Mark Sandrich | The Gay Divorcee / 1934

under the hide

by Douglas Messerli

 

George Marion Jr., Dorothy Yost. and Edward Kaufman, with additional dialogue by Robert Benchley, H. W. Hanemann, and Stanley Rauh (screenplay, based on Dwight Taylor and Cole Porter’s stage musical The Gay Divorce), Mark Sandrich (director) The Gay Divorcee / 1934

 

The Gay Divorcee (1934) was the second of ten Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, and established the pattern for many of the films which followed. In each of these Astaire, playing a different-named dancer by profession falls passionately in love with the various named Rogers’ characters, doing anything he can to woo the resistant and strong-willed woman who most often confuses him and his intentions with someone else.

 

     This time the soon to-be-object of Astaire’s desire, with the improbable name of Mimi Glossop, is a hopeful divorcee who does not actually get unhitched in the film despite the fact that she ultimately falls in love, after a great deal of chasing, with the Astaire figure, Guy Holden, the Hays office actually forcing the studio into a slightly more scandalous title than the original stage musical’s The Gay Divorce. Evidently it was preferable for a woman to be joyful about her upcoming divorce than to allow the divorce itself to be seen as a celebratory event. Yet, obviously, by postponing the divorce the film allows its audiences to enjoy all the delights of sexual attraction and even a symbolic consummation of their love in their 20-minute-long performance of Herb Magidson’s and Con Conrad’s The Continental which lavishly celebrates with its “dangerous” and “daring” rhythms that have “a passion” “Because you tell of your love while you dance” and encourages you to go ahead and “kiss.” Certainly, none of these things might have been approved for any of the junior high and senior high school dances I attended in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A head leaning on a shoulder perhaps, but no tossing female torsos through the air or body drops into the waiting arms of waiting male suitors as played out in Mark Sandrich’s film were permitted.

      The score of the original stage musical was by Cole Porter, of which only one of his songs remains, “Night and Day.” It’s easy comprehend why Porter’s lyrics such as those to “Why Marry Then?” didn’t make it to the screen:

                                   

When I see troops of carriages

go marching to marriages

My heart always bleeds for the bride,

For I know that her honeymoon

Will soon seem a funny moon

When alone she sits nursing her pride.

For all men are polygamous,

At heart at least bigamous,

And when the night falls

Their eyes start to roam,

So it's pure asininity

To save ones virginity

For a husband who hates to come home.

 

     Or why the He and She duet of “I’ve Got You On My Mind” would never be recorded to celluloid in 1932.

 

She:

You're not wild enough,

He:

You're not gay enough,

She:

You don't let me lead you astray enough.

He:

You don't live enough, you don't dare enough,

You don't give enough,

She:

You don't care enough....

 

     Yet “Night and Day” as sung and danced by Astaire and Rogers isn’t exactly the kind cute ditty which the Hays people preferred given this song’s open references to sex:

 

Night and day under the hide of me

There's an, oh, such a hungry yearning

Burning inside of me,

And its torment won't be through

Till you let me spend my life making love to you

Day and night, night and day.

     Fortunately, the censors didn’t really know the urban language of day, evidently being perfectly happy with passing on the song Betty Grable warbles to Edward Everett Horton (playing the discombobulated lawyer Egbert Fitzgerald), Mack Gordon and Harry Revel’s “Let's K-nock K-nees,” with several dancing chorus lines following, the first of which is three chorus boys with arms around each other wildly kicking up a storm. On the streets “knocking knees” is a phrase used to describe sexual intercourse.

      In fact, in almost all the Astaire/Rogers romances the studios and their directors let the dances tell the story of straight-forward heterosexual romances that allowed critics such as The New York Times’ Andre Sennwald to declare that the actors and music “help to make the new Music Hall show the source of a good deal of innocent merriment."  

      Meanwhile, the musicals themselves, in their topsy-turvy like situations—in this case Mimi at first snubbing Guy because she is still married and later mistaking him for the correspondent the lawyer has sent to help her get her divorce—create enough chaos with characters rushing in and out of doors to hide themselves from one another to match nearly any Georges Feydeau farce.

