Robert Milton | Bella Donna / 1934

the confirmed bachelor

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vera Allison (screenplay, based on the play by James B. Fagan and H. Fowler Mear and the fiction by Robert Hichens), Robert Milton (director) Bella Donna / 1934

 

Bella Donna began its nefarious life as a 1909 novel by Robert Hichens. That work was brought to film in a 1915 silent film produced by Charles Frohman and the Famous Players—Lasky, with Pauline Frederick starring as the evil wife, Chepstow Amine. That film is now lost.

      Even before that, in 1912, the great Alla Nazimova, histrionics intact, brought it to the Broadway stage where it ran for 72 performances. And it was rendered into film again in 1923, starring Pola Negri as Chepstow and Conrad Nagel as her unfortunate husband, Nigel. A print of that film is supposedly is held in the Gosfilmofond Archive in Moscow.

       For many long years, it was thought that the 1934 version, starring Mary Ellis and Conrad Veidt as the villains, was also lost, before being discovered in a dubbed Czech version, the one you will have to watch today if you want to hear any of the dialogue.

   Although this film quickly moves to the exotic world of Egypt, it begins, strangely enough, in England, with Lady Harwich (Jeanne Stuart) paying a visit to Dr. Meyer Isaacson (Cedric Hardwicke) to inform him that Mary Chepstow (the book on Conrad Veidt’s life, which has a fairly long description of this film’s plot, lists the major character as being named Mona instead of Mary) has set her claws on her brother-in-law, Nigel Armine (John Stuart). Since the doctor is a dear friend of Nigel’s she hopes he might talk to him, warning him of Mary Chepstow’s history.

      Hardly has she left his home office, however, before Mary (Ellis) herself pays a visit, pretending to have an undefined illness, but mostly attempting to find an ally in him, as one of Nigel’s closest friends, against the family’s refusal to even see her. He promises no such thing, but does assure her that their meeting will remain private and the next time he encounters her it will be for the first time for all others.

      He hardly has long to wait, since the very next day Nigel has invited the doctor to lunch, hoping to introduce him to Mary, who “just happens” to be dining the same restaurant alone. For absolutely no apparent reason, the doctor quite forcefully reminds his friend that he is a “confirmed bachelor”—in other words, that he has no interest in women, obviously suggesting he is a homosexual. But, of course, it is not to Nigel whom he is presenting this information, but the audience, who almost immediately is asked to perceive that his and Nigel’s relationship may involve, as old school friends, something deeper than mere friendship, an issue that will be of great importance later in the film.

      In the meantime, Nigel simply wants, just as Mary has previously sought, his approval, and later that evening, he stops by doctor Isaacson’s house for a drink and to beg him to visit Mary the next day so that they might become friends. When she suggests that she intends to visit Egypt, and that Nigel has work he the Fayoum district, Isaacson declares that if Nigel is going to Fayoum he strongly suspects that he is not going there to work. Mary cannot comprehend his meaning, as the doctor explains that Nigel is not like most modern men; he has very old-fashioned notions of what a woman is, and Isaacson does not want his friend to be hurt.

       Mary suggests that what he is hinting at sounds very rude. But he continues to put it to her rather bluntly, suggesting that she is not truly in love in Nigel and that he doesn’t want his dear friend to be abused.

       Although, it quickly does become apparent that Mary is marrying Nigel because of the family inheritance, it soon after becomes equally clear, when they receive a letter explaining that Nigel’s older brother has twins, that there will not be a great deal of money left for him, the reason of her interest in the somewhat sexually deficient man whom she has made her husband.

      But before we discover this, the two, Nigel and Mary, do quickly marry and travel to his villa in Egypt, where both seem for a while to be perfectly enchanted. They soon, however, meet the wealthy Egyptian business man, Mahmoud Baroudi (Conrad Veidt) whose dark looks captivate Mary just as her representation of a wealthy white virgin captivates him. By the time that Nigel actually plans his voyage to Fayoum, Mary is already itching for husband to get lost.

