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This was a glorious collaboration between the Kennington
Bioscope and the Vito Project, a film club aimed at exploring cinema through a
queer perspective, both meeting in elegant harmony with two silent films
featuring two of the finest comedians of the period doing what they did best;
challenging norms and making people laugh. This had to be one of the most
celebratory atmospheres ever at the Cinema Museum with a meeting of
minds from the two passion projects finding new aspects of appreciation, fresh
angles to adore. There is always respect here for the context of century old
cinema but there were new laughs to be had as the audience spotted patterns in
the humour that some of us may have previously missed.
That said, some of us are clearly not that observant as I
had completely forgotten the spectacular two-strip colour finale for Beverly
despite having seen this restoration in Pordenone in 2019 with Mr Sweeney
also accompanying. At the time I wrote about the importance of watching comedy
with an audience and tonight this was proven once again with delicious new connections
within the nuanced daftness that hold us all together in front of the world.
Marion’s a tonic and, as I put it in 2019, clearly hungover
and heavily caffeinated, “…there’s no better sight than Marion’s look
straight to camera eyes twinkling with the latest daftness. Mabel started it
and Stan followed but Marion took it to another jazz-age level; her face
bubbling and alive, as knowing as anyone, with perfectly timed beauty, an
irresistible smile.”
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| Marion in colour!! |
Vito supremo, Matheus Carvalho introduced and gave us an
overview of Marion’s once misunderstood career…. Davis never made a seriously
revered film (although Show People comes close: it is loved) but
it doesn’t matter as she was the queen of romantic comedy drama for much of the
Twenties producing a string of major hits that allowed audiences to laugh
themselves out of the day-to-day and onto the screen in sympathy from When Knighthood
was in Flower (1922), to Little Old New York (1923) and onto this film. In
all three, Marion dresses as a man to save the day and she does so in a manner,
as Matheus quoting from Jeanine Bassinger in Silent Stars, aims at “comic
androgyny”: she creates the physical sense of the male in her movements and
attitude, with a grow-up, very meta sense, that anyone as feminine as she could
every get away with really fooling anyone…
To this extent, Marion in drag is just an extension of her
look to the camera and the audience, its’ a look of comic collaboration, we know
and she knows but, strangely the rest of the cast don’t. We’re in on the joke
and we can’t help but love her for it!
The story is brief on set-up and long on the situation. She
plays a New York socialite, Beverly, called upon to impersonate her cousin,
Prince Oscar of Graustark (Creighton Hale) after he injures himself in a skiing
accident. If the Prince doesn’t make it to the Graustark coronation on time the
deals off and the nasty General Marlanax (Roy D’Arcy once again fits the role
of moustache twirling baddie to an evil T).
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| Marion just about a boy (screenshot from Movies Silently) |
So, we literally have a Prince formerly known as Beverly having
to dress as a man and convince the cabinet and court to save the throne and she
does such a splendid job that even politically active and military-trained
goatherd Danton (Antonio Moreno) can’t see that, with that skin, those eyes and
all the rest, that she’s less of a man than he’ll ever be.
It’s exquisitely daft and the timing is absolutely perfect throughout and, this was reinforced by another masterclass in sympathetic accompaniment from John Sweeney on piano; the accompanist is the fourth element of the perfect silent mix: after film, location and crowd. Tonight, we were blessed with all round excellence from John and from Colin Sell on the first feature, an all-together more riotous affair.
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| Things getting out of hand... |
The evening was also special one at the Bioscope as it was
Michelle Facey’s birthday and, inundated with flowers, cards and gifts she
celebrated her gift from Ernst Lubitsch and Ossi Oswalda in her introduction
for the film. Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don't Want to be a Man)
(1918) was one of the director’s last long-shorts made just before his first
feature with Pola Negri, Die Augen der Mumie Ma (1918). Oswalda is every inch as energetic as Negri
and far more anarchic than Davies, or almost any American actor.