       As in Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby Astaire’s character early on accidently rips Mimi’s dress, and chases after her through the London streets and countryside long enough to convince most viewers that the story is really about true love attempting to find a way to openly express itself in a world of bungling idiots such as Horton’s Egbert, Mimi’s absurdly forgetful and eternally confused aunt Hortense (Alice Brady), and the linguistically and sexually discombobulated correspondent Tonetti (Erik Rhodes), along with their smug valets and waiters (Charles Coleman and Eric Blore).

        Yet the true comic heart of almost all of these films relies on these seemingly supporting actors who are provided by an entire cadre of writers (in this case George Marion Jr., Dorothy Yost, Edward Kaufman, Robert Benchley, H. W. Hanemann, and Stanley Rauh) with enough hilariously bawdy and often queer double entendres to spice up the blandly-conceived general plot. If the beautifully attired Mimi and Guy dance their way into ordinary American’s hearts, it is these other figures that make The Gay Divorcee and later works of its kind worth watching.

      In all of these Astaire films it is never explained why the dapper and sophisticated dancer might ever have come to befriend the befuddled Horton let alone why he seems to live in his friend’s homes, staterooms, or apartments. It’s not that Horton, in this case Egbert, is exactly averse to marrying women—he does so or has a wife in most of the RKO pictures, and in The Gay Divorcee he ends up marrying the woman from whom he has been running for much of his life, Hortense. But nonetheless, nearly all these works portray him as a queer who lives apart from women with his dancing friend as his permanent guest.

      Early in the 1932 film Egbert, receiving a telegram from his father who’s addressed his message to “Pinky,” makes his sexual preference quite clear: My father always called me Pinky ever since I was a golden-haired little tot padding about the ancestral home in pale pink pajamas.”

     Throughout most of this movie, Egbert attempts to escape Hortense and any other woman who looks his way for more than two moments, having earlier escaped the clutches of Mimi’s constantly remarrying aunt by running off to India to supposedly hunt for elephants.

      In almost all of these films, moreover, he is both confounded and reassured by the presence of Eric Blore, in this film his waiter in a Bristol hotel where he has gone on business with Guy to procure Mimi’s divorce. A bit like Hortense, when Egbert goes to order breakfast he cannot recall what he wants. Always the correct and well-meaning servant, Blore begins to suggest the possibilities, finally approaching them through a series of alliterative associations. When Egbert can still not call up the word, the waiter stubbornly refuses to abandon him: “I hate to leave you with my duty undischarged.” Ignoring the obvious scatological joke, we also read it as a statement of sexual readiness being held in retention. And when Egbert finally recalls that he wants “tea,” the waiter slyly smiles suggesting that it is his favorite as well. Again, in urban street language “British tea” is another expression for putting one’s scrotum into a sexual partner’s mouth, later adapted into American slang through the phrase “tea-bagging,” when gay dancers bend their bodies to allow their balls to flop upon their admirers’ heads (see John Waters’ film Pecker).

       At regular intervals throughout the film, Egbert and Guy are seen playing with the hand-puppet dolls that were at the center of a nightclub act they attended in the first scene of the movie. Egbert, however, cannot quite seem to get the hang of it, his fingers stubbornly refusing to dance just as he later remains fairly inert even after Grable’s sexual encouragement. Catching him working with the finger puppets at another moment, Hortense responds, “Oh, Egbert, I didn’t know you liked dolls. (Turning to her niece) He always had the mother instinct.” Throughout we realize that if Egbert is not precisely gay, he is a kind of sterile heterosexual who will forever be defined by that pink-clad childhood, more at home with other men than with those of the opposite sex.

       Even Hortense gets the chance to mouth a couple of zingers. Plotting together with Egbert for her niece’s divorce, she sighs, “You know divorces make me so sentimental. [Directly looking at Egbert] Don’t you wish it was ours?” Later, when the lawyer observes her about to join Mimi who is on her way to her hotel room to meet with the correspondent, he calls her back, “You can’t have a clandestine affair between three people.” Hortense quips, “Oh, that’s what you say.”

