Douglas Messerli | Manservants, Interior Decorators, Clothes Designers, Chorus Boys, Lady Wrestlers and Other Persnickety Sissies and Female Toughs in the Last Days of Hollywood's Cinema Sodom [essay]

 

manservants, interior decorators, clothes designers, chorus boys, lady wrestlers and other persnickety sissies and female toughs in the last days of hollywood’s cinema sodom 

 

The noted increase in cinematic cross-dressing, homosexual undertones, and the increasing portrayal of unmarried heterosexual relationships of the films of the teens and the 1920s, along with, one suspects, the increasing influence of foreign films such as Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Michael, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger, Downhill, and Champagne, William Dieterle’s Sex in Chains, W. G. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, and Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of the Poet did not go unnoticed by religious, governmental, and even film studio conservatives.

     In 1929 Martin Quigley, editor of the film trade newspaper Motion Picture Herald and Jesuit priest Father Daniel A. Lord created a code of standards, submitting it to the studios. In particular, Lord was worried about the lure and effects of film of the nation’s children.

     By February 1930 studio head Irving Thalberg of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and others met with Lord and Quigley, worried about direct governmental intervention, to establish a new set of codes. One month later the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) agreed to the Code, intended, in particular, to limit films which were widely distributed.

     Divided into two parts, the code—much like the 1927 list of “Don’t” and “Be Carefuls”—was divided into two parts, the first a set of general principles prohibiting movies from “lowering the moral standards of those who see them,” and a set of particular applications, a specific list of prohibited activities. Strangely homosexuality and the use of curse words were not even mentioned, presuming that they were included in the restrictions.

      Besides, homosexuals were included under the description of “sex perversion.” The code sought not only to determine what could be portrayed on screen, but also to promote traditional values. Sexual relations outside of marriage—which were forbidden to be portrayed as attractive or beautiful—were to be presented in a way that would not arouse passion or appear to make them seem permissible. Any sexual act considered perverted, including any suggestion of same-sex relationships, sex, or romance, was ruled out.

     All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience. Authority figures had to be treated with respect, and the clergy could not be portrayed as comic characters or villains. Under some circumstances, politicians, police officers, and judges could be villains, as long as it was clear that those individuals portrayed as villains were the exceptions to the rule.

     The depiction of miscegenation (defined only as sexual relationships between black and white races) was forbidden.

   The entire document was written with Catholic undertones, and stated that art must be handled carefully because it could be "morally evil in its effects," and because its "deep moral significance" was unquestionable. It was initially decided to keep the Catholic influence on the Code secret. A recurring theme was "that throughout, the audience feels sure that evil is wrong, and good is right.” The Code also contained an addendum commonly referred to as the Advertising Code, which regulated advertising copy and imagery.

    In February 1930 Variety published the entire Code, predicting that state film censorship boards would become obsolete.

    Jason Joy, head of the Committee until 1932 and his successor, Dr. James Wingate were, however “unenthusiastic” in maintaining the Code, and were considered generally ineffective. For example, Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930) was passed by Joy with no revisions, while it was considered indecent by a California censor. With over 500 films a year to review and a small staff with limited power, Joy’s committee, although negotiating numerous cuts from films, was more willing to work with studios, which led, ultimately, with is being hired at Fox for his writing talents. His successor Wingate simply couldn’t keep up with the pace of films being produced. The Great Depression, moreover, led studios to seek out racier material which might attract dwindling audiences to their films. By 1931 The Hollywood Reporter joked that “the Hays moral code is not even a joke anymore; it’s just a memory.”*

     Yet, the Code had an enormous effect, nonetheless, particularly with the rise of Joseph I. Breen in 1934, who had worked for the Hays Code committee since 1931. And the basic principles of the 1930 Code were still in place, with writers, directors, and studio producers simply finding subtle ways to subvert some of the principles.

