slinging forbidden love along with the pies
by
Douglas Messerli
Charles
Chaplin, Vincent Bryan, and Maverick Terrell (writers), Charles Chaplin
(director, with Edward Brewer as technical director) Behind the Screen /
1916
To
describe Charles Chaplin’s 1916 film Behind the Screen of being a “gay
film” would be to highly misrepresent it. Rather, it is another of his
on-screen love trysts with Edna Purviance—who appeared in 33 Chaplin films and
with whom Chaplin was long romantically involved.
I included it in my volumes of Queer
Cinema simply because it reveals some of the attitudes toward gays that
existed even in pre-code Hollywood, at a time when some sophisticated directors
created far more complex subtexts around LGBTQ behavior without having to
apologize for it or risk having their films censored.
This Chaplin film, distributed by the
Mutual Film Corporation, foretells much of what later would become the heart of
the pre-talkie satire in the Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen film of 1952, Singing
in the Rain. As in that later film, the studio Chaplin works for, playing a
stagehand named David, shoots various kinds of movies simultaneously, allowing
Chaplin to mix a biblical drama, with a western, and a pie-throwing comedy in
the manner of Mack Sennett.
The assistant stage-hand David works for
Goliath (Eric Campell) who might easily carry about the Byzantine-like columns,
couches, chairs, and other props that, while he dozes off, David must struggle
with. (It’s fascinating to note is how much the numerous chairs that David
gathers up, all
David is put to work so busily that when
we discover that there is a entire crew of stagehands, we are a more than a little
surprised. They appear, evidently, only at lunchtime, when the morbidly
overweight Goliath pulls out 12 pies, consuming every last one, while the
others chaw on chicken breasts so large that one might imagine they were actually
a portion of some dinosaur relative, and such a quantity of onions that David,
attempting to bite into his three small slices of white bread, is forced to don
a medieval headpiece in order to escape the smell.
Immediately after the large quantities
upon which the other stagehands dine, they, like Goliath, fall asleep, and when
awakened by the studio director, go on strike for his intrusion upon their “sacred”
time. Later, in revenge, they succeed in dynamiting the place into ruins.
There temporary departure leaves the door
open, obviously, for the appearance of Purviance, who previously attempted to
get a job as an actress, but now perceives that at least she might join those “behind
the screen” by donning one of the missing stagehand’s, pants, shirt and hat—making
her appearance as one of the first of the silent screen’s cross-dressers.
Previously, we might have wondered a bit
about David’s rather natty attire—particularly since Goliath and the other workers
are dressed like Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—but
then we have gotten so used to the “tramp” that even before that character’s
existence we are not surprised to see his David in a tie, vest, coat, etc. as
if, like all Chaplin figures, he were aspiring for the role of a legitimate
gentleman.
Yet Chaplin takes this a bit further when,
as the intertitle tells us, he applies “the finishing touches” in dressing a
scene, in this case acting as a kind of hairdresser as he meticulously massages
and grooms the hair of a bear rug.
Later, after Goliath has hired the new “stagehand,”
David comes upon the young boy playing a guitar somewhat flirtatiously before
standing up to apply, in a moment of forgetfulness, a powder puff to his
cheeks. For a second the assistant stagehand seems almost delighted by the new
boy’s attentions, but soon after mocks the character with a playing out of effeminate
behavior, fanning his face, winking he eyes, and flinging out loose wrists as
he dances by while raising his pant-legs, as if to suggest what Texans will
later describe as Purviance’s character as being “loose in the loafers.”
Goliath, appearing at the very moment when
David fully kisses her back in response for her feminine attentions, simply
presumes that his protégé has—as Cary Grant would later proclaim in Bringing
Up Baby, “just gone gay”—preening and dancing off in his own hefty mockery
of homosexual love.
Chaplin’s film takes these
misunderstandings no further. The rest of the work is filled with trapdoors
being open and closed by David as he drops and locks out actors, director, and
Goliath alike.
The film ends with the comedy director’s
attempt to try out what he describes as an “experimental” scene, “something never
done before," which consists of a long pie-throwing contest between David and
Goliath that ends with the pies flying into the faces of the nearby biblical
cast members. As expected, working behind the scenes, David has finally slain
his Goliath and probably gotten fired along with his new-found lover, whether
she be a man or a woman in drag no longer of any matter.
Los
Angeles, August 10, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (August 2020).
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