 

     The would-be correspondent, Tonetti is the most obvious openly gay figure in this film, even though he too is married. Apparently, however, he seldom sees his wife given his line of business, and when he faithfully attempts to telephone her, hears a male voice in the background wonders whether that be there another man with her in the kitchen. After hanging up, he announces, “Isn’t it wonderful! At only 9 years of age by son’s voice is changing.” Tonetti has not a clue about women, demonstrating later that he doesn’t even know how to pretend love between him and his client when her husband walks through the door. When Egbert warns Tonetti that he must be careful with Mimi regarding his behavior, the correspondent assures him not to worry. “My slogan is: Your wife is safe with Tonetti. He prefers spaghetti.” Even without an explanation of what that might mean, we recognize that Tonetti is sexually harmless with regard to women. The writers, in this case, snuck in another street term, spaghetti describing the excretion of smegma during oral sex.

      With Tonetti on the loose, moreover, the romancer himself, Guy, becomes connected with the gay sexual innuendos. As he and Mimi attempt to find a way to slip out of the house, Guy suddenly picks up a newspaper and cuts out a image declaring that cutting out paper dolls was something he did as a boy, which of course reminds us of the hand puppets he was seen manipulating early in the film. In this case the images, placed on a record player, serve as shadows to trick Tonetti into believing that they are still dancing in the next room while they escape to participate in “The Continental” with the crowd below.

       When morning comes we see Guy tied up at the ankle by a rope that connects him to Tonetti, supposedly placed there to make sure that the correspondent would not interfere with Mimi. But we recognize it, metaphorically speaking, as a kind of sexual bonding that proves to us that, if nothing else, they spent the night sleeping together.

        When the waiter (Blore) arrives with morning breakfast the three of them, Tonetti, Guy, and Mimi, share the table, Mimi saying that it is pleasant sharing breakfast with the two men she has come to like. Guy responds, “I’d like to have breakfast with you every morning,” to which Tonetti, presuming Guy was addressing him, replies “Yes? Thank you.”

        Mimi continues the conversation, “I’ve never had breakfast with two gentlemen before.”

    Guy retorts: “I’ve tried it. It’s no fun,” hinting, obviously, that he may have once tried out a homosexual threesome before sharing breakfast the next morning with his sexual partners; or, perhaps it was the fact that they were gentlemen that made it “no fun.”

       When the long-expected knock at the door by Mimi’s husband Cyril is finally sounded, Guy and the waiter are hurried away to the bedroom as the wife, clumsily embraced by Tonetti, and husband encounter one another for the first time in a long while. Cyril dismisses Tonetti immediately, recognizing him for what he is, a ploy to make him give his wife a divorce. When Guy is called to the rescue the situation, Cyril also sees him no threat, telling Mimi that he can easily forgive her while still refusing a divorce. When finally, the waiter enters he recognizes Cyril as his geologist friend—Blore has previously declared that he has a passion for rocks—with whom he had once met to discuss geology along with the man’s wife, a French woman who hardly spoke any English. Cyril, it turns out, is the true adulterer, and Mimi is finally free—at least in the future— to marry Guy, the man she loves. 

         Innocent merriment? Perhaps, if you can accept the fact that at least in the terms of the signs and language of the cinema, Guy has already slept with Egbert and Tonetti and danced “The Continental” with Mimi. What else, we can only wonder, is left? A man and woman can only dance around the room so many times.

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).   

 

 

Tomu Uchida | 警察官 (Keisatsukan) (Police Officer, aka Policeman) / 1933

looking homeward

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eizo Yamauchi (screenplay, based on a story by Toshihiko Takeda), Tomu Uchida (director)

警察官 (Keisatsukan) (Police Officer, aka Policeman) / 1933

 

Only this film of the several Tomu Uchida made in pre-war Japan has survived intact. But Keisatsukan (Police Officer and The Policeman) is certainly one of the most remarkable of all the pre-war films made in Japan, of which an estimated 90% have been lost.

     Police Officer (1933) can be compared in its geometrically arranged compositions with Fritz Lang’s Spione (Spies, 1928) and M (1931); Lawrence Garcia describes one of its sequences, when it lays a “pulsing wire-screen fence over city maps and high-angle shots of Tokyo” as delineating “the era’s nascent surveillance-state mechanisms as resolutely as the Mabuse movies” of Lang.