      From 1930 to 1933 filmmakers began to introduce a wide range of homosexual figures who, having no sexual role in their films and standing apart from the general heterosexual plots of the movies, nonetheless offered a stereotyped viewpoint of the sexual “other,” at least allowing for the fact that gays and lesbians still did exist even though the cinema had almost completely neutered them. And given the ugly vision of producers, bosses, husbands, fathers, and other men in power in these early Great Depression films, the sissies actually seem more capable and happier than their heterosexual opposites. Yes, these gay figures are made to seem ridiculous but they most emphatically know who and what they are.

       n his Screened Out: Playing Gay Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall, Richard Barrios describes the pansy craze. Speaking of one of the major pansy actors, Bobby Watson playing the character Paisley in Manhattan Parade, Barrios writes:

 

“As done to a crisp turn Watson, Paisley was one of the most conspicuous of gay characters in sound films thus far, setting the tone for portrayals of that Uncle Tommy of onscreen gayness, the Pansy, Sissy, Fairy, Nance, Fruit, Queer. From early 1932 to mid-1934 and beyond, Hollywood reflected the (now-fading) pansy craze in earnest, steadily codifying gay men onscreen by dress, manner, voice, and gesture. The fedora hat, the gestures that alternately swept and minced, the little mustache, the flower in the lapel—the pansy was as immediately recognizable onscreen as he was on urban sidewalks (while millions of gay men and women without a codified look were allowed to pass undetected). For women, there would be less exposure, since the pansy craze had not been about male impersonation. Nor were there verbal labels. The portrayals, however, were numerous, and the look was even more distinctive than that of the men: jackets resembling men’s waistcoats, starched shirts with neckties, close-cropped hair, monocles, cigars.”

 

      Barrios argues, based on a Variety article, that the “craze” began with a newsreel cameraman covering a dog show who, becoming bored with the canine performances, began to pretend that he was a mincing dog owner whose animal had won the award of heroism, “gushingly thanking all and sundry for the gorgeous honor bestowed on his little precious.”

      Pathé and Fox both decided to run the bit in their newsreel which immediately became so popular, a true comic delight to its audiences, that Paramount sent the same cameraman to another show for a second round of “canine-devoted effeminacy.” Eddie Cantor even incorporated it into his vaudeville show at the Palace.

     While the skit might have been so popular that it led some writers and producers to incorporate it into their films, I truly doubt whether those incidents alone determined the vast number of “pansy” and “lesbian” appearances in the films from 1930-1933. Indeed, the creators of first films I write about below from 1930, could not even have known of the 1931 incident. And the pansy had already appeared as a character type in Ralph Cedar’s The Soilers (1923), Howard Hawks’ Fig Leaves (1927), R. E. Williamson and Joseph E. Zivelli The Wanderer of the West (1927), Fred Niblo’s Way Out West (1930), and Richard Thorpe’s The Dude Wrangler (1930) among others, all before the cameraman determined to entertain audiences with his sissy dog lover.

      In the selections from films below I have attempted to summarize the appearance of such ancillary figures in a great number of movies during this period, saving me from having to describe full plot summaries of a few of the lesser films, particularly since the pansy or Sapphic references were carried no further than the few moments of screen time devoted to them. In more significant movies, however, I continue to describe the entire plot since I have always argued that the context in which gay characters in relationship to the heterosexual figures is of vital importance.

     Films from this period which carried their pansy figures further into their plots or subtly connected their central character’s actions with the sissy boys and boyish girls, along with works that featured their queer figures, are discussed outside this multi-page collation. This gathering is simply a way of indicating just how extensive these stereotyped visions of homosexual beings permeated the entire film industry, even after the 1934 date which is generally seen as a serious attempt to eradicate all non-normative sexual figures. In many cases even during these years, several films’ original scripts along with their gay figures did not survive the censorship, and after 1934 Joseph I. Breen and Will H. Hays often demanded that such scenes from earlier films be excised. Although some of these have been restored in several cases we have left only the censored versions. Like the Afghanistani Taliban, these individuals and their Codes permanently deleted and defaced numerous works of US art and helped make gays invisible for decades longer than what might have otherwise occurred. 

