his own breed
by
Douglas Messerli
Earl Baldwin, Monty Banks, and Arthur Caesar (screenplay, based on the 1903 play by Richard Carle and the 1935 play by George S. Kaufman), Ray Enright (director) The Tenderfoot / 1932
What’s true for almost all of the coded-queer films from Hollywood’s golden era of filmmaking from 1930-1960 is that it takes a clued-in eye sometimes to separate the heterosexual surface from the purposely hidden subtext—and admittedly one wonders at times whether it’s worth all the bother, particularly in the case of a rather mediocre work such as the Joe E. Brown vehicle The Tenderfoot of 1932, directed by Ray Enright, whose 73-some films represent some of the most inane productions of the studio system.
The plot of Enright’s film is of concern
only because it might be described as a kind of a prelude to Mel Brooks’ 1967
film and Susan Stroman’s 2005 musical version of The Producers, only in
this case the Nazi musical is simply a badly conceived melodrama in which Tenderfoot
producers Lew Cody (Joe Lehman) and McClure (Robert Grieg) convince the newly
arrived Texas cattle-roper Calvin Jones (Joe E. Brown) to invest 49% ($20,000).
(Nevertheless, there is a sour anti-Semitic joke about “the lost tribe” as well
as Brown’s wisecrack that reading the menu of the Jewish delicatessen is
incomprehensible.)
And, yes, the play which Cody and McClure are
certain will be a sure-fire flop turns, as in The Producers, into a hit
after Calvin buys out the rest of the shares and—since he no longer can afford
new costumes—dresses his small town melodramatic thespians in Shakespearian vestments
which convince the audience, just as does Springtime for Hitler, that
the dreadful work must surely be a satire.
There’s not much else to The Tenderfoot’s
plot except that Calvin falls in love with Cody and McClue’s secretary, Ruth
Watson (Ginger Rogers) and when he makes a fortune from his producing
activities he is threatened by the mafia; thank heaven Calvin’s an
award-winning shooter and carries two loaded pistols with him wherever he goes
and that he can successfully lasso even a New York taxi!
But then, as we all know, he ain’t in Texas anymore! And even from the very first frame we recognize that the actor Joe. E. Brown, born and raised near Toledo, Ohio, is dressed in drag with his string tie and ten-gallon hat that, when his character is transformed into a producer, will dress up in drag again in city-slicker duds, in which Calvin always looks miserable as he struts about in stiff-legged strides through the city environs.
Even if the script makes it clear that
Calvin is a heterosexual stricken with love for Ruth, she appears to also be acting
in her sexual encouragement just to keep him on the ranch, so to speak.
After she makes it clear that she has just
been pretending and declares that he’s been an utter idiot to believe in Cody’s
and McClure’s schemes, the almost mindless Calvin buys out the schemers’
remaining shares.
That’s when the new “butter and egg man”
in the form of the hotel party waiter comes in. To convince him to invest the
needed money, Calvin tells the plot of the old-fashioned melodrama all over
again, almost literally pawing the poor would-be producer as he describes the
various amatory actions of the poor farmer’s daughter who falls in love with an
evil city-slicker and the good-hearted local postman who genuinely loves her.
It’s one of the best scenes in the film as Brown playing Calvin puts his arm
around the waiter’s shoulder, positions his rubber face smack in front of his
prospective investor’s eyes, and drops to floor to declare the character’s
love. I could have sworn that Calvin was about to kiss the man, but even in a
pre-code flick that might have been going a bit too far. We certainly do come
to comprehend, however, just how close the attempts to convince a man to
surrender his money to a Broadway play is to courting a lover. If you recall, that’s
how Zero Mostel got in trouble in The Producers as well.
This is, of course, a Hollywood movie and, accordingly, we see no more of the “bride” who has been willing to marry his life-savings to this fellow dreamer. Calvin naturally returns to the Lone Star state with Ruth, at film’s end the mother of triplets. But don’t worry, even if they look a bit like Calvin they’re not really the product of his sperm but are cinematically created homunculi, cloned evidently from fan photos.
Los
Angeles, January 29, 2021
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (January 2021).
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