Classical comedy... Phil-for-Short (1919), with John Sweeney, BFI

 

Oh, my husband’s all right – but he’s not vital.

 

These notes are based on my introduction to the screening of this film on 17^th July, I’d like to thank the BFI for the opportunity, John Sweeney for his amazing accompaniment and the audience for not booing me off stage. A splendid time was had by all.

Women's films were changing

 

This film was released on 2^nd June 1919, just two days before Congress passed the 19^th Amendment in the US which finally granted some women the right to vote and could be seen as part of a broader trend of films that focused on female stars taking charge of their own destiny.

 

Cinema had always had tomboys with Mary Pickford and others not just cheeking the men but outwitting them but there was a definite moment being created after the Great War opened up a new drive for relative equality. Films such as Come out of the Kitchen, The Amateur Adventuress and the entire oeuvre of Texas Guinan showed more confident leads actively taking on men at their own game and leading their own agendas.

 

Famously, there were more women working in Hollywood in 1916 than 2016*, over half of silent films were written by women and there were more directors, not just Lois Weber, Mabel Normand and Nell Shipman. It wasn’t to last after male corporatisation led to the establishment of the Hollywood we all know; Universal, once home to 30 female directors, didn’t have another woman director after Weber left in 1919, until 1982…

      

Summer releases in 1919

Clara Beranger

 

It needs no cursory glance at the current releases and those of even six months ago to prove that there are more writers among the feminine sex than the male persuasion. The heart throb, the human interest note, child life, domestic scenes and even the eternal triangle is more ably handled by women than men because of the thorough understanding our sex has of these matters…

Moving Picture World, 24th August 1918

 

Clara Beranger co-scripted Phil-for-Short with Forrest Halsey and was a fierce proponent of women’s role in the industry for the reasons outlined above.  Not only were more women watching films at this point, but the industry relied on their input.

 

Clara was able to peruse her own agenda and she also scripted Miss Lulu Bett (1921), screened last month at the BFI and another film tackling the role of women post war and suffrage. Both Lulu and Phil ultimately decide their own course of action and they are true to themselves.

 

Clara Beranger in 1918

Evelyn Greeley

 

The studio PR suggested that Evelyn was the most proposed-to woman in America? Well, she may or may not have been but she was married three, possibly four times in the end. Her past is obscured by the usual studio hype but she was certainly not an all-American girl having been born in Austria before emigrating with her family aged ten.

 

She began on stage before small roles in short films from 1914 onwards – she was 25 – before being signed up from 1917-19 by the World Film Corporation with whom she featured mainly alongside Carlyle Blackwell up to Phil-for-Short, billed as her first solo starring role. Her final film was in 1922 with Blackwell, Bulldog Drummond, after which she retired with the first of those husbands presumably to start a family.

 

She’s very good in this film though, energetic and very naturalistic, greeting every misfortune with a pause and then a smile as she figures out a countermeasure. The education she has been provided by her academic father seems to have not only informed but enlightened her approach; she’s a woman of action, decisive and morally courageous.

 

Whilst reviews seem to have been mixed, but no one seemed to complain about her ability.

 

Evelyn Greeley hiding from proposals...

I don’t want to be a man?

 

One of the reasons for negativity is almost certainly the fact that Phil by name means Phil by nature. Evelyn dresses as a boy for a good portion of the film and initially out of necessity as she has to pick up the responsibility for keeping the family farm running. Later she disguises herself as a boy in a bid to escape the local moral majority and to solve certain romantic difficulties.

 

This was definitely a challenge for some, with Variety, according to Nasty Women curators Maggie Hennefeld and Laura Horak, condemning it as a “a sissy play, too nice for our boys; we want them to be manly,” after a local screening attended by a Boy Scout troop in Wilmette, Illinois. What would our Robert Baden-Powell have said? I do hope he saw the film.

 

Possibly the filmmakers saw Ossi in drag in Lubitsch’s cheeky, I Don’t Want to be a Man (1918) but there’s no way an American film could be as daring… and whilst this is hardly the only example of cross-dressing in early Hollywood, Phil is a challenge because of her sex and not sexuality.

 

I work like a boy, why shouldn't I dress like one?

Stronger woman, weaker men

 

Phil stands out as practical, inventive and a leader; all very male characteristics for the older generation. She has to deal with reality as her aged father is still buried in the myths and legends of his books and, lovely and liberating though he is, she works the farm and is happy to step up.

 

Then the man who takes her fancy, John Alden (Hugh Thompson, wonderful as a stuffed shirt), has decided he hates all women after discovering his fiancée was a gold digger.  He doesn’t know himself any longer but Phil, educated in the emotional meaning of classical philosophy, knows what to do. For what it’s worth, I don’t see John as emasculated just confused and bruised by his experience. More than anything he needs a friend like Phil who can manage his mood…

Then there's the more general complaint from John's sister, who's husband is "alright" just not "vital" with the meaning focused on his lack of vitality, not so much unmanly as submerged in manners and the day-to-day. Men need liberating too.

