didn’t. Although, just as in most of the “Panze” films of the first part of the 1930s, this crooner appears without any engagement with the rest of the characters and is bullied for singing his rendition of the pirate song.

    For the next 6 1/2 minutes Sinbad spots the pirate ship just as they spot Sinbad. The pirates shoot cannon balls at the approaching ship, which the world sailor easily bats back at them. But recognizing that he is outnumbered, he attempts to sail in the opposite direction, the pirates catching up with him, dropping anchor and engaging in hand-to-hand battle.

    When the pirate captain finds himself alone, he picks up a cannon ball, and mows Sinbad’s crew down like bowling pins, forcing the famous sailor to walk the plank.     

     Sinbad almost drowns, but he is saved by his famous parrot, and he is able to swim ashore a deserted island which he imagines inhabited by dancing hula girls, introduced, one suspects, to make it clear that Sinbad is a decent heterosexual.

     On this same island he discovers the pirates busy digging hole for the stolen treasure, and climbing a tree to observe them, Sinbad throws a cocoanut first at one and then at another, tricking them to believe they are slugging their own compatriots, which leads briefly to a brawl.

     Eventually, however, an angry ape who eats from the same tree, tosses him to the ground revealing his existence, once again, to the pirates, who tie him up to a tree. The tree is actually the leg of a giant, fire-breathing roc, who, unable to shake off Sinbad from his leg, takes his vengeance on the pirates before he flies away with Sinbad still attached.

    Once again, the parrot saves him by untying his friend, the gigantic bird dropping both our favorite sailor and the treasure with which he has also absconded.

     Sinbad activates a parachute hidden away in his turban and lands safely on the open treasure chest, enjoying his victory with the parrot until they discover the cigars they have begun to smoke are the inferior kind, as in a joke, exploding in their faces.

    I basically agree with a commentator on Letterboxd who goes under the name of Cinemasurf: “Maybe it was the pipe, or the very large pirate trying to relieve ‘Sinbad’ of his ship of treasure, but I just kept thinking this was a ‘Popeye’ cartoon only without any spinach!      

    UCLA has nicely restored this 1935 film with funds from ASIFA-Hollywood.

 

Los Angeles, August 6, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).

David Hand | Who Killed Cock Robin? / 1935

dan cupid admits to his crime

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Cottrel, Joe Grant, and Bob Kuwahara (writers), David Hand (director) Who Killed Cock Robin? / 1935

 

In late June of that same year Disney released yet another offering in “The Silly Symphony” series, Who Killed Cock Robin? In this 8-minute work director David Hand, who with William Cottrell and Wilfred Jackson would two years later direct the great classic animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, presents us with possibly two LGBTQ figures, if you count the animator’s Hamilton Luske’s wonderful portrayal of Jenny Wren, imitating with near perfection the top-heavy female impersonator Mae West, as a queer figure, presented in this work as a puffed-up mourning dove.

     In his Screening the Sexes, Parker Tyler deliciously describes Mae West as the drag queen who every gay male who has laid eyes upon her image knows her to have been. Tyler describes West’s perfect timing into a world that needed some heterosexual evidence that they still existed.

 

“What homo society in comic art would seem to need is the perfect assurance of Mae West, its Mother Superior, whose suavity is that of a candid diplomat and whose tacit authority is that of the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. One has to admit this is a very difficult assignment, requiring a subtle and powerful grasp of life style. The ease and authority of Miss West as a homosexual camp symbol speaks aloud to her unique privilege: she is, after all, a woman. In many respects she behaves like a homo with a lifelong dedication to putting on the ritz, while undeniably being a good fellow through it all.”

 

     Luske and his fellow animators capture West perfectly as the dolled-up dove enjoying the passionate tweets of Cock Robin (who sings with a mix of voices that sound a bit both like Bing Crosby and Maurice Chevalier), as she calls down to describe him as a “fas-cin-ating man.” She’s waiting for him to come up and see her sometime soon when he’s shot by an arrow, which arouses the entire avian society who immediately demand a trial to discover who might have accomplished such an atrocious act.