 

*For my comments in the above few paragraphs I have relied heavily on the well-written and informative Wikepdia essay on the Production Code.

 

Los Angeles, November 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

 

Robert Z. Leonard | Let Us Be Gay / 1930

midsummer madness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rachel Crothers (screenplay, with additional dialogue by Lucille Newmark, based on the stage play by Crothers), Robert Z. Leonard (director) Let Us Be Gay / 1930

 

Perhaps I should begin this essay by noting immediately that the title of Robert Z. Leonard’s 1930 film, Let Us Be Gay, has absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality or lesbian behavior. The “gay” here refers solely—well almost entirely—to the common, but now dated meaning according to the Oxford dictionaries, of being “lighthearted and carefree.” Indeed, Rachel Crothers’ reimagined stage play from 1929, is a rather arch and shrill mansion-bound comedy of manners that superficially seems a bit like the kind of play that Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee mocked in their Auntie Mame (1958), “Midsummer Madness.”

      In her time, Crothers, who until Lillian Hellman’s rise to fame in the late 1930s and 1940s, was perceived as the major female dramatist of the day. And although several of Crothers’ plays seem to motion toward feminist issues, others of her works, almost of which are centered on women’s lives and problems, parody radical feminism.

     This play, in particular, almost seems a sell-out to the cause. The basic plot is a thin one, nicely summarized by Ed Garea on the Celluloid Club site:

 

“As the film opens, we are in the house of Bob and Kitty Brown (La Rocque and Shearer). Kitty is a hausfrau who dotes on her husband, this day serving him breakfast in bed. She’s the definition of meek and subservient. Bob would like to stay and chat but he has an important date to play golf and he has to get ready. At one point, he can’t find his favorite tie and asks Kitty where it could be. Kitty, ever so dowdily dressed, is making yet another dress, but finds the time to locate the missing article of clothing. She asks Bob if she can come along on his golf date; after all, she has in the past. Bob, however, is evasive, telling her that he’s already rushed and for her to dress properly would take too much time.

     Years of experience watching these sorts of movies tells us instinctively that golf is the last thing on Bob’s mind, and a phone call shortly after he exits the bedroom confirms our suspicions, especially when he tells the caller never to phone him at his house. But it’s too late, she is on her way over to “clear the air,” and shortly afterward she’s standing in the living room. Just as she has her arms wrapped around his neck, who should saunter in but Kitty? Bob is too visibly embarrassed to speak, but his squeeze introduces herself to the shocked Kitty as Helen, adding that she thought it was time that they met.

      Kitty, quickly pulling herself together, tells her adversary that she has heard a lot about her from Bob. Helen, damage done, tells Bob she’ll be waiting out in the car. After she departs, Bob and Kitty get into it, with Kitty asking him to leave. Bob coldly tells her that if he walks out that door he’s not coming back, which is fine by Kitty. After he leaves, Kitty breaks down in tears.”

    Three years later and after a long stay in Paris, Kitty (Norma Shearer transformed into glamorous mode) is an entirely different woman, a beautiful, well-dressed, joyful, frivolous manhunter who evidently the eccentric millionaire Mrs. Bouccicault (Marie Dressler) is so fond of that she has invited her to her Long Island estate to help break up a nasty relationship between her granddaughter Diane (Sally Eilers) and a bounder she has met, Bob Brown (Rod La Rocque), who just happens to be Kitty’s ex-husband. Apparently, “Bouccy,” as Kitty calls her, doesn’t realize that the two Browns were once a couple.

      The play seems absolutely clever enough until Kitty discovers that the man she is supposed to steal away from the young girl is the very man who destroyed her youthful happiness, and from there on as the two are forced to perform flirtatious gestures while holding deep feelings of anger and regret, the double weight of being “gay” cracking through the air with a sound as if someone had become determined to laugh heartily at every line that anyone ever imagined might be naughty or hinting of wit, reducing Shearer’s performance and the register of her voice to a mini-series of “hee-haw.”