      But perhaps more importantly, along with Uchida’s close friend and colleague Yasujirō Ozu’s Dragnet Girl, released the same year, Police Officer “makes it tempting to herald these two films as precursors to the American postwar noir movement, suggesting that Berlin should share some of the proto-noir credit with Tokyo,” as critic Eddie Muller observes

      Certainly, in its quick moving sequences, filmed often at night, with a heavy use of rack-focus and long shots demonstrating a near labyrinthian pattern of a cat-and-mouse game between a rookie cop and a seasoned criminal, this film comes as close as one can get to the later 1930s and 1940s noirs of Hollywood.

     As Muller continues: “Policeman even features a somber and vengeful leading man on a dangerous quest in the shadowy underworld, a figure practically de rigueur in noir. The film’s premise—dour cop and suave crook once were neighborhood pals—was a staple of 1930s Warner Bros. gangster dramas (a major influence on Japanese cinema of the era), and it’s also featured in noir classics such as Cry of the City (1948). But while there is unmistakable noir DNA in Policeman’s themes and mise-en-scène, Uchida’s film is truly more a police procedural, prototype of noir-stained policers such as Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948), He Walked by Night (1948), and Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog (1949),” the latter of which some critics have argued was influenced by Uchida’s work.

      Although Uchida’s films generally presented leftist viewpoints, this one is different in the fact that the gangster, previously a young dandy living on his father’s wealth, admits early on in the film “The Sons of Blue Bloods invariably become Reds.” And his Communist run gangster organization is destroyed by film’s end.

     Film commentator Matthew Legare suggests that Police Officer “owes something to the real-life Omori Bank Incident (aka the Red Gang Incident) of October 1932. Members of the Japanese Communist Party robbed a bank, something unheard of in Japan, in a desperate attempt to keep their party alive. Instead, it dealt a death blow to Japanese Communism, allowing the police to crack down even harder on Communists, like the writer Takiji Kobayashi, who was beaten to death in February 1933.”

       Rumor has it that script writer Eizo Yamauchi was pressured to make the gangsters Communists. But Uchida’s film downplays that aspect, and features as perhaps the central element of the story another completely different kind of connection that overwhelms any political message the film might have been asked to convey.

      In the very first scenes of the film, the police have set up a roadblock to seek out the bandits of a recent holdup where we observe a young rookie policeman, Itami (Isamu Kosugi) stopping a chauffeured car wherein the back seat sits the golf-playing Tetsuo (Eiji Nakano), who when queried where he has been, reports that he is returning a game of golf. When demanded an identification card, however, he claims to have forgotten it, as another cop begins to explore what is actually in the golf cart. But at that very moment, Itami and Tetsuo recognize one another. They have been high-school friends, and as an acquaintance of Itami’s, the temporary suspect is immediately freed from any further inquiry.

     Soon after, however, they meet up again, summarizing where they are now in their lives and why they disappeared from one another’s worlds, Tetsuo dressed in western clothes, Itami the Japanese uniform. Tetsuo is startled that his friend is now a policeman; he had simply disappeared from school. Itami explains that he had family problems and had no desire to face his friends. He continues, however, that he thought the world was against him, becoming sick apparently in both “body and soul.” Mr. Miyabe (Taisuke Matsumoto), a seasoned police Sergeant, saved his life, he claims, later encouraging him to himself become a policeman himself.

      Itami had presumed that by this time Tetsuo might have become a “big shot” in his father’s company. And it is here that Tetsuo explains that he has been disowned by his father for becoming a Communist. He is now idle and spends most of his days playing golf and other games. He gets his money, he insists, by returning to his father begging for more support, something he’s embarrassed about.

      But something doesn’t quite gel about either of their stories. If Tetsuo has broken with his father why does the father still provide him with money? And what were Itami’s family problems, and how did that lead to his inner turmoil which sounds a great deal like depression and despair.

      They too must have questions about each other as well as taking delight again in one another’s company, agreeing to meet soon after for a dinner.

       Meanwhile, we get to know what kind of man Itami has become through his walk home through a neighborhood where adults and children both respect him and greet him enthusiastically. One boy, Shinichi, the younger brother of a neighbor Emiko, loses his kite in a tree. Itami attempts to pull it down for him, but when he fails promises Shin that he’ll buy him a new kite at the market that evening. He lives in the same house with Sergeant Miyabe and Miyabe’s daughter, Tazuko, who it is clear has a deep admiration for him that borders on a silent love.

