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 as opposed to 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."
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.
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).
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.”
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.
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.”
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).
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