     Disney’s animators show avian justice to not be so very different from the homo sapiens police. Raiding the usual tough night club they come away with a Blackbird (voiced by Nick Stewart) who clearly “Don know nuttin’ ‘bout it” (racism as deemed necessary to accomplish his voice). Despite his claim of no knowledge, the Irish cop keeps bopping him over the head again and again, and even after “telling it to the judge” finds himself continued to be hit and pummeled as they toss him into “Sing Sing.”

      The prosecuting parrot (Pinto Colvig, who also voiced the Gingerbread Man in the previous cartoon) also questions Legs Sparrow (Clarence Nash), an obvious gangster, and the cuckoo bird who probably has been made that way by all the police bashings over his cranium. Judge Oliver Owl (Billy Bletcher) is growing impatient and is ready to string all three up for the crime until Jenny Wren (Martha Wentworth) shows up to describe her rendezvous with Robin. She declares she “wants to see justice done” since (in song):

 

                      Somebody rubbed out by Robin.

                      Somebody sure done him wrong.

                      Why they sneaked behind him and shot him

                      Right at the end of his song. 

 

     Convinced by Jenny’s sweet lament, the judge declares they should “hang them all,” to which the chorus of birdies reply in song, “We’re going to hang them all, we’re going to hang them all. We don’t who is guilty so we’re going to hang them all.”

 

     Suddenly an arrow is shot into the midst of the proceedings with a cry of Stop! The judge demands to know who it is. A small child-like figure appears nearby on a branch giggling in “he-haw” hilarity, answering in a lisp: “Sssay, don’t be sthupid. I’m Dan Cupid.” Quickly admitting to the crime he explains:

 

                   I shot Cock Robin.

                   But Robin isn’t Dead.

                   He fell for Mrs. Jenny Wren

                   And landed on his head.

 

        The twittering, hands on hips, swishing Danny boy is as gay as you can get.

        Jenny walks over to the dead Robin, pulls the arrow out of his heart, and helps him to sit upright as if she were Prince Charming hovering over the body of Snow White. He stands and they kiss, she politely blocking it out with the twirl of her umbrella, although his head appears above it as he remains below obviously focused on the top-heavy part of her renowned anatomy. According to Tyler, Mae once confessed that “she directed her sex appeal toward the male in terms of the contrasting magnetic fields situated in her right and left breasts.”

                    

Los Angeles, April 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).

 

Ben Sharpsteen | The Cookie Carnival / 1935

angel fruit cakes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pinto Colvig, William Cottrell, and Ted Sears (writers), Ben Sharpsteen (director) The Cookie Carnival / 1935

 

     In May of 1935, the Disney Studios released the 8-minute cartoon, The Cookie Carnival, the animated tale of a poor Gingerbread Cookie Girl who, like Cinderella, has no proper dress to wear to the parade. The Gingerbread Man comes upon her crying, and quickly, with the help of icing, cupcake flutes, nonpareils, sugar sequins, and numerous other sweet tarts dolls her up to become the Queen of the Parade.

 

       Given the award, the cookie judges must now find the perfect King to share her throne. Performing before her in competition are the “Dandy Candy Kids”; “The Old-Fashioned Cookies Like Mother Used to Bake”; “The Devil’s Food Cakes” who jive with jazz proclaiming that they are “naughty and nice”; the “Upside Down Cakes” with the wrong side up doing a dance on their heads and hands; the Jolly Rum Cookies who sing their song quite obviously drunk; and finally, the “Angel Fruit Cakes”—two queers if I’ve ever seen one—who as they flutter and flit about in careful time to their dance ask her to marry “one of us because we are so good,” presumably no sex involved.