     Given Dressler’s wonderful ability to chew up her butler along with her lines, the movie might still have been somewhat enjoyable if it weren’t for the fact that the figure playing Brown, La Rocque (an actor who was rumored to have had an affair with gay travel writer Richard Halliburton), weren’t as wooden as the grand staircase of Bouccy’s mansion and the fact that her other guests are made up of the totally dislikeable individuals such as the frozen widow Madge Livingston (Hedda Hopper) and three other males, among them a clumsy British lothario, Townley (Gilbert Emery) and a perfectly nice young man Bruce Keene (Raymond Hackett)—whom Bouccy intends her granddaughter to marry. The third male is the only truly comic figure, played by the long-time cinematic “swish” Tyrrell Davis (whose performance in as the dancing instruction in Our Betters did more than any other film to force Joseph Breen to outlaw all cinematic sissies) who this time plays an utterly boring poet who gets his inspiration apparently from cuddling up to and subserviently obeying the commands of the female sex. He is certainly not interested in the normative institution of marriage, announcing at one point that he most definitely has not been married and making it clear that he wants nothing to do with the sexual and familial aspect of female relationships.

      He is Madge’s “boyfriend,” forced to move every bench and chair upon which she sits a fraction of a few inches closer (to what, we are never told), to endlessly pick up her dropped handkerchiefs, and to fetch her any liquid or condiment that she can conjure up. Davis’ character, Wallace Granger, provides great comic relief for a few moments, and presents us with a sort of bridge between a sissy and a gay masochist who loves to be punished by a sadistic woman, a role Hedda Hopper performed later so effortlessly as a gossip columnist, something no one might have imagined had been explored in film as early as 1930.

     Davis plays the role magnificently until he is forced to join to the two males in absolute reverence of the new woman from Paris, while Kitty, by definition, must pretend to be deferential to all their attentions. The conflict forces her into what becomes—as Kitty herself describes it—a French farce, with various men hiding out in every room of her suite, and costing her the opportunity, so it appears, to keep her ex-husband away from the young Diane, whose heart he will surely break as he has her own years earlier.

     Perceiving that Kitty has failed to do her job effectively—since in retaliation for her supposed sexual dalliances, Brown has now proposed to Diane—Bouccy, who seems to have known more that she has let on, calls in Kitty’s nanny and her two children, who everyone seems to have forgotten (along with the critics), even though the characters played by child actor Dickie Moore and an unnamed girl are introduced to us in the very first frame. They come running to their father, who evidently hasn’t even bothered to see them in his three years’ absence, kiss him, and swing his philandering heart back in the direction of the normal American household of the first few scenes of the film as he asks Kitty to marry him again.

      Much to our shock, the giggling dunce accepts him, and the film ends with a reunion kiss. Perhaps Kitty was just getting tired rescheduling her appointments with her would-be suitors or, even more likely, just got tired of being gay, in the dated meaning of that word. She seemed far more convincing putting her arms around the young Diane in the attempt to help her negotiate the world of meaninglessly badly behaving men. Perhaps she should have tried out the new definition of the word that just a few years later would be cast into cinema history by Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby.

 

Los Angeles, February 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).

Al Christie | Charley’s Aunt / 1930

four weddings and a funeral of sorts

by Douglas Messerli

 

F. McGrew Willis (screenplay, based on the play by Brandon Thomas), Al Christie (director) Charley’s Aunt / 1930

 

One might describe Brandon Thomas’ 1892 farce Charley’s Aunt as the forerunner and proving-ground of most of the drag and gender-confused cinema of the 20th century. In both England (where it ran for over 1,466 performances) and in the US where it was also a hit, the play was revived internationally numerous times and adapted several times into cinema.

    Like all farces it is plot heavy, and since I have already discussed the 1925 film version of this work, I will simply repeat the basic structure of this tale from that earlier entry while altering the names of the cast members, this version starring Charles Ruggles as Lord Fancourt Babberley, better known as “Babbs.”