       Soon after, Itami and Miyabe stop a car only to discover Shin’s older sister Emiko riding in it with a rich man, making it clear to them that the neighbor is working as a prostitute. And soon thereafter, when Itami attempts to visit Emiko’s house to pay Shin a visit, he discovers they have moved away, suggesting that she has been shamed and forced to leave the neighborhood.

      All of these earlier scenes, however, simply help to establish the world in which Itami now lives. And soon Uchida’s film moves into a much faster paced world of gangsters at the very same time it alternately flows out into a far more languid psychological study of both Itami and Tetsuo’s inner feelings, their present and, most importantly, former relationship.

       It begins with one of the most significant scenes of the film: Itami and his senpai, mentor Miyabe are called with the rest of the force to an armed bank robbery. The two of them arrive before the others, spotting two men jumping from the second floor of the bank to the ground in their escape. Miyabe begins to chase of one of them, but is immediately shot, while Itami first chases the other, shooting and wounding him in the leg. But immediately he returns to capture the man who has shot Miyabe while other policemen gather up the Sergeant and rush him to the hospital. The scene is as exciting and tragic in its series of events—after several days in the hospital Miyabe dies, a devastating blow to Itami—as any cop and robber’s scene made after it, and probably helped to serve as a model for many of them.

       But the film now wanders off, as Itami and Tetsuo share a dinner, and finally begin to reveal aspects of their high school friendship. Itami first refuses Tetsuo’s offer of sake, but gradually is convinced by Tetsuo’s implorations and the insistence of the waitress. After dinner, the two lay down head to foot, as they talk over old times. What we discover is that as students they were most influenced by the teachings of a professor, who they agree “brought us together” with readings by Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, known better under his pen name Novalis, the German Romantic writer who later influenced everyone from the 1890s aestheticists such as Oscar Wilde and J. K. Huysmans, to Karl Marx and Richard Wagner. They both quote memorable passages, describing themselves as having “read [Novalis’ work] as in a dream. We were young then” Briefly the handsome Tetsao strokes Itami’s long black hair.

     A blink of a frame takes them back to a scene of them as young boys laying in very same position in which they now lie, as in the present they quote the lines: “Philosophy stems from nostalgia. No matter where you are, you want to be home”; “There is an art to achieving humanity”; and “Our life is never a dream. But it should become one of our dreams one day.”

     Throughout these passages we glimpse further images of them in their youth, not only laying in the grass together, but playing football, and skipping rocks across a lake. We realize that neither of them, in fact, have “found home,” truly “achieved humanity,” or created a life that might serve as a dream. In a very odd way, these two in their school-boy dedication to Novalis, remind us of the couple in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope (1948) who share their schoolboy love of Nietzsche without truly understanding or being able to embody his concepts. And, if we are not blind, we also begin to perceive the boyhood relationship between the policeman Itami and the gangster Tetsuo as homoerotic if not actually homosexual. In the same moment, we begin to wonder whether or not some of the turmoil that Itami describes upon suddenly leaving high school is related to his relationship to Tetsuo, now brought back to him in full force.

      In this same meeting, Itami discovers that Tetsuo is suffering from a leg wound, and when he visits the hospital to visit Miyable, he is reprimanded by another officer for smelling of alcohol.

       His silence about his growing suspicions of Tetsuo and his consumption of something that will dull his investigative abilities creates from here on a growing tension between the duties he has pledged to the populace and state in becoming a policeman and his nostalgia for a world in which he can no longer return.

       The following scenes further suck him into Tetsuo’s world as his friend’s “soldiers” begin to follow him and he, in turn, backtracks and follows them. He discovers that Shin and his sister have moved to a new neighborhood where, by coincidence, they look directly to the apartment where Tetsuo and his band have holed up, and he stakes out the location, watching Tetsuo’s movements for several days.

       But in between, he begins to have brief reveries that he can't escape. Muller, in is essay “Silent Noir” describes these “flashbacks” perfectly:

 

“Much of the emotional impact comes from Uchida’s intercutting of past and present; far from the ponderous, telegraphed flashbacks of 1930s films, here the past emerges suddenly, elliptically. These are memories that Itami, now the loyal lawman, can’t allow himself; yet they sneakily flash to mind despite his attempts to bury them. It’s brilliant, inspired filmmaking—especially when these shards of memory disrupt scenes of tedious policework—which Uchida is not afraid to render

in all its painstaking monotony.”