Charles Walcott and Hugh Thompson

High society and lower morality

 

Within the film as well as without there are some very old-fashioned responses to the ancient ideas of Greek freedoms of movement, thought and free will (gosh). The moral majority base their high ground on the old days but they’re completely at a loss in explaining away the really old ways… especially the aptly named McWrath family (emphasis on Wrath, nice one Clara!), Donald the village banker, corner stone of the church and his disapproving mother.

 

Outside of the village, Phil has to deal with John’s wealthy bourgeois family who, whilst they like her culture also have issues with an amoral violinist making merry with John’s sister and being the very epitome of a gaslighting womaniser.

 

Wherever she goes, Phil tries to find a way forward. A classical education needn’t be as bad as Britain’s Prime Minister has made it seem… and she is liberated in thought as well as action by the clear-sighted pursuit of moral balance.

 

 

The McWraths respond

Is it all Greek?

 

Phil’s so-called after a poem by the much-misunderstood Sappho who as Hennefeld and Horak point out was often referenced in silent films as part of a general attraction to Greek literature with the hints of her precise hidden depths that the Old Fogey’s object to here.

 

As with “Greek Deployments” by the likes of DeMille, there’s an excuse for under-the-counter meaning and shorter frocks justified in the name of higher art and here, whilst we do have dancing in diaphanous skirts, we also have Phil berating saucy male onlookers and Donald’s appreciative leer cut short by his mother’s disapproval. The hypocrisy of inappropriate male gazing is made clear and the dancing, whilst hardly balletic, is more about freedom than allure.

 

This film plays with so many angles and Greeley is wonderfully peppy, hardly pausing for breath justifying her love of Greek movement and expression or deciding on cross-dressing as her own “twin” to escape from unwanted suitors including her late father’s doctor - a man old enough to be her censor.

 

The search for beauty is perhaps the search for truth?

Moving Picture Classic, June 1919

Entertaining intertitles

 

I love the film’s witty intertitles and the design of the title cards is as deft as the film’s overall tone, overlaying text on images and the live action in a very effective way that doesn’t take you out of the action but smooths the flow. There’s wit and there’s wisdom and the BFI audience laughed with and not at… the sense of the moment still ruining true after 103 years.

 

Here’s why Phil is so called.

 

That joke isn’t funny anymore?

 

Critical opinion in the trade press was split and, as ever, the challenge for the modern viewer is to understand why.

 

It is too bad that Evelyn Greeley… did not lead off with a stronger picture… Miss Greeley has a pleasing personality and is a sufficiently accomplished actress, given the right sort of role, but only occasionally does she have the opportunity to appear at her best in this unconvincing story.

The Film Daily, 11^th July 1919

 

This picture offers Miss Greeley splendid opportunities for her starring debut, and her natural ability will see her up the ladder of fame. Considerable ingenuity was exercised in compiling this scenario to fit the piquant charm and saucy roguishness of the new fledged star…This picture will please young people.

The Billboard, 7th June 1919

 

This is a thoroughly daft but enjoyable film but it succeeds precisely because of Greeley’s open-hearted playing. Phil is a real pick-you-up leaping every moral hurdle in a single bound and connecting comedically and emotionally.

 

John Sweeney enriched the film with his seemingly effortless array of classical lines mixed with the authentic moods of period and narrative that make his work so highly valued. As usual his improvisation fitted seamlessly with the orchestra on screen, from Phil’s dance and romance to the light and shade of the lightened drama. I’d previously only seen Phil on the small screen, streamed from last year’s silent festival in Pordenone, but this, this was the way to properly see and understand this charming production.

 

Directed by Oscar Apfel, the Mark of Quality...

A Nasty Woman?

 

Inspired by a remark made by the grandson of a one-time Yukon bordello owner, there has been an ongoing project to research and revive interest in unsung women filmmakers who broke new ground in the early years of cinema.

 

One of the outputs is a magnificent new box set from Kino which includes this film and 98 others. It’s out in August and it’s on my Christmas list if anyone’s thinking of a gift?

 

I wouldn’t say that Phil is a nasty woman though but she is a liberated one. Imagine how good it felt to watch her in 1919 newly enfranchised and with new choices starting to open up.

 

PS You can find out more about Nasty Women on the Women Film Pioneers Project website.

There's also a piece about Phil and other NW films from project co-director Maggie Hennefeld, also of the University of Minnesota, on the Flow Journal site.

*Silent Women: Pioneers of Cinema (Supernova Books, 2016), Melody Bridges, Shelley Stamp et al.