     University roommates Charlie Wykeham (Hugh Williams) and Jack Chesney (Rodney McLennan) are in love with Amy Spettigue (June Collyer) and Kitty Verdun (Flora Sheffield) who are respectively the daughter and niece, wards of Stephen Spettigue (Halliwell Hobbes). Unfortunately, although they have reason to believe the young women are attracted to them, they have been unable to get up the nerve to ask them to marry.

      Meanwhile, Spettigue learns that once Miss Verdun is married he will no longer be the recipient of a stipend for her support and fearing that loss of income refuses to allow either his own daughter or his ward see the young men, planning instead to take them off to a summer vacation spot where there are no young men in sight.

      Charley gets word that his Brazilian aunt, Donna Lucia D' Alvadorez (Doris Lloyd), a woman he has never before met, has traveled with a young lady, Ela Delahay (Flora le Breton) to England and plans to stop by for a visit that very afternoon, perfect timing the young men realize, since she might play the required chaperon to a luncheon party to which they plan to invite their women friends and pop the question.

      Meanwhile, their busybody college chum from another room, “Babbs,” trying to collect on a loan they’ve never paid back, attempts to rob them of the bottles of champagne they’ve set out for the event. He’s about to prepare for a new play in which performs in drag. Catching him in their room, they suggest that he also join them at the luncheon to help keep Charley’s aunt busy so that they might have time with the girls. But when, soon after, they get word that the aunt has changed her plans about her visit, and after seeing “Babbs” in his new female attire, they get the idea to have him replace the aunt so that the girls will have no qualms about a lunch alone with the two bachelor men.

      As often happens in such farces, people regularly drop in to add to the complexity of the situation. In this instance Jack’s father, Sir Francis (Phillips Smalley) also suddenly shows up to visit his son, reporting that having done a thorough audit of his finances, he finds they are now debtors. Jack suggests he join them also at lunch and woo Charley’s aunt who is notoriously wealthy and a widow. Obviously when he discovers that she will replaced by their friend, it is too late, and he daren’t reveal the truth.

     When the girls go missing, the bothersome father and ward, Spettigue decides to butt into the celebrations.

      For the next hour or so we are treated to “Babb’s” ridiculous attempts to imitate a Brazilian heiress, having utterly no knowledge about who she is and only knowing that she comes from Brazil, the land of the nuts. And nutty is the key word of his desperate attempts to keep in character, particularly when beyond all rationality, and with to the shock of his son, both Jack’s father and Spettigue fall head-over-heels in love with the aunt, dueling in their attempts to win her over.

     The drag figure is so abstractly presented that it allows nearly any good character actor to add in whatever particular acting tricks and personality traits they want to be featured. Ruggles is already performing with the prissy nervousness that he would later reveal in Bringing Up Baby and numerous other roles, an actor who, if he’d been born a few years earlier, might have served in the numerous pansy roles played by the likes Johnny Arthur, Franklin Pangborn, and many others. But as in most of Ruggles’ roles, here he plays a heterosexual, this time temporarily forced into drag but fully consumed with the loss of his own young woman, who after her father’s death ran off to Brazil, a common destination for romantic and disenchanted Britishers leaving from the port of Liverpool if one is to believe A.J. Lees Brazil That Never Was.

     Without exception, Thomas’ farce also brings in, at the very last moment, the lovely and sophisticated real aunt and her companion, Babb’s lost love, Ela, who immediately realizing the absurdity of the young men’s fibs, play along without revealing their true identities. But not before the rejected Sir Francis recognizes Charley’s real aunt as a woman he loved from long ago in the past, thus hooking him up with both lost love and the money he needs to continue in his life.

