strength of character

by Douglas Messerli

Sam Taylor (screenplay, based on a play by André Picard as adapted into English by David Belasco), Sam Taylor (director) Kiki / 1931

Based on the Belasco play and the 1926 film version starring Norma Talmadge, Sam Taylor’s 1931 revisit of the French farceKiki must have seemed like the perfect transition for Mary Pickford’s move into more adult talking pictures. Although she had won an Oscar for her 1929 role in Coquette, her performance with her husband Douglas Fairbanks in Sam Taylor’s 1929 film version of The Taming of the Shrew had not been well-received. Despite the fact that in 1931, having just become one of the major producers of what would become a highly successful studio, in part because of her business acumen, at the age of 39 she was still beloved primarily for her roles of fiery-tempered, independent juveniles.

     The role Kiki, certainly a hot-tempered individual, must have seemed perfect. Alas, the film failed—the first the new United Artists pictures to do so, and she made only one further movie, Secrets, directed by Frank Borzage in 1933, before she retired as an actor. Accordingly, not much has been written on her version of Kiki, just as the former Kiki evaded later critical attention because of its seeming to have been a lost film. In the end, film culture has basically missed out in two truly excellent movies.

     Pickford purposely slathers of the Parisian accent of her character almost as if it were Canadian maple syrup, making her even more gauchethan the original version. Here she keeps changing identities as it were, beginning as the daughter of a Spanish bullfighter, later insisting she grew up in a family of Corsicans, and still later when threatening her rival Paulette Vail (Margaret Livingston) claiming to be born into a family of L’Apache, as if the often-violent dance had suddenly become a native tribe closer to its American meaning.  By the end of the film, it doesn’t really matter that in the original she was a Parisian street waif; after all, her major love Victor Randall is played by the still vaguely handsome but equally culturally confused British actor Reginald Denny, here supposedly now a suave New York producer. 

     In this case, losing her role as a waif and putting the emphasis on her own invention of identity becomes the film’s strong point, as this forceful and most willful Kiki is no longer an accidental pawn in a series of power struggles between the theater producer and his major star, but instead a one-woman chorus of uncontrollable disasters that gradually move the two, Kiki and Victor toward their inevitable love and marriage.

 

     From the very beginning of this film, it is established that Kiki is a hellion on wheels, someone so dangerous that no one dares to touch her as they toss the chorus girl into a room afraid to let her out to cause further chaos. Evidently freed, she bee-lines her way immediately to the producer’s office and, after another series of threats and pouts, gets her job back only to wreck the show much in the same way she does in the original version, only this time in a chorus of women performing—appropriately, giving her later assertiveness in all matters—in male drag, finally even losing her tuxedo as she falls, butt-first through the skin of a drum. If this film, in many respects, is quite faithful to the Talmadge version, Pickford’s wonderful acting skills and a few plot changes by Taylor completely upends the original and, in the process, creates a new genre.

      In this case, Paulette is not Victor’s fiancée but, as in Cole Porter’s version of The Taming of the Shrew, Kiss Me Kate, his forever feuding ex-wife with whom he believes himself to be still in love. He well knows of her lying and sexually inconstant behavior, but still is convinced that her reformation is not only possible but believable when she claims, as she endlessly does, that she loves only him. Yet Victor in this version is also soured on womankind, and throughout the film attempts to prove his strength of character by living "a life without women," something of which his theater assistant Bunson (Fred Walton)—who in his admission of "I’ll stay with you, sir" establishes his marriage vow to his boss)—and his protective valet Eddie (Phil Tead) most heartily approve. And in this sense, although we never question our hero’s heteronormality. his aspirations are most certainly homosexual or at least aimed at living a life without sex, an radical condition that the previous version did not feature. Certainly, he does not have sex within the confines of the time in which the film’s events take place.

      In short, this establishes the necessary character, a man definitely unsure or confused about his masculinity necessary to set up an utterly different genre from that in which the first movie places its heroine, a romantic farce.

      In the very first scene of the film, as we watch the dancers, set designers, workmen, stage director, and numerous others going about their business we observe an elephant enter the set, viewed from a camera on a crane looking down below upon it. The elephant is an enormously large costume, we perceive, under which a pair of shapely small legs strut, moving across the room and beginning to most daringly, give the ungainly weight upon its back, to climb a ladder to large set-pedestal, presumably where the elephant stands during a number. We never discover what exactly happens to this "elephant," but its appearance ends in the chaos in which gets Kiki tossed into a locked room and fired. Presumably, Kiki was under that outsized costume and like the western metaphor of an "Elephant in a China shop," clearly indicates that chaos is about to occur whenever she goes. But she is also much like a demon-female figure like Ganesh, the Indian elephant goddess who makes things happen and removes obstacles, bringing about wisdom and good luck.