 

       Despite the fact that, given their roles in life, the two would perhaps prefer never to encounter each other again, they are inevitably drawn to one another as they keep appearing and reappearing, knowing that with each new meeting they are further endangering their lives. At one point we can hardly read the image that Uchida flashes upon the screen in one Itami’s memories, but a careful look suggests that it is a quick flash of Itami holding his hand to his face in either despair or tears. Some of the images of the two running across the beach have long been a standard visual trope of young gay lovers.

      Uchida so slowly builds up the tension between the two through Itami’s psychological sufferings and Tetsuo’s plans to escape his lair, that we are not surprised when it suddenly explodes into a final shoot-out that is brilliantly filmed in a darkened world illuminated only with dramatic spot-lights trained upon the criminals by the police as they attempt to escape. Garcia summarizes: 

 

     “The jaw-dropping climactic shootout effectively explodes the preceding events into an abstracted, formalist array of light, shadow, and movement, leading into a final embrace that is also a point of no return.”

 

      Mueller reiterates and expands those comments:

 

“It’s that third act, however, where Uchida shows off his skills as both director and editor. Up to then, the film has maintained the unhurried, reflective pace common to Japanese films of the period, with Uchida favoring long moving-camera shots, occasional optical effects…and those evocative subliminal flashbacks. For the film’s finale, however, he pulls out all the stops, combining starkly dramatic lighting effects with frantic tracking and panning that threatens to soar out of control at any moment. The climactic chase is an impressionistic, breathtaking explosion of delirious technique. For this sequence alone, Uchida deserved his adopted professional moniker ‘Tomu,”’which means ‘to spit out dreams.’”

   Although the last-scene raid involves a shoot-out between all the gangsters and policemen, it is the chase and run of the film’s two major figures, the adversary lovers, which captures our attention most. When Tetsuo, trapped, must look finally fully into the face of the man he loved so long ago, he attempts another impossible leap into the river, only to be shot in the arm by Itami. He has no choice now but to turn back, “home” if you will have it, into Itami’s brief hug, before the policeman applies the requisite handcuffs, symbol of Tetsuo’s final capture by the culture which he refused to embrace.

 

Los Angeles, February 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023).

 

Darwin Serink | Aban and Khorshid / 2014

hold my wing

by Douglas Messerli 

Darwin Serink (screenwriter and director) Aban and Khorshid / 2014 [13 minutes] [Proudvision TV]  

This short, 13-minute, film made in the US but filmed in Farsi, tells the story of two Iranian lovers, Aban (Mojean Aria) and Khorshid (Bobbby Naderi), now locked away in adjacent cells, both waiting to be executed. Despite their obvious fears, Aban remembers their love, Khorshid constantly photographing him, and their intense lovemaking. But recall how they met on the beach on Chaharshanbe Suri when Aban appeared “out of nowhere.”

     Khorshid recalls Aban’s constant hunger, and tells his lover that his one true desire is that he might fly.

     In response to Aban’s hunger, he pretends to order tea, cheese, and other delicacies.

    The film shows them making love, and their sudden arrestment for illegal behavior in Iran, one the 76 countries where homosexuality remains illegal, and one of the 5 that still has the death penalty as punishment.

      Khorshid has folded a piece of foil paper, which he has reshaped as a rose and throws it out of his cell toward Aban’s, who receives the gift, and opens the paper. Although there is nothing on it but one faint spot of white, he claims that it represents the two of them in their own universe.

     The authorities come for them, binding their eyes, and forcing them to climb to the gallows where they will be hung. Khorshid tells his friend not to be afraid, but Aban clearly is terrorized, begging for them to unbind he eyes so that he might once again see Khorshid before he dies. Khorshid begs him to reach out to his fingers, telling him to hold on to his wing. Aban touches the fingers of his friend as they both are hung and killed for doing nothing but sharing their love.

      This is a painful short work, and meant to be since it commemorates the death of Mokhtar N. and Ali A. a pair of gay lovers hung in Iran in 2005.

    Watching gay films as intensely as I have over the last 26 years, as Vito Russo predicted, I have simply had to call witness to far too much suffering and death. Some days, it is difficult to go on.

      But as Beckett would put it: "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."