      Bored and lonely, Mary is now quite ready to run into the arms of Baroudi, but at first his servant reports that he too has left for the Fayoum district—a strange piece of information that I truly don’t know what to make of. Might it be somehow related to the reason why Isaacson has declared that Nigel is not seeking work in the Fayoum region. Does he have a male lover there, perhaps even Baroudi? Nothing is quite clear in the film’s insinuations.

    But Baroudi soon returns and Mary rushes into the Egyptians arms, even though she quickly discovers what we already know, that he not only is served by a number of dancing girls but has an Egyptian wife, whom he immediately commands to leave his bed so that Mary might replace her.

       As if we needed any evidence that Mary is truly sexually experienced, she gladly accepts his wife’s place in the bed as the two plot Nigel’s death without creating a scandal.

       When Nigel returns with the intention of taking her down the Nile in a large boat house, so to does Baroudi follow them in his own boat.

        Over this long period, Mary and a local doctor (obviously recommended by Baroudi), Dr. Baring-Hartley (Michael Shepley), has been slowly feeding Nigel small pellets of lead in his daily coffee, and much like Alicia Huberman in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 film Notorious, Nigel begins to suffer from headaches and disorientation, which Mary and the doctor both claim is due to his receiving too much sun, just as in the Hitchcock film.

       Back in England, Dr. Isaacson has received a letter suggesting that all is well, while Harwich has received an epistle that describes something far different. Worried about the discrepancies and the welfare of his friend, Isaacson makes his way to Egypt.

       But when he finally meets up with Mary in the houseboat, she suggests that her husband is being well looked after by Dr. Hartley, and when Isaacson demands to see his friend Nigel, she argues that Hartley has insisted that he must not have company, and refuses him entry.

       Isaacson quickly tests the remains in Nigel’s morning coffee cup, and confronts Hartley, who quickly seeing the course of events, backs down and refuses to have anything more to do Nigel’s case.

     Taking over, Isaacson rushes to his friend’s side, who is delighted to see him. He forces Nigel to take a drink that might correct some of the damage and insists that he should no longer take any drink or food from anyone but himself.

       Observing the change of events and terrified of the results, Mary confesses her crime and declares that she no longer loves her husband, having long ago chosen to share of love with Baroudi.

      She quickly rushes off to Baroudi to tell him that she is now his alone; but when she explains what has happened, he orders her off of his boat, insisting, as he has always, that he cannot allow himself to be involved in any scandal.

      Mary returns to Nigel’s boat at the very moment that he demands the door and windows be closed, Mary is left on the outside, allowed only to peek in through the wooden slats. It is clear Nigel has returned to the side of his bachelor friend, bringing Nigel back into his man’s world without the troubles provided by a “beautiful woman,” proffered with homosexual affection if not actual sexual acts.

 

Los Angeles, August 19, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).

Jesse James Rice and Mike Macdonald | Never Gone / 2020

a ghost never laid to rest

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cameron Becht, Mike MacDonald, and Jesse James Rice (screenplay), Jesse James Rice and Mike Macdonald (directors) Never Gone / 2020 [6 minutes]

 

Although the movie itself simply credits this film to Jesse James Rice as both screenwriter and director, IMDb adds other names to this short work about a grieving man. They also seem to have a list of other characters who do not appear in the film. So, I can imagine there might have been a remake or a later, extended version which I have not seen.

    Shane (Jordan Sorenson) arrives back home with groceries, greeted by his gay companion (Brian Sounlath) who is busy cooking. Yet we quickly realize his lover is there only in his memory, that the apartment is actually empty.

     In a fury Shane throws his groceries to the floor, only to turn back into the living room, again filled with his former companion’s presence as he announces a TV movie he wants to share with him.

     As Shane attempts to escape into yet another room, his partner declared he has just douched for sex.

   There is clearly no escape from his memories, and he finally falls apart, wailing and crying, as the dead ghost of his lover tries to comfort him about the accident which killed him.

      Soon, however, he realizes he is alone yet again.

