between here and there
by
Douglas Messerli
Paul M. Bryan (scenario), Thomas J. Geraghty (intertitles), Fred. J. Balshofer (director) The Isle of Love / 1921
In 1918 director Fred J. Balshofer shot a US World War I propaganda film titled Over the Rhine starring the popular transvestite star of the day, Julian Eltinge. But before it was even in the can Armistice was declared and the film was of little worth, particularly since it also featured two then unknown actors, Virginia Rappe and Rudolph Valentino. Seeking to salvage the useless film, Balshofer recut it and released it in 1920 as The Adventuress, which was a complete failure at the box office.
In 1921 his unknown actor, Valentino
starred in the major box office sensations The Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse and The Sheik, two of the most popular films of his
entire career.
In the very same year Rappe, while
partying at Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s suite at the St. Francis Hotel in San
Francisco suffered what was described as “trauma,” over the next days dying of
a ruptured bladder and peritonitis. Rumor had it that her condition was the
result of a violent sexual assault by Arbuckle for which he was arrested and
tried—eventually three times—on charges of manslaughter, for which he was
finally acquitted.
Balshofer now perceived a way to recoup
his loses by recutting his film yet again and splicing in new and repeated
images of Valentino in a re-doctored scenario crafted by Paul M. Bryan along
with some of the original intertitles by Thomas J. Geraghty.
The plot now revolves around an island
“of love” where evidently the women gather along the beaches in one-piece
swimming suits, dancing among themselves as nymphs pretending to perform some
imaginary version of a dance on which Ruth St. Denis might have collaborated
with an improvisatory work by Isadora Duncan while lacking their style and
grace. At moments the cinematographer focuses on a woman silhouetted
against the darkness of a cave which hints at nudity, but for the most part,
these clumsy hoofing “beauties” seem mostly to be enjoying the company of their
fellow sisters—hinting perhaps of lesbian ecstasies except when they are being
ogled at and chased by the scrawny ruler of the Isle, “Pom Pom” Al Faffa
(Charles Millfield) or the local Grand Duke Nebo (Stanton Beck) and his
collaborator Prince Halbere (Leo White), who together are evidently plotting
the overthrow of His Majesty, who spends all of his days and nights on the
beach, often half-buried in sand.
The cornball intertitles, written as if
they were meant to be in-between feature comic travelogues of a 1940s or 50s, try
their best to create a sense of heterosexual prurience:
there...it’s halfway between.
But...WHAT A SPOT!
MEN....Use both eyes
and hang on to your seats!
LADIES!!....Hang on to your
men!!
A great sight for men! Yea! A
great sight!
Sorry to hang the blinders on
you so soon,
fellows, but we must get back
in time to welcome
the boys home from college.
So we are illogically returned to the US,
where the college boys drop off Cliff (Eltinge), a repatriate who lovingly
embraces his mother and his fiancée Eunice for both of whom he has obviously
longed throughout the war.
Cliff illogically, given his supposedly
young age, has an old friend, Dick Sayre (William Clifford) who lives on the “between
here and there isle,” who writes of an uprising of the island’s peasants over
the bizarre behavior of their majesty, Al Faffa, a word in my urban dictionary
that describes “a scene where two or more people get involved in sexual
actions. But those actions last longer than usual because they are either
horny, or want to try out new positions to spice up their sexy time with people”—which
certainly does characterize the ruler’s and his Grand Duke’s actions.
Will Cliff please immediately fly over
to the isle (a good way to use the numerous biplane scenes from the original
war film), writes Dick, and help in overthrowing both the silly Al Faffa, his
son, Prince Halbere and the Grand Duke?
How could he resist, despite the tears of
his mother and Eunice, the latter of whom gives him a small flag he had carried
with him in his wartime adventures to remind him of home.
To describe this film’s absurd narrative further
might lead any sane reader to wonder about my mental condition, so I want to
assure all beforehand that I’m not making this up. Upon Cliff’s arrival the “old
friends” quickly attempt to plot the downfall of the evil trio, determining to have
Dick take care of the Prince while Cliff will entice the Duke, explicably
dressed in drag—somehow leading to their being overthrown.
In order to trap the Prince, Cliff
invites another of his dear friends, the wealthy Jacques (Valentino,
represented in the credits as R. De Valentina) to join them, and he too jumps
into a biplane and speeds off to the isle, in his case because he has left
behind, apparently on a previous visit, the woman he loves, Vanette (Rappe).
When Cliff tells Jacques of his plans to seduce
the Duke in drag, he jokes: “So when you see me, don’t sheik me,” a new
verbal form of the word which obviously refers to the possibility of being
grabbed up and carried away into the night which the Italian-born beauty had memorably
enacted in The Sheik.
They all join up at a local nightclub, where
Vanette easily entrances the Prince by diving, fully clothed into a small pool
located near the club’s dance floor to retrieve a pearl ring he offers her.
Meanwhile Cliff, dressed rather convincingly as the American beauty Julie,
catches the eye of Nebo, who invites her to his mansion the next day.
That next afternoon Julie further intrigues
the Duke my agreeing to meet him in her one-piece swimming suit on the Isles
infamous beach. She’ll be wearing striped stockings, she teases him.
Julie/Cliff never shows up at the Isle’s
renowned tourist spot, but in her next meeting with Nebo, she does take the Grand
Duke for a motor ride with Dick at the wheel. Together the men manage to beat
up their rider, whose car eventually crashes over a cliff somewhere near
Malibu.
Nebo’s men, on the chase after Julie and
Dick, nonetheless finally capture Julie, now sans wig playing the manly
Cliff, and arrest him, sentencing the insurgent, soon after, to death by a
firing squad.
The would-be king Jacques, in the meantime,
tells Vanette that even without a kingdom, she will always be his queen, as the
Vaseline-haired, pink powder-puffed hero—as racist homophobes of the day soon
after described the Latin actor and dancer Valentino—absconds with his woman,
this time in a touring car whose destination remains a mystery.
Despite all of this strange film’s attempts
to portray a heroic heterosexual adventure, it remains, as the Isle in which
the action takes place, firmly intrenched in between “here and there,” queer
and square.
Los
Angeles, December 2, 2020
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December
2020).
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