This was Weimar Germany and an initial post-war period that
saw a flourishing of frank expression and, with no censorship for a year or
two, some of the most forward-thinking sexual statements including, of course,
Different from the Others (1919). Watching this film again there’s no doubt
that the film does more than tease us with the implications of the
cross-dressing; Ossi’s erstwhile counsellor Herr Brockmüller (Ferry Sikla) who
she meets in a cabaret, dressed as a man, is in no doubt that he is kissing a
he even if it’s a she. As he says later on about his new pal’s sister, “she’s a
looker too…” Of course, what’s so great, what’s so free, is that Lubitsch makes
very little of this… he leaves that to the audience in a tragically short lived
permissive society.
Ossi is a rebellious tomboy, gambling, drinking and doing
all manner of grown-up male things from which her uncle (Kurt Götz) and
governess (Margarete Kupfer) forbid her if only to allow themselves to indulge.
Lubitsch highlights the comic hypocrisy of both as she carries on smoking
Ossi’s cigarette and he grabs a bigger glass to increase the rate of alcoholic
intake.
Ossi’s like Iggy with a Lust for Life… or at least for
eating cherries and gobbling candies in her window whilst a crowd of young men
pleads to be fed like hungry penguins. She obliges only for Uncle to chase them
away... what the girl surely needs is some discipline or maybe an adventure! Uncle
is called away for the comically un-specific fact that “the institute he has
set up is ready for him” but before he goes, he recruits a stern governor to
make sure his ward is properly looked after: Herr Counsellor Brockmüller.
Brockmüller almost immediately brings Ossi to heel with his
startling natural authority – he’s also a bit of a looker boys and girls! But
Ossi is not so easily curtailed and she vows to resist whilst he promises to
cut her down to size. The game is afoot! Ossi decides to play men at their own
game and goes off to the gentlemen’s outfitters to order a dinner suit. The
assistants fight over measuring her up and decide on splitting the work limb by
limb. Men lust after Ossi in groups and make horrible obvious play of their
intentions: but she’s in charge.
Kitted up in starched collar, bow tie, top hat and tails,
Ossi sets off to have fun at the dance hall, catching the eye of a number of
young women as she takes her pretty-boy swagger to the dance. She chances
across someone familiar: Herr Brockmüller and tries to attract away his favoured
escort and once she’s distracted by another man, the two get to know each other
in the time-honoured rituals of male bonding: they get smashed.
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| Governess Margarete Kupfer enjoying forbidden fruit... |
It’s a long night and by the time the two fall out onto the
pavement it’s the morning and they’re struggling to think or walk straight,
putting on each other's overcoats which happen to include their address cards.
Confused by the cards, their driver takes them to each other’s houses but not
before the above-mentioned drunken smooching. Cheekily subversive. the kissing
has the audience running through the permutations: Ossi knows what she’s doing
but Brockmüller is clearly a man of broad tastes…
Colin Sell accompanied with wit and the practices ease of a
man who has worked with Graeme Garden and played up the storm Ossi’s anarchy deserved.
In Germany as elsewhere, the War left an opportunity for gender equality and
Ossi was here to grab that chance with both hands either in a suit or in a
dress… for the continuation of the film’s title is clearly: I want to be a
woman!
Back to Marion, Matheus quoted Cordelia D.
"Delight" Evans writing in Screenland in July 1926 “…ninety
years from now, when all the war pictures and propaganda films and arty
productions have been forgotten, some old white beard is sure to mumble, ‘There
was a girl named Marion who looked awfully cute in boy’s clothes.’”
Well, there were two awfully cute girls in boy's clothes here tonight, Miss Evans, it’s 2023 and
my beard is indeed, mostly, white.
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| Antonio and Marion, he has no clue the sap! |
Here's to more collaboration between the KB and Vito, a splendid time was had by all.
Bioscope details are to be found on the Cinema Museum website.
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