      A friendly neighbor knocks and the door, and insists that she enter just to be with him for a while in order to comfort him in his time of deep pain.

      This is a truly simple statement of the suffering a gay spouse, just like straight couples, encounter when their loved one disappears suddenly from their lives.

      There is nothing astounding or innovative about this film. It’s simply a statement how a room filled with the other’s presence is gone and missing, even while the survivor realizes the memories will never leave him and that he must suffer the experiences now missing from his life over and over again.

 

Los Angeles, July 31, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).

Lloyd Bacon | Manhattan Parade / 1931

elephants and ostriches

by Douglas Messerli

 

Houston Branch and Robert Lord (screenplay, based on a play by Samuel Shipman), Lloyd Bacon (director) Manhattan Parade / 1931

 

Lloyd Bacon’s Manhattan Parade was originally to be a musical, in which the musical numbers, Harold Arlen’s and Ted Koehler’s “I Love a Parade,” “Temporarily Blue,” and “I’m Happy When You’re Jealous” along with any dance numbers that had been planned and then erased. Musicals had suddenly worn out their welcome with early Depression audiences.

     The film which at the time of its release was noted for its newly improved Technicolor which Variety described as "easy on the eye and never harsh or confusing as the early color pictures were." Yet the version that remains is in black-and-white, although the University of California Los Angeles film collection does still hold a 16mm safety color print.

     And, finally, what was originally to have been a musical comedy turned out to be a rather biting, at times even sour satire on musicals, their producers, the theater in general, and the treatment of working women by their husbands in the marketplace.

     Although it’s fascinating for its odd viewpoint—that of a large costume manufacturing company that provides outfits for many Broadway plays—its characters get lost in the difficulties of the early Depression years and the betrayal of friends and lovers. Even the comic “pansy,” the head designer Paisley (Bobby Watson who also played the fashionable dressmaker in the original Broadway musical Irene and the diction coach in Singing in the Rain) from whom you might expect a few clever bon mots appears to be on the constant edge of a nervous breakdown over a director’s demand for cerise brocaded dresses instead of maroon and another lunatic director’s attempt to costume elephants and ostriches.

     And in order to save the company which she created with her husband, executive head Doris Roberts (Winnie Lightner) has to put her best customers, the production team of the ever-arguing Lou and Jake Delman (the comedy team of Joe Smith and Charles Dale) out of business and threaten to sue her husband (Walter Miller) for alienation of affections through her secretary with whom he ran off to Europe after financially bankrupting the business.

      In short, without any music, dance, color, or upbeat humor it’s not a pretty picture.

      Still, there are a few elements that at least provide the film with some fascinating moments. Working so devotedly and professionally that you truly believe that she might change the course of Depression-era theater, Lightner is engaging and even charming as a female executive who makes her husband seem like a fatuous male  chauvinist, a man who uses even her devotion to her near-perfect son (the famed child actor Dickie Moore) against her, convincing her that falling asleep while reading her son Jack the Giant Killer that she is not spending enough quality time with him and, accordingly, should abandon all the hard work she’s put it making The John Roberts Costume Company a success.

       The real reason, of course, is that if he pretends to work long nights in the office, he can spend his time romancing her former secretary, Charlotte Evans (Greta Granstedt). That Doris believes him and heeds his advance suggests she’s not quite as clever as she has seemed to be in the previous scenes when she outwitted a pair of arguing producers who want to cancel their order for dozens of pirate costumes, calmed down her peevish designer Paisley, and assured her bookworm information specialist that he will not be beaten at 5:00 by the husband of a wife whom he has informed that Lady Godiva wore no costume whatsoever if he leaves the office by 4:30.

       Even the brief time when she’s off-screen caring for Junior, we so miss her that when he hear her husband’s gone to Europe on a sexual tryst and in order to save the business she must return to the office, we breathe a little easier and hope the film can get its wandering plot back on track.