 

Los Angeles, October 8, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2026).

John Francis Dillon | Millie / 1931

independence is hard to hold on to

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Kenyon and Ralph Morgan (screenplay, based on the novel by Donald Henderson Clarke), John Francis Dillon (director) Millie / 1931

 

John Francis Dillon’s 1931 film Mille portrays a world in which men are definitely no good, and if nothing else cannot be trusted. Millie (Helen Twelvetrees), we are told from the very scenes of the film, is a strong-minded beauty who everyone loves, particularly those of the male gender, but not because she’s easy—quite the opposite, any loose hands are removed quite emphatically from the geography of her body. But she’s still an innocent when it comes to romance, and marries a local rich boy, Jack Maitland (James Hall) simply because he happens to ask her when they’re out on a drive. Trapped in a hotel room a few hours later, having stopped by for a visit to the justice of the peace, Millie realizes that she is still a young girl now suddenly unprepared for sex.

     A few years later, doting on a lovely 3-year-old daughter whom the governess snatches from her after only a short while with the mother, Millie is ensconced in a beautiful home with a husband who, often away on business, also seems to have forgotten the joy of their youthful love.

     For those sentimental hearts who haven’t figured yet it out, Millie is now buried in the role of a housewife without any household chores and parenting responsibilities and without the husband who her installed her in the house. She is bored and restless.

     The director and writers of this sophisticated picture don’t even bother to explain how different her life is now from the others when it puts on full display two obviously lesbian women in bed together, their landlord standing nearby demanding the monthly rent. One of them, Angie Wickerstaff (Joan Blondell) went to school with Millie and her other, more dominant of them, Helen Riley (Lilyan Tashman) has clearly put Angie up to calling her with the hopes of borrowing the rent money. Millie, delighted with the call, agrees to meet them that afternoon at a cabaret.

      As these two make immediately clear, men are good for one thing only: money and the good times they provide. Men are useless when it comes to a serious sexual relationship. And that’s were friends come in.

      Millie is intrigued just for the variety of having a day out, but before she can even swallow down a drink she spots her husband, who has just left on another business trip, dancing with a blonde, his lips upon her cheek. Within minutes, Millie has confronted the couple, given her hubby’s girlfriend a good slug, and begun divorce proceedings that will leave her, for the sake of the good home and better opportunities, without her daughter Connie (Anita Louise) and will put her behind a hotel cigar stand where once more all the men gather with the hopes of a date.

      As her now dear friends, Angie and Helen, argue, however, Millie—who prefers the lowly paid reporter Tommy Rock (Robert Ames) over the wealthy playboy banker Jimmy Damier (John Halliday) or the theater producer who begs her to perform in one of his musicals because at least Tommy “keeps his hands to himself”—has a very strange notion about men. When she first announces that since she is now divorced, she will go looking for work, Helen howls out: "Work?!? You won't have any time for opportunity!" Angie proclaims: “When I’m through with a man I’m just beginning.”

     Between Millie’s tough control of the men who try to get her into bed and the two lesbians’ endless flirtation with anyone who keeps a wallet in his pocket, Dillon’s movie is a great joy to watch, as actor Twelvetrees begins to take her character into previously uncharted feminist territory, even moving in with the regular guy Tommy, who takes her to Coney Island instead of a fancy restaurant, while refusing to marry him on account of “I’ve already tried that.”

      Soon her good work even pays off as she gets promoted to head of all hotel special operations and through her connections with Jimmy Damier even gets Tommy a special job in his bank. And if in all their heterosexual gold-digging antics have confused some of the movie’s audience, Helen makes it quite clear that she won’t allow Angie realize her attempts to squeeze a proposal out of a wealthy businessman too far, offering herself up to a bruising dance with him in order to cut off her lover’s drunken sentimentalism.

      Much of this takes place during a grand celebration Millie has arranged in the hotel dining room, where Damier has even arranged for a song to be sung especially composed about Millie’s lovely red hair. But then something happens to this movie.

