The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 20-26
A Florida Enchantment (1914)
Directed by Sidney Drew
The claim for a secret queer history of cinema overlooks how such history has never been all that secret. Gay themes and subtexts have appeared in films for virtually as long as films have existed, and present-day efforts to uncover and decode hidden subtexts in past artworks often point to ways in which our current moment is more conservative than former eras. For great film tragedians such as Carl Theodor Dreyer (of Michael) and Mauritz Stiller (in Vingarne), thwarted homosexual desire registers painfully as unfulfilled human desire, eternal in its longing and universal in its suffering. For great comic auteurs from throughout film history like George Cukor (Sylvia Scarlett) and Andy Warhol (take your pick), the power invested in acting fruity allows characters to launch liberating shock effects upon fellow denizens of what might otherwise be a dull, square world.
The pioneering Sidney Drew falls into the second camp of artists, with the release of this actor-director-producer’s comic wonder A Florida Enchantment preceding even that of Mack Sennett’s first feature-length film, Tillie’s Punctured Romance, by three months. In what could well and truly be the first feature-length film comedy, a wealthy young woman (played by Edith Storey) discovers her doctor fiancé (Drew) to be philandering and avenges herself by consuming a magical seed that transforms its eater into a member of the opposite sex. “Lillian Travers” soon becomes “Leonard Talbot,” the mustachioed darling of virtually any lady’s eye. The doctor, after munching a seed on his own part, finds himself becoming horrifyingly effeminate, and the St. Petersburg hotel housing the central action turns increasingly topsy-turvy as male and female servants there dive into swapping roles. Many of the actors’ blackface appearances, for which Enchantment has often been criticized, help bring to the proceedings an exaggerated air of make-believe. The film concludes with the revelation that what we’ve watched has been a dream—one to which we dreamers, seeking pleasure, might still return more than a century after its fantasies were first expressed. Aaron Cutler (April 26, 6:45pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “An Early Clue to the New Direction: Queer Cinema Before Stonewall”)