      Unfortunately, it’s already too late. Instead of clever repartee Paisley has thrown another cissy-fit, threatening to go home and decorate his own apartment. It’s apparent that writers Houston Branch and Robert Lord, although both noted for their numerous later contributions to film writing, didn’t know how to present a gay character who could do anything but stomp his feet and flap his wrists. Executive Doris Roberts calms him down eventually by offering new drapes for his office.

      The film, moreover, offers up another effete male, the actor Frank Herman who demands “etchings” in his dressing room and, already being paid $5,000 a month as an actor who evidently is not bringing in his promised audience, wants $2,000 a month more from his confused producers Smith and Dale. If he pretends to dress a bit like a dandy or a 1930s version of Oscar Wilde, his lines reveal nothing whatsoever of Wilde’s wit, and we wish he might sail off on his yacht and remove himself from the screen as soon as possible.

       But first we have to sit through Smith and Dale’s abysmal shtick. With their success in vaudeville (Neil Simon modeled his Sunshine Boys duo on Smith and Dale) it might have seemed a good idea to bring the endlessly arguing brother’s skit to the silver screen, and the first time round of their interruptive attempts to each claim the credit for anything of momentary success and to deny everything when it fails—which given these former cheese merchants’ lunatic Broadway productions are most of the time—is somewhat amusing; but when they repeat the skit and repeat it yet again without so much as a single funny line behind it we begin to dread listening in to their long discussions of Broadway’s Depression woes, even if they are willing to lay down in the street with their overpaid actor if he’ll only give them a break.

      At least when a true loon, the arrogant self-created Russian-born direct Vassily Vassiloff (Luis Alberni) shows up at their door determined to create a revolutionary new high-brow play, things seem to momentarily perk up, particularly when we see the prologue of his imaginary play, which consists of several men of varying heights dressed in sack cloth beating their chests as they make their way across the footlights and into the orchestra pit. Before the Delman’s have even paid off the $18,000 their new director has expended just for costumes, Vassiloff demands the audience seats be removed so that he can fill the theater with water as if it were suddenly the Hippodrome before he just as suddenly decides to replace it with desert sand. The elephants go, and ostriches replace them, and finally the ostriches are also out. A theater wall is torn down despite the Shuberts’ threats to sue, and eventually the mad director decides that his cast will wear no costumes whatsoever and requests the theater lights also be disassembled.

       If his purchases save Doris’ costume company, Vassiloff’s play bankrupts the Delman’s who end up back in the cheese business with no Depression customers even interested in what originally made them rich.

       And before we might even be able to crack a smile about the film’s satire of serious drama, Doris’ husband returns to try to take over the revived business once more from his now justifiably fed-up wife. As I suggested above she manages to involve her husband’s mistress in a scheme which puts her boring husband out of the picture, but having been responsible for the Delman brothers’ failure we wonder who will buy her costumes of the future and why anyone might want to do business with a woman who kills off the source of her own income. By film’s end Broadway looks as dark as if the Covid virus has shut it down. We don’t even find out if Doris makes it back home to Junior. And by film’s end, there’s nothing left to do but to throw the former director out the window.

        Fortunately, the real director of this horror, Lloyd Bacon, went on to direct several hits when movie musicals almost immediately came back into style again, including 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, and Wonder Bar.

 

Los Angeles, August 8, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2021).

 

Frank Tuttle | No Limit / 1931

sex with butterflies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Salisbury Field and Viola Brothers Shore (screenplay, based on a story by George Marion, Jr.), Frank Tuttle (director) No Limit / 1931

 

1931, as film commentator Jeffrey E. Ford notes, was perhaps the nadir year of Clara Bow’s life. Ford summarizes the year:

