nobody’s perfect
by
Douglas Messerli
Hal
Roach (scenario), W. H. Walker (titles), Fred Guiol (director) Why Girls
Like Sailors / 1927
Actually,
neither of the two “girls” in this forgettable short directed by Fred Guiol for
the Hal Roach Studios—and staring, before they had become a team, Stan Laurel
and Oliver Hardy—ended up liking sailors. We have to presume that this work’s
title, Why Girls Like Sailors, was ironic.
Hardy, sporting a scruffy beard and
described by an intertitle as "a bully, the nastiest crew member, after
the captain of course," is almost a lookalike to that captain (Malcolm
Waite), who is just a little taller and stouter, but also features a scruffy
beard. Although this basically forgettable comic short of 1927 is generally
only sited in lists of LBGTQ movies for the reason that Laurel plays a
crossdressing woman (the second of the “girls” I mentioned), the mean men, who endlessly
argue like a ship-marooned husband and wife, are a kind of same-sex couple. The
“nastier than his nasty underling” captain of “The Merry Maiden” (a name. moreover,
that reminds us of the silly sailors in W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s HMS
Pinafore) even allows his first mate to occasionally use his razor and chastises
him early in the film for using it too often, in short suggesting that his
First Mate has become what one might describe as “too familiar.”
If nothing much else is made of their
relationship, the very fact that they look so much alike characterizes them as
a highly temperamental “pair,” if nothing else, from whom the other sailors on
board try keep their distance.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that they are
not both seeking out someone of the opposite sex. Even in the pre-code days of
filmmaking, sailors, although known to bunk down with one another aboard ship, were
generally stereotyped as womanizers once they had reached land. At one point the Captain, planting a kiss upon
Willie’s face even says “I haven’t kissed a woman since we left Africa,”
probably an inside racist joke in 1927.
But this film immediately has other gay
fodder on its mind. Inexplicably aboard
a nearby boat in Sugar Bay, where the “Maiden” is now docked, are a seemingly
heterosexual couple, Willie Brisling (Laurel) and his fiancée Nellie (Viola
Richard).
Surely this may present us with an image a
loving couple—Willie has even just bought his Nellie a lovely necklace—but his
gentle kiss of her cheek sends him immediately into a kind stupor that leaves
him spinning through their cabin, knocking over a chair and falling into a bed
where, with his eyes blinking into empty space and his tongue tied as tight as
a noose, that is so goofy that even a commentator on the “Laurel and Hardy
Central” site describes him as being in “Pixie mode,” flitting around and
making funny faces, my dictionary describing the word “pixie” as meaning a
fairy or, as a second definition, a “petite vivacious woman or girl.”
The intertitle suggests that “In little
Nellie’s eyes, Willie Brisling was the most handsome man in the world. Others
saw him in a slightly different light.”
Prowling their boat is also the Captain of
the “Maiden,” who once he spots Nellie, is determined to kidnap her and take
her back to his own quarters. Entering the loving couple’s room, he instantly
begins to court Willie’s girl, who pulling away, introduces the stranger to her
lover, who she declares has his own boat; “Show him Willie.”
Willie pulls down his shirt to reveal a
tattoo of his ship, “the Periwinkle.” A periwinkle, in case you’ve forgotten, is
a blue flower, often described as the flower of death, supposedly because its glossy
vines were often woven into headbands placed upon criminals on their way to
execution and children who had recently died. We can only suspect that the
filmmaker or his writers, at least, are telling us that any trip with
Willie—even to the altar—can end only in a kind of frozen netherworld.
The Captain quickly douses Willie’s
dreams of any voyage by pouring an entire jug of water down his blouse, the
liquid ballooning about his belly as if he suddenly had become pregnant.
In
fact, soon after the Captain does abscond with Nellie, Willie’s previously
empty head—I should add that just before this he has attempted to scare away
another would-be girlfriend poacher by portraying a “headless man”—conceives of
a solution to his situation: he will dress as a woman, seducing the four sailors
and then the captain himself.
Enter the Captain’s wife, longing for more
than a month of martial bickering, and just in time to observe his new sexual shenanigans.
She’s ready to shoot him as well as the other woman, but Willie as the easy
woman, tells her it’s all just been a test to make her jealous.
Escaping, at least momentarily, the wife’s
wrath, Willie hops off to save his Nellie, the two of them, now like
girlfriends walking off into the future—but not before the wife, spotting them through
the porthole, shoots the clothes off their back, leaving the two to walk away
in their under garments both with an utter hatred of sailors and their landlubber
wives.
Rereading what I just wrote I realize I’ve
made this double reeler sound much funnier than this movie truly is. The short
was thought to have been lost until in 1971 the Cinémathèque Française
announced they had a copy, but critic Roland Lacourbe, after reviewing it,
found it simply “mediocre.”
A private Danish collector later was also
found to own a 16mm print, and helped it to be re-released in Copenhagen. After
Laurel and Hardy author Glenn Mitchell saw that version he observed "Why
Girls Love Sailors is one of several instances where the status of a 'lost'
film has been reduced by its rediscovery."
Los
Angeles, August 13, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (August 2020).
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