      The obstacle most in need of being removed from Victor’s life, of course, is his ex-wife Paulette. And it takes all the chaos of an elephant walk in the form of Kiki to subdue Paulette’s insistence.

       As we begin to observe Kiki’s clumsy but quite effective frontal attack on the object of her desires, one quickly begins to see it in relation to the zany antics of Katherine Hepburn in her confrontations with Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby (1938) where she lures her prehistoric specimen out of his museum into nature, steals his clothing, hides his "bone" (with the help of a dog), and forces him on a jungle safari in order to prove his manhood. Or in connection to Carole Lombard’s even zanier behavior with William Powell in My Man Godfrey (1936) wherein she takes a "forgotten man" (or, put another way, a being who has forgotten he is a man), dresses him up properly in male attire, puts him to work to serve her, takes him on as her personal "responsibility," and intrudes upon his own bedroom, driving him and nearly everyone else crazy until without even noticing it he has mouthed the marriage vows.

      So Pickford takes over a room in Reginald Denny’s all-male residence, quickly terrorizing and upending the figure behind Denny’s ordered life, his valet Eddie, while censoring his outside communication. Preposterously pretending to be his wife, Pickford as Kiki takes her man into a rabbit hole of chaos from which he only dares peek out again when she fraudulently is turned into a frozen sculpture (struck down by catalepsy), a sort of Pygmalion in reverse. In this case when the doctor suggests jabbing a pin into her leg to test his theory, Eddie not only offers his services, but asks, "Can I jab all the way in?" and stopping action for a second more, continues "And as hard as I want?" Kiki’s answer is to set his bathrobe afire.

      As in the earlier version, Victor plays with his new doll for quite a while, over the objections of Paulette, before Kiki unexpectedly plants a kiss on his lips. And then, just as suddenly as for Grant’s and Powell’s characters, out pops the marital question or at least the full expression of love.

      The genre I allude to above, obviously, is the "screwball comedy," what film critic Andrew Sarris described as a "sex comedy without the sex," and therefore of increasing popularity after 1934, with Joseph Breen’s empathic regulations against portraying various sexual acts. These films, which have their roots in farce (as I identified the original Kiki to be), also often have a great deal to do with the struggle between economic classes, with a self-confident and stubborn female protagonist involved in subversive courtship or remarriage.

      As Ken Dancyger and Jeff Rush argue in their Alternative Scriptwriting: "The screwball comedy is funny film noir that has a happy ending…. The premise of the film is about the struggle in their relationship. During the course of the struggle, which is highly sexually charged, the maleness of the central character is challenged. The female is the dominant character in the relationship," the role reversion being central to the genre.

      Is it any wonder that many of gay actor Cary Grant’s films—the aforementioned Bringing Up Baby, The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife, Holiday, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, I Was a Male War Bride, and To Catch a Thief all being variations on the genre—as Rock Hudson’s later movies such as Pillow Talk, Lover Come Back, and Send Me No Flowers.

      Finally, as Elizabeth Hafkin Peck and Cele Otnes argue in their Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding," the genre, like farce, often involves masquerade, cross-dressing, and other disguises as characters resort to secrecy. Often the genre involves fast-paced, overlapping repartee, farcical situations, escapist themes, and a physical battle of the sexes.

      Most commentators have claimed Victor Fleming’s Bombshell (1933) or Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) to represent the first full examples of the screwball comedy. But then, as I mention, not much attention has previously been paid to Taylor’s Kiki,* although all the elements mentioned above are represented in this film, which ends, like so many of them, with the male hero suddenly realizing that he has fallen in love without his knowledge—or, at least, that despite his better instincts he is now the verge of marriage. Grant and Hudson, and one might argue Denny in this film, as well as Powell in My Man Godfrey are not really the marrying kind and seek out women more as controlling or motherly figure than a sexual mate. But in this genre, it doesn’t matter; the marriage puts everything back to right and we can easily ignore—or, at least, Joseph Breen and the Hays board can—all of those previously queer goings on: the back-story battle between valet and Kiki for their master’s love, Victor’s own assertion that he seeks a life free from women, and Bunson’s stated union with his boss. Talk about an elephant in the room!

      Too bad this film’s Eddie cannot match the earlier version’s far more obviously gay figure played by George K. Arthur. It might have had it all!

       In any event, I now claim Kiki to be among the very first of the screwball comedies, and the film as having a great deal of backroom intimations of interest to contemporary LGBTQ readers.

 *A DVD for this film, the last of the Pickford talkies released, was not available until 2016.

Los Angeles, January 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).