 “Not even her earliest days as a working actress – an extra girl confined in a succession of cheap studio pictures — could have encompassed the personal humiliation and professional disappointment that Clara had to endure in the last year of her Paramount contract. First, there was the whole Daisy DeVoe mess [Bow’s personal secretary who was accused by Paramount of financial mismanagement) and its highly publicized trial; following hot on the heels of Clara’s disastrous involvement with Texas doctor Earl Pearson and its exposure [Paramount, taking money from her salary had supposedly paid hush money to Pearson’s wife who threatened to make their affair public, but evidently it was never paid]. …Second, there was “The Coast Reporter” and its unprecedented slander campaign against Clara, a campaign so vicious and mean spirited that even the eventual imprisonment of the newspaper’s editor/publisher on obscenity charges could do little to salvage Clara’s shattered reputation. Worst of all, the star’s two films of that year, No Limit and Kick In, were both failures at the box office. For an actress who had been the top female star with the public a short two years before, the collapse was extraordinary. Clara’s subsequent release from her Paramount contract seemed, at the time, almost like an act of mercy. One thing was certain: the 1920’s were over, and the “It Girl” who had received 45,000 fan letters a month was no more. The shining, soulful eyes that had dominated such films as Mantrap (1926), It (1927), and The Wild Party (1929), was considered a Hollywood has-been at the age of twenty-five.”

    

      That any studio would even think to put one of their most popular actors into a disaster of a film such as No Limit which changes its genre, without transition, every few moments, and forces Bow to alternate between an innocent usherette named Bunny O’Day, the owner of a New York private gambling den, and the dedicated moll to a ne’er-do-well gambler, Douglas Thayer (Norman Foster, whose role might as well have been based on Fanny Brice‘s beloved Nicky Arnstein) is almost beyond logic. Although Bow tries her best, and does her best acting in this work as the wide-eyed innocent Bunny, her shift to the dedicated lover of a man who she knows has stolen the jewels of a famous star whom she has just met and tries to pawn off one of rings as a gift to keep her quiet, lies to her continually about his activities, and finally is arrested and imprisoned, is so far beyond believability that the role would stymie even a Garbo or Hepburn.

      You can’t lie to the police to protect a thief at one moment and be the would-be lover to an innocent, wide-eyed hick sailor like Ole Olson (Stuart Erwin) in the next. Actually, the gambling den she is perceived as owning, belongs to Olson, having just inherited it from his uncle along with a Rolls Royce, all that is left of the man’s wealth after paying off his debts.

    What’s even worse, as the commentator to the online Classic Movie Ramblings observes: “the comedy parts of the movie are sadly lacking in laughs while the dramatic sections are equally lacking in drama.”

      The movie has two Pre-Code moments which justify its being in these pages. Told by a lawyer that his uncle was “unique,” Olson responds: “By golly is that why he never got married?” It is far easier for this young fool to imagine that his uncle was a “eunuch” than trying to imagine him as a homosexual.

      The second moment when the unimaginative director Frank Tuttle calls in the pansies comes right after Bunny has stormed out of the gambler’s apartment when he has attempted to rape her—yet another reason why we find her later devotion to him difficult to swallow. Immediately after she leaves, the doorbell rings and he runs to it, imagining that she has returned, only to be greeted a soft-spoken man with slight lisp (Percy Ivins), asking if he might be interested in the postcard collection “Sex among the Butterflies.”

      The script by Salisbury Field and Viola Brothers Shore* was so bad that they couldn’t even come up with a couple of good pansy jokes.

       The final assault on its audiences’ intelligence comes, for those who have suffered through to the end, when it asks them to share her joy for Thayer, having been paroled early for good behavior, the self-declared changed man now, unlike Brice’s Nicky Arnstein, ready to live out his life with Bunny happily ever after.

       After what was to have been her penultimate Paramount picture, Bow had something close to a nervous breakdown, but after she was released from Paramount and broke with her manager B. P. Schulberg, she went on to make at least two more successful pictures, Call Her Savage (1932) and Hoop-La (1933) before retiring from movies permanently.

      

*While both were terribly mediocre writers, Edward Salisbury Field became the secretary, protégé, and possibly lover of Fanny Stevenson after her husband’s Robert Louis Steveson’s death, and upon Fanny’s death married their daughter, Isobel who was 20 years older than he. Viola Brothers Shore and her third husband Haskoll Gleichman were called upon to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

 

Los Angeles, August 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).