     So too do the boys find the courage to ask their girls to marry them and are quickly accepted. Babbs recognizes Ela, although she, like all the others, cannot recognize him, and when he finally reveals himself, she accepts his love only after a great deal of dismay and doubt. Certainly, one might wonder about a beau dressed up as a woman at the very edge of marrying an old man, a situation that reminds one most particularly of Jack Lemmon’s Daphne’s last scenes with Joe E. Brown’s Osgood Fielding III in Some Like It Hot.

     The only one who winds up without a soul is the foolish Spettigue, whose loneliness and  poverty, the writer suggests, is his reward for his cross-gender licentiousness and greed.

     Christie’s version, with the requisite comings and goings of the entire cast, is fairly lively, but the acting, particularly on Ruggles’ part is rather hit-and-miss, with far too much comic athleticism and impossible to believe asides that might work wonderfully on stage but seem ludicrous on the narrower frame of a film with those who are not supposed to hear standing inches away from the whisperers.

      And, of course, even the original was already a hackneyed story supposed to provide guffaws

without end. There are most certainly laughs in this chestnut, but not nearly as many as Sennett and Christie’s two-reelers had already provided his audience, along with his far more absurd situations facing his stars soon after such as the Ritz Brothers, Buster Keaton, and even Bob Hope.

The next cinematic reincarnation of this story would be Jack Benny’s 1941 performance of the aunt.

     But oddly, this film bid a kind of farewell also to the dominance of drag in LGBTQ cinema. Obviously, there would be numerous drag performances throughout the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st. But the focus shifted even beginning in the late 1920s and certainly even within the same year toward gay and lesbian figures who, despite their brief appearances and stereotyped behaviors, were at least not playing at being gay or lesbian, but actually were as cis gender beings homosexuals. In short, although being gay might still be representing as something of humor or even to be laughed at, it was no longer a mistake or joke.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).

Lloyd Bacon | Office Wife / 1930

women in charge

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Kenyon (screenplay, based on a novel by Faith Baldwin), Lloyd Bacon (director) Office Wife / 1930

 

One might have chosen to simply include this among the numerous films made from 1930-1933 that featured stereotyped gay figures such as those I include in the long series of films featuring male sisses and female toughs which follows this essay; but Lloyd Bacon’s The Office Wife, begins with an event that might have been a remarkable alternative to what has been described as the “Panze Craze” of the early years of the 1930s.

      In general, the film is interesting only because it takes as its central theme the rise of female work force in the industrial age—mostly women working as office secretaries—analyzes the situation, and felicitously resolves in a manner which not all other movies with this theme have been able to. Moreover, along with The Clinging Vine of 1926, it might be seen as representing one of the earliest of the genre of “The Office Romance,” which quickly became one of the most popular heterosexual film genres throughout the 1930s to the present day including notable movies such as Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940), Jean Negulesco Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), Colin Higgins 9 to 5 (1980), and Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire (1996), to name somewhat curious examples from the following six decades of the 20th century.

       In his daily work, Publisher Larry Fellowes (Lewis Stone) is more than ably supported in his daily routine by his rather elderly secretary Andrews (Dale Fuller), a woman who having devoted her life to her boss has fallen in love with him, and faints away and quits her job when she discovers Fellowes is about to marry.

       Fellowes, now realizing Andrews’ situation, promotes a secretary respected for her intelligence more than her body, Anne Murdock (Dorothy Mackaill), to replace her as he proceeds on his honeymoon abroad. He returns to find an equally capable woman, but also a beautiful younger woman who, as she makes clear to her sister Katherine (Joan Blondell) with whom she boards, is not about to turn away a figure like Andrews. She will use her intelligence not simply to help her boss but steal the boss away from his marriage, a goal shared by many such secretaries throughout cinema history.

       Working long days and sometimes even weekends with her handsome but reserved employer, Anne becomes such a capable helpmate—a woman who tells him what to eat, when to take vacation, and keeps him on his daily schedule—with whom no wife could possibly compete. And predictably, he falls in love with her, particularly when he perceives that his wife Linda is having an affair with a mutual friend Jameson (Brooks Benedict).