     Wisely, Miss Gingerbread resists all the candidates, with the cookie world quite perplexed. The judges each suggest she marry one of them, or perhaps, marry all three. But upon discovering the Gingerbread Man, who having slipped away from the cookie guards, shows up just in time, she declares him as her consort. The two kiss as the Gingerbread Man, embarrassed to be seen by all, lifts up a lollipop to cover their canoodling.

 

Los Angeles, April 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022)

Douglas Messerli | Sissies for Kids [Introduction]

sissies for kids

by Douglas Messerli

 

By 1935 US motion pictures approved by the Hays Board has rousted out the portrayal of “pansies” and “sissies” from almost all moving picture frames, which, along with the restrictions concerning portraying any homosexual activity virtually banned LGBTQ figures from being represented in any form in US cinemas. Queers, as far as Joseph Breen and Hays Board committee members, were gone and dead, no longer able to sully the silver screen of their criminal sexuality.

       As I note throughout these pages, cleverly coded films arose precisely to get around these restrictions. But strangely, Disney films, particularly The Silly Symphony cartoons somehow escaped notice, in at least two instances in 1935—that crucial year in which filmmakers and their audiences realized that the gays and lesbians had now fully disappeared from their screens, presumably forever—slipping in gay sissies by simply getting them up in extravagantly original costumes and disguises.

      In fact, through the later 1930s and straight through the next two decades during the height of the Motion Picture Production Code’s iron first, cartoons of all kinds were basically ignored both for their sexual and violent content. Perhaps Breen and others simply felt that the figures they saw on the screen were not human, but animal figures such as Bugs Bunny who weren’t breaking the code simply because they weren’t human. We can even wonder, although I strongly doubt it, whether the Hays board saw these drawn figures as a kind of art that like many of today’s AI figures were seemingly except from the law simply because they were expressions of the artistic imagination as opposed to the real humans pretending to be someone else. Films performed by real human beings were just too close to life to ignore, while the animated drawings were just fantasies. If so, we can argue that film’s relationship to photography helped to make it a dangerous mode of expression which the nation’s censors throughout history have felt needed to come under control. Can you imagine if Robert Mapplethorpe or Andres Serrano (the photographer of “Piss Christ”) were to have made commercial movies? The outcry might have closed down the industry even into the 1980s and 1990s continuing even to today in the US right’s attacks on photographic imagery.

      Some comedians have even argued that nearly all of the Disney cartoons, including Bambi, are gay friendly. As the TV sitcom character Maude (Bea Arthur) argued with the troublesome bigot Arthur, who asks her if she approves of homosexuals: “Arthur, it doesn’t matter if I approve or disapprove, they are human beings and they exist. It’s like asking me if I approve of dwarfs.” Arthur responds, “That’s different. There’s no such thing as gay dwarfs.” Maude reacts: “Come on Arthur, you’ve read Snow White. Seven little men living together like that, wake up and smell the coffee.” Although I might have wished for her to have argued for her complete acceptance of homosexuals and the writers, by speaking of the original written version of the fairytale, legally twist out of publicly associating it with the Disney film creation, we all know the Disney version of the story is really behind that statement, not the Grimm’s folk tale.

      Whatever their reasons, Joseph Breen and the Hays Code board appeared generally to ignore cartoons like the ones I mention in this section and later, including Popeye and Bugs Bunny, somehow not even registering the fact that their rules were being utterly ignored by those programing for the nation’s children, kids who immediately recognized these wild doodles as representing human beings and their behavior. If Bugs could transform into a woman in an instant and poor effeminate Percy even get applause from his school peers, then perhaps there was hope for all of us who felt so different growing up from those around us.

      Is it any wonder that we who were post-World War II kids of the 1940s and 1950s, watching these same cartoons on TV, eventually reached out for a more generous cinema rating system, despite its continued problems, beginning in the early 1960s, pushed for approval by Jack Valenti in his efforts to allow films of the early 1960s such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Blowup to be shown, free, as he put it, of the outdated “odious smell of censorship.”

 

Los Angeles, August 7, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).