      In terms of the plot, it’s simply that Millie overhears from a woman while in the bathroom that her beloved Tommy hasn’t yet made it to the grand affair Millie is throwing because he’s upstairs with another woman. The woman in the bathroom declares she’ll prove it by having Tommy bring down her purse which she left in that same room. When Millie returns of her party, she watches behind her to observe Tommy’s entrance, which sure enough involves a quick stop at the gossip’s table. But then, we knew—as she and her friends maintained early in the movie—men are not to be trusted. So Millie gets drunk, sends Tommy packing and breaks, along with Damier, into the place they cohabited to tear down the drapes she’s specially sewn and break a few of the pictures of herself scattered about the place.

       So now Millie herself becomes a good time girl. But with her sad eyes, her intensely deep beauty, Twelvetree’s pretense of self-destructive loneliness is difficult to believe. Her Millie is a self-made woman of great beauty who has been suddenly thrown a new script from which she, alas, will never recover, as the movie slips slowly into a lachrymose revenge drama. Even Angie leaves one of her parties with the obscene businessman that evidently she has married despite Helen’s attempts to prevent it. As Millie and Helen drink out the end of that long party by themselves, Millie dares to suggest that it’s not the same for Helen as it is for her since Helen has never been in love. Even the script seems to have forgotten her and Angie’s former relationship or suddenly has determined that such alliances do not really involve love.

      Throughout the late 1920s the general manager of the Radio Corporation of America David Sarnoff, with backing from financier Joseph P. Kennedy began buying up theaters in which to show their new Photophone talking movies. Making arrangements, with great controversy, with Pathé and the vaudeville Keith-Albee-Orpheum circuit run by Edward Albee the company obtained a large chain of new theaters in which to show its products. And buoyed by the success of its new Technicolor production Rio Rita (1929), it increased the number of newly announced films from 12 features to 29 at the same time making a deal to purchase the small Pathé Studios outright. The deal, secured on January 29, 1931 included the studio, its contract players, it well-regarded newsreel operation, and Cecile DeMille’s old Culver City studio and backlot, becoming the new RKO Pathé Pictures Inc. This, despite the reeling US economy and Kennedy’s masking of Pathé’s considerable financial debt.

       Shooting for Millie began in October 1930, announced as a Universal Production, but because of producer Charles R. Rogers’ previous agreement to have his films distributed by RKO and the fact that Twelvetrees had been under contract to Pathé, the film was released in February 8, 1931 as one of the first of the new RKO productions.

       I have no evidence that anything in the script changed after the RKO takeover or that RKO or even the censors made alterations in the original script, but if nothing else at this point in the film the tone of the movie changes. All the air—and obvious fun—of the previous 46 minutes of this work has gone out of it. The independent, free-thinking woman now finds herself pleading with Jimmy Damier—who she’s heard is now working with her former husband Maitland and regularly visiting the house where he has taken an interest in her now 16-year-old daughter Connie—to stay away from her daughter.

       He agrees, but within a short period of time, while pretending to drive the girl off to college, waylays her in his nearby lodge with the intent of seducing her. His chauffeur realizing what he has in mind, makes a telephone call to Millie, who hops in a Manhattan cab and speeds off the country lodge to shoot her old friend dead just in time to save the unsuspecting child from Damier’s next move after his sudden kiss.

      In the murder trial, Millie refuses to explain the circumstances in order to keep her daughter’s name out of the news, but in so doing allows the prosecution to suggest that she shot her old friend out of jealously for another woman who ran off, Millie refusing to reveal who she was. The situation is dire until Millie’s three old journalist friends, Tommy Rock among them, play a trick on the prosecutor getting him to demand “who was that woman” at the very same moment that Millie’s daughter Connie arrives to testify that her mother shot Damier to save her from his molestation. The murderess is found justified in her crime and is returned to the loving arms of her ex-husband’s family, the mother having always loved her former daughter-in-law. Accordingly, a movie that appeared to take joyful pleasure in the rising feminist independence of its characters Minnie and her lesbian friends, ends with Tommy’s observation, “It looks like Millie’s going back home,” as if she were Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz returning to her god forsaken Kansas or Meet Me in St. Louis’ Esther Smith, absolutely overjoyed in remaining in good ole St. Louis instead of having to move to New York City. As Millie herself says early in the film, “Independence seems to be a hard thing to hold on to.”

      If nothing else, after this film, RKO made certain that nearly all of the movies in which the wonderful Helen Twelvetrees appeared were of just such a tear-jerking nature typecasting her in a way that ended her career far too early.

 

Los Angeles, January 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).