 

Lloyd Bacon | Fifty Million Frenchmen / 1931

pansy’s disqualified

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joseph Jackson, Eddie Welch, and Al Boasberg (screenplay, based on the musical by Herbert Fields, E. Ray Goetz, and Cole Porter), Lloyd Bacon (director) Fifty Million Frenchmen / 1931

 

The motion picture Fifty Million Frenchmen was “based”—if one can describe the complete gutting of the original and its replacement with a “book” that was already dead on arrival as a kind of adaptation—on the Cole Porter of 1929, which had the same characters but little else. Because of the sudden total lack of the American public’s interest in cinematic musical comedies, inundated as they were with the rise of the talkies, Warner Brothers held back their technicolor musical film hoping things might quickly change. Alas, they didn’t, and by 1931 they had stripped away the Porter’s score and the drained the color out to a black-and-white production to release a script written by three movie hacks, Joseph Jackson, Eddie Welch, Al Boalsberg,* who replaced a theater book by Herbert Fields that was already stretching the limits of Broadway acceptance of zany plots. They assigned the direction to Lloyd Bacon, who had only three mediocre comedies under his belt (he later did 42nd Street), and who certainly didn’t have the fearlessness of the original director Monty Wooley. The Technicolor musical was released in other countries but is now lost.

      The reviewer from the Pre-Code.com site summarizes my feelings about this film:

 

 “All we have left is a start and go comedy that doesn’t shy away from the corniest gags it can manage.

      The plot, as it is, involves a bet between Jack and Michael, two rich men who are vacationing in Paris. Both are in love with Lulu, a dim blonde who is also vacationing in Paris. Jack makes a bet that he can get her to marry him without the use of his wealth, and Michael employs a pair of bumbling detectives, Simon and Peter (the comedic team of Olsen and Johnson), to make sure Jack doesn’t cheat.

       Olsen and Johnson as the star attractions falter here since their schtick is that they don’t really have much of one. Johnson has a high-pitched goofy sort of squeal and Olsen has a stick up his rear, but that’s the most of it. Their personalities melt in the face of a joke, as well, making their interplay seem fairly generic.”

       For the most part there is no real plot, and the work is centered around numerous vaudeville-like skits. For example, upon entering the Ritz bar, Olsen and Johnson, observing a nearby drunken patron who has passed out, attempt to mix a drink using his open, snoring mouth as the shaker. After Johnson is robbed by a woman who they’ve been working with as detectives, Olsen remarks: “Swell detective you are, letting a dame steal your watch,” Johnson snapping back, “That’s all right. I got her bracelet,” holding up the item for all to see as he giggles uncontrollably.

       Jack, the lead, spends most of the movie moping over his inability to find the woman he loves, Lulu Carroll (Claudia Dell), who, as the Pre-Code writer observes, “is as interesting as a piece of cardboard,” so that we hardly care whether or not he might find her without using any the millions he’s inherited. But at least he’s a plausible stereotype, the closest to character for which this film strives.

     Given the years of its birth, along with its parentage of Cole Porter and Monty Wooley, there is inevitably a fair share of “pansy jokes” to be tossed off at various occasions. Indeed, there are enough that perhaps, had this film been just a little more interesting, it might have found its way out of my out my grouping of persnickety sissies and into the more solid and sinful sodomite films; but Bacon and his actors evidently don’t even know what to make of the queer jokes that creep up from time to time.

       Early the film when someone asks what brought them to Paris, Olsen quickly replies “I came over looking for a man,” but since no one knows what to do with that suggestive line evidently, Johnson quickly adds, “I came looking for a woman,” the inquirer asking, “Aren’t there any women where you come from?, he answering “Yes, but I know them all.” Ba-bum, another dead end.