      After a particularly exhausting night, working late with Anne, Fellowes finally kisses her, but at that very moment his wife appears and he is forced to return to his life behind the closed doors of his home which Anne is only temporarily inhabiting.

      Anne, having fallen completely love with Fellowes, realizes the danger of what she has been doing, and suddenly is ready to abandon her former goal, and with great pain and suffering, tenders of resignation informing her boss that she is now marrying Ted O’Hara (Walter Merrill) a boring small-town editor who has been courting her all along without success.

      Now spending time with Ted, she realizes even more clearly that he is not man for her, an intelligent woman who basically manages a company. Fellowes, meanwhile, has tried to mend his relationship with his wife, but too late, for she now wants a divorce.

      The two unhappy lovers are finally nudged toward one another through the machinations of Anne’s sister Katherine, who has discovered through Ted that Fellowes and his wife are getting a divorce.

      Working late for the last night of her employment, Anne finally reveals her love for her boss, and he his love for her, ending the movie on the predictable note, since the entire film was predicated upon the notion that employers spend more time with their capable secretaries than they ultimately do with their less than doting wives.

    Indeed, that very notion begins the film, with Fellowes perceiving the reality which he ends up proving. He has invited one of his most able writers to his office to discuss the idea of her writing a book on the subject. This figure, a successful author Kate Halsey (Blanche Friderici) is presented clearly as a lesbian. Film commentator Richard Barrios describes her as “a tweed-wearing, monocle-wielding Butchwoman, here sporting a man’s fedora.” She banters easily and forcibly with Fellowes while smoking a stogie that evidently is too strong for Fellowes’ taste, since he turns down her offer of a cigar with a comment, “Not one of yours, thanks.”

        But she is not presented as a comic figure at all. As Barrios continues, she is “strong, authoritative, talented, and good humored”; “A woman in charge, in short, a paragon of the independent New Women of the twenties” that was mocked in The Clinging Vine. “….She is portrayed as mildly eccentric, perhaps, certainly not heterosexual, and meriting her associates’ affection and respect.”

       How amazingly different is this film of 1930 from the equally capable but titteringly laughed at and openly mocked manservants, interior decorators, clothes designers, dance directors, and other homosexual figures of the 35 movies I write about below. Without any reason that this figure should necessarily be lesbian, Bacon and his writer Charles Kenyon simply represented her as different the rest of the heterosexual characters of the drama, and enriching the movie in the process.

       Office Wife, accordingly, much like Upstream, The Matinee Idol, Just Imagine, Myrt and Marge, and few others treat their obviously queer figures with a respect that few other Hollywood films could imagine, and employ them in a manner that reveals their capabilities rather than the simple silliness for even having existed. If only Hollywood filmmakers could have taken their cue from these few films, and realized how truly simple it was to present significant queer characters even within the confines of films that had no intentions of being profound, perhaps Breen and his ilk might have been silenced—although given their raging homophobia I sincerely doubt it.

       Kate Halsey does not again appear in the movie except for a couple of type-written paragraphs in which she has summarized some of the lessons Fellowes later learns (“Give her six months at side of any absorbed businessman and the office wife’s sufficient sympathy has reduced the influence of the wife at home to a mere maker of beds and pancakes”; “The fact that the businessman is unaware of his bondage, is the final proof of the office wife’s iron hold upon him”) But her brief appearance has been a significant one in that demonstrates the humanity and sophistication of the film’s central character and his world as opposed to most of the other “pansy” films that followed, in which homosexuals are tossed into the fray for a quick laugh like so many freaks despite the fact that they capably watch over their employer’s lives, design their furniture and clothing, furnish their houses, and help them to accomplish their business successes—while in real life they were sometimes even the actors, directors, and producers of the pictures in which their diminished brethren appeared.

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022). 

