Well—didn't you like the taste?

[sovay]

In celebration of my renewed access to streaming media and recognition of the fact that it was stupidly late by the time we started, spatch and I pulled the coffee table and its new computer up to the couch last night and watched Ernst Lubitsch's I Don't Want to Be a Man (Ich möchte kein Mann sein, 1918) because it was the shortest thing on FilmStruck that looked good. It was great. Still relatively early in its director's career but already showing the witty audacity of the someday Lubitsch touch, it's fleet, bouncy, and packs more genderbending and queerness into its fifty minutes even than I expected from the country that gave us Magnus Hirschfeld. Do you like ladies in tuxedos? Do you like ladies in tuxedos flirting with ladies and dudes? Do you like cheerfully bisexual resolutions plus a little role reversal for the kink of it? Have I got a film for you.

Ossi Oswalda stars as an irrepressible exemplar of flaming youth, the kind of drinking, smoking, card-playing hoyden who is the despair of her strait-laced uncle and governess and the toast of the local students who crowd under her window to serenade her so exactly like a clowder of tomcats that you're surprised they can be dispersed without anyone having to throw a boot at them. Even for silent cinema, Ossi the character is a full-body live wire, with high-kicking heels and a catchy grin—I was not surprised to read afterward that the actress started her career as a dancer—but no matter how much a girl in 1918 Berlin just wants to have fun, she can't catch a break with her guardians always breathing down her neck about feminine decorum. The departure of her uncle for a prestigious post overseas temporarily raises her hopes of running wild, but they're dashed almost as instantly by the arrival of Kurt Götz's Dr. Kersten, a patent leather prig with an insufferable bowtie and a lanky face that might be good-looking if it weren't so punchably smug. "So you're the prize guardian?" his new charge jeers at him. "You're in for a cold bath!" He smiles serenely and promises to cut her down to size: "So klein!" He insists that she curtsey, which she does with resentful grace; that she go to bed at a ladylike hour, squashing her evening plans. Tossing angrily under her bedclothes and a frilly nightcