nice boys do not always make the best lovers
by
Douglas Messerli
F.
McGrew Willis (screenplay, based on a story by Carey Wilson (screenplay),
Christy Cabanne (director) The Midshipman / 1925 [Difficult to find]
Make
no mistake, this difficult to see silent film from 1925—a copy of which does
exist in George Eastman Museum Motion Picture Collection—is a heterosexual
romance with no obvious LGBTQ content.
I’ve included it here, however, not even
because it stars the very gay Mexican actor Ramon Novarro as the movie’s star,
James Randall, and features actor William Boyd as midshipman Spud, long rumored
to have had an affair with Howard Hughes with naked pictures involved, and a
possible later relationship with gay actor Randolph Scott, despite Boyd’s five
heterosexual marriages and his famed portrayal later in his life of the
clean-living upright cowboy Hopalong Cassidy.
Neither of these actors portray figures in
this film that are even hinted to be gay, although Novarro’s beauty does most
certainly dominate the story.
This film, after all, was mostly filmed on
location at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and was authorized by
the Department of the Navy, allowing the use of an entire brigade of midshipmen
as extras There is not even a sustained coded message in the plot which mostly
involves Randall’s attraction to and courting of his young mentee’s Ted
Lawrence’s (the freckled-faced Wesley Barry) sister, Patricia (Harriet
Hammond).
What this film does reveal,
however, is a few of the tropes that would later appear in Brown at Harvard (1926)
and even, in more subtle ways, in William A. Wellman’s classic Wings (1927)
and William Wyler’s later Tom of Culver (1932). Of course, anytime you
gather a mass of young men living together night and day, the tensions and
relationships between them often hint at homoerotic possibilities, particularly
when you match up someone like the beautiful Novarro with the fit but
intellectually inferior Tex (Harold Goodwin).
Early in the film, the resentful Tex is
matched by the pansy dance teacher who assigns him a “ladies” role in relation
to Randall’s “male” position. Yet here the dance, instead of a similar scene in
Tom of Culver in which the dance releases the expressions of the two
men’s friendship and possible love, ends in a kind of comic and clumsy march of
the two across the screen.
There’s also a very strange moment early
in the film when an uppperclassman asks the freshman plebs, gathered around the
table for their meal, two strange questions, which in fact do seem quite coded.
The first: “Why do they call a battleship ‘she?’ Tex Wilson has no answer. But
Randall immediately comes back with what seems to be a clever riposte, “Because
it can’t grow a beard.”
This
strange and enigmatic reply actually makes sense in the homosexual vocabulary: in
gay slang “a beard” is a person—usually a woman—who knowingly or unknowingly
dates or marries a gay man to provide him with heterosexual cover, helping to
conceal his true sexual orientation. The ship, filled with men, is a beloved
cover for the presumable behavior of the men within. Tex simply doesn’t get it,
but Randall is praised for his “brilliant” answer.
The second question seems even more confusing:
“Why are battleships painted gray?” Randall’s seemingly absurd answer also
receives commendation. “So the fish will know they’re not radishes.” This
perhaps refers to the Vermont term “had a radish,” referring to the fact that
wild radishes are poisonous to sheep and rabbits, suggesting that anyone who
eats such an underground product will not survive the encounter. It relates, also
perhaps, to another underground idiom referring to something that’s no longer worth
anything, that has no meaning or purpose. Gray, in short, is not red, bloody,
and dying, but something that belongs to areas of life that are not fully
understood or accepted by mainstream society. In the water, the unknowable gray
beast is alive and purposeful, even dangerous, not worthy of taking a bite.
The fact that these coded messages
suddenly appear out of nowhere hints at where this movie might have ventured,
but due to circumstances doesn’t go there. Wilson simply shakes his head in
confusion, the conversation seemingly having washed over his and most of the
audience’s head.
From now on, so the script seems to warn
us, everything will be quite literal. A simulation of ships moving together in
dangerous waters, soon after, ends up not in what might have been an important
example of bodily contact, but in a brooding call by Tex for Randall to stand
up and fight it out just because his symbolic boat has been crashed into by the
men manipulating Randall’s play craft.
The fight, encouraged by an
upperclassman, does reveal a kind of male-on-male admiration of the body, if
nothing else. As they both strip off their shirts, the young man overseeing
their battle is at first quite impressed by Tex’s impressive pectorals and
chest, but when he looks over at Randall’s even more beautifully developed thoracic
cage, he almost smirks in utter appreciation of his physical beauty.
Against his will, Randall quite easily
defeats the more brutal and coarser Tex, but even then he shows sympathy with
the man he is beaten up, and is quite angry when his fellow midshipmen attempt
to congratulate him for his prowess. Quite obviously, he has been raised as a
peaceful man.
But
again, whereas Wyler or Wellman might have pushed their warfare and its closure
as an almost romantic gesture, director Christy Cabanne turns it almost in a
grudge which Tex continues to hold through most of the film until he finally
discovers that the villain of the piece, Basil Courtney (Crauford Kent), has
sent a woman to visit, against regulations, the on-duty guard room to ruin
Randall’s career, while actually destroying the innocent Lawrence’s chances to
graduate.
He saves the day in reporting the truth,
in short, not because of any deep feeling he may have developed for his fellow
classmate, but out of sense of duty.
An earlier scene in which the young
midshipmen are learning how to row, which in Conway’s Brown at Harvard becomes
an expression at their youthful beauty, a truly homoerotic scene in that film,
is in The Midshipmen turned into a comic scene, the men remain fully
dressed as the boat begins to sink.
Even Randall’s growing fondness of the
young midshipmen Lawrence whom he comes to mentor and help find his role among
his high achieving schoolmates, which in the other films I mention might have
suggested perhaps an inkling at least of romantic interest, is here simply a
gesture of good will, Randall apparently so disinterested in the young boy’s
looks that when Lawrence asks him to help fill out a dance card for his sister,
Patricia, at the upcoming dance, he, imagining her to look like her brother, bows
out of any participation in the dance.
She is, of course, the stunning woman with
whom he falls in love, the relationship that dominates this movie, which allows
no time for these young boy’s admiration for their fellow peers.
What is fascinating is how this film uses
similar tropes in the other films I mention that help to indicate that there is
some subtle homosexual relationships going on, to push away from that very
possibility. In the process the handsome man at the center of this film,
Randall (Novarro) becomes a kind of unapproachable virgin, as the villain
describes, the “unkissed” hero.
Accordingly, even though it is quite
clear in the plot that Randall has fallen in love with Patricia and will do
everything in his power to save her from Courtney’s clutches, it is difficult
for us to imagine what his love consists of other than the dedicated love of
his elderly mother which consists of tears and chaste kisses.
Is this man really capable of sexual
love? We certainly have clue of any sexuality behind the beautiful body he
inhabits. And even at film’s end, when insists that Patricia marry him, she
pushes him away, he demanding that she has a duty to love him, coming close to
a kind of misogynistic view that characterizes Coutney’s virtual attempts to
lock her up and rape her.
If only Randall might have kissed one of
the boys, we would at least have known that his hormones were in good shape and
he was ready for love. Here, the virgin king seems as stand-offish and unready
for any kind of relationship as the innocent pleb he was on his first day,
tutored to enter the institution only because his mother insisted he emulate
his dead navy-serving dad.
Howard and I had a neighbor when we first
moved in Washington, D.C. in 1970, Bob Orr, a lovely gay man who became a
beloved friend and helped us to discover opera. He was a professor at the
Annapolis Naval Academy who had been cited several times as an outstanding and
highly admired teacher. Bob died the following year of recurring Leukemia,
which I now suspect might have been an early case of AIDS. (He regularly
stalked the stacks and bathrooms for young men of his age in the Library of
Congress so he told us and, as we learned in helping to clean his apartment, he
had been a lover of Anthony Perkins). How marvelous it must have been for the
midshipmen of the day to have such a loving, sensual being as a teacher.
In The Midshipmen we get no glimpse,
other than the pansy dance teacher, of these “future admiral’s” teachers. The
higher-ups simply proclaim new rules which they must obey. For a movie
supposedly about heterosexual love, accordingly, we get no indication of what
that kind of love consists of or what it even means. These boys seem to remain
utterly innocent.
The only lust that is even hinted at in
this work is that upperclassman’s broad smirk when he catches a glimpse of
Randall’s naked chest. And the only real bodily contact that occurs in this
film are the arms the boys put around one another in their dancing lesson and
the slugs which Randall regrets having to inflict on Tex. Surely somewhere in
the mass of male flesh someone, I hope, must have sneaked into another boy’s
bed and discovered what he might define as love.
This film almost becomes an exemplar of why
filmmakers sometimes need to involve their characters in homosexual
relationships just to learn about and prove they’re capable of heterosexual
love. At least the British always understood that boarding school and even
university was a learning ground for young men to explore sex. These American
boys are clearly unready to settle down and have families, which may be why so
many USA men gather each weekend at their local bar in an attempt to reclaim
their schoolboy days.
Los
Angeles, April 14, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2026).
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