 

André Palacios Tingberg | Copenhagen Rendezvous / 2023

escape to the real world

by Douglas Messerli

 

André Palacios Tingberg (screenwriter and director) Copenhagen Rendezvous / 2023 [3 minutes]

 

I have to admit that I’m beginning to dislike the increasing numbers of short gay films which have ditched all dialogue for what, as this film describes it, is an “Emotionally charged” and “vivid tapestry of memories” as opposed of helping us learn linguistically—which is the primary why we make meaning—what isn’t visually on the surface of things. Film relies obviously on the image, but the wonderful thing about a full cinematic experience is its incorporation of narrative techniques within language, music, and image, each enriching the other as it does in the sound-focused world of opera.

     Take away words in either case and we immediately realize something is missing from the full experience, and in the case of relying just on image I find that directors often feel they need to simplify and universalize their images so significantly that they often become cliches of experience rather than full expressions of a confusing and disorderly universe.

     When viewing Copenhagen Rendezvous I kept thinking of another film, The Memory of You (2015) located in another Scandinavian capital, Stockholm. Just as the two men on the Copenhagen escalator (Jonas Kajberg and Nicklas Bøhm), one going up, the other down, the two Swedes of Memory who run into each other at an art opening across the street from a restaurant where one of them was about to dine, have had an intense relationship. While in Copenhagen it was a one night fling replete with drinks in a bar, followed by a few karaoke songs, dinner in a cozy restaurant, dancing in a romantically-lit apartment room, and finally intense sex, the Swedish couple evidently had a long term relationship memorialized in one of the men’s paintings being shown at the small gallery.

      In Copenhagen all their memories take place in a matter of a few seconds (the film is only 3 minutes in length), while the brief conversation in the Swedish art gallery takes the men into a far more tense interaction, particularly when we discover that the artist would like to renew his relationship with the other man, and that their love for each other has never been fully resolved.

     In Copenhagen it was simply a good night on the town, while in Stockholm it was a full, if failed commitment to love told to us in 14 minutes.

     If we are rather startled to discover that one of the handsome Danish men is actually riding that escalator next to his pregnant wife, meaning that the two boys’ night on the town was simply an act of mendacity to both the woman and the other man, which quickly wipes away any pleasant feelings we have about the gay affair we may have shared with the lovers, in Stockholm we learn that a far more complex series of events have transpired before one of the men, seeking a way out of the gay relationship entered a heterosexual marriage with a woman patiently waiting in the restaurant for her husband to return with his “forgotten wallet.”

     Both men have presumably lied, not only to their mates but to themselves, pretending that being gay is something like a choice which you can simply turn off and on through will. Yet, knowing nothing about the Danish cheater except that he had a good night on the town, we immediately dislike him and feel negative about what a moment before appeared to have been joyous.

     As the one of the Letterboxed commentators, with the moniker of Icarus, expressed his/her feelings: “I had no expectations for this, but that ending was totally not what I could've expected. I was like, ‘Oh. Oh...’” Another amateur viewer put it, “The end gagged me real bad.”

     In Sweden, on the other hand, given the men’s intense attempts to express what was actually behind their separation, we at least give the man with the waiting companion a fair hearing, and we sense his fears of what he has to face when he quickly slips back into “normalcy” at the restaurant table with his wife.

     If we don’t quite know the whole story about the two Swedes, we at least perceive it as a believable story about their very human struggles to move on without each other, while the Danes, rushing around in their one afternoon and evening together—where inexplicably they even found time to visit a laundromat—is simply a bad joke, a misunderstanding.

     If we feel any emotional involvement regarding Tingberg’s Copenhagen Rendezvous it is in simply sharing the good fortune of the man returning to street level reality. If the other is going up, we recognize it won’t not be for long and his memories of his glory days will be all his has as he faces fatherhood and a marriage in which there are certain to be problems regarding his hidden sexuality, unless he has already admitted to bisexuality, something we would need words to express.

     The punch of irony is all the primarily visual experience can offer, while the one combining images and language presents us with a far more complex vision of the failure to accept his gay sexuality.

 

Los Angeles, November 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).