       Soon after, a “real live” pansy slides up next to them at the bar, asking for a drink. “O barman, barman, I say, old fellow, a tall, frosted glass with the tiniest piece of lemon peel.” All Johnson can do is uncontrollably squeal, which might lead our prissy friend to imagine for a moment that he’s one of his kind, but such behavior is so absurd that he simply doesn’t know what to make of it as he continues, “A dram of whiskey, a digestion of bitters, a lump and a half of sugar, garnished with a sprig of mint, two cherries, two red cherries.” He’s made clear who he is, but Johnson is so busy squealing that we hardly identify his species let alone his sexuality. The audience doesn’t need Johnson’s taunts to know what was going down, and probably is now more confused than well-humored.

       The best role in this film in search of a way to be simultaneously naughty and funny, is given the American tourist, Violet (Helen Broderick, who later played the marvelous Madge Hardwick, Everett Edward Horton’s worldly-wise wife in the Rogers and Astaire vehicle Top Hat). Here she plays a woman who has already seen the town without being able to find anything that’s left her feeling she’s “insulted,” and wants Jack, now working as a tourist guide, to take her someplace truly naughty. 

     He shows her dirty postcards, but she’s already bought several of them and sent them off to her nephews and nieces. He offers to take her to “dark theaters with little holes in the walls you can look in,” which she finds vaguely of interest (if she were an art collector 30 years later she would certainly have purchased Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés), and offers her a knife which when you look into its pinhole is a picture of a muscleman covered only by a thong. She’s not insulted, but does ask, soon after, to see it once again.

      A short while later she encounters Olsen and Johnson working as baggage handlers nearby, who have accidently just opened a large traveling case in which there are drawers and drawers filled with women’s lingerie. Coming upon them, she wonders what they’re doing with all the “Curios,” suggesting her attitude toward such feminine undergarments.

 

Simon: “You’re wrong, lady. This is female underwear!”

Violet: “I was right. Curios. You know, I promised the folks back in America I’d come back with some underwear.”

Simon: “Oh, lady. You should have started out with some.”

Violet: “I meant for the folks back home!” 

 

She turns to go, but turns back again, calling out, “Which one of you two girls is a model,” Simon looking Peter, “I told you to keep your hands off your hip.”

     Amazingly, she finally does get them both to model her lingerie choices, dragging in a little bit of crossdressing into the film’s search for naughtiness. But even she’s not convinced, and purchases nothing from them.

     In between these events and the film’s not speedy enough end, Jack, Peter, and Simon attend a formal ball where they pretend to be magicians and show up at the racetracks where they all bet on a losing horse named Pansy, of course. Despite a number of lame jokes (“I hope pansy isn’t a polite horse.” “Who’s pansy by?” “I don’t know. Every time I see her she’s by herself.”), the horse miraculously wins only to be immediately declared as “disqualified.” Bringing back Violet just to deliver the quip, the director has Jack tell her the bad news, “Pansy’s been disqualified,” to which she quips—obviously foretelling the Hays Code decision of two years later—“I thought she would be.”  The writers, however, can’t even let that joke lay, for a few minutes later Pansy is once again declared to be the winner.

     Chasing for a closing, the film later requires Jack to be kidnapped with Simon and Peter running on foot after the auto into which the villains—hired by his betting partner Michael—have tossed him. They follow the car followed by nearly every gendarme in Paris through the auto-clogged streets over the roofs of the cars, down a newly tarred side-street, and through a whorehouse that appears to fear group orgies, before finally catching up and bringing us back to the end of the bet just in time to explain to nitwit who he wants to marry that he’s truly well-to-do. Consequently, she doesn’t ask a single question and mutters out the words, “I do” just as the movie gives up trying to do anything further to save itself or possibly insult its audiences any further.   

 

*Of the three, Boalsberg was the exception, having written, by 1931, Keaton’s The General and Chasing Rainbows, and later contributing to Freaks, A Night at the Opera, and A Day at the Races. In 1933 he also directed one a movie with one of the healthiest portrayals of a gay figure in the 1930s, Myrt and Marge. But at the time Jackson had already written for dozens of now-forgotten films, so he was obviously hired as the head writer.

 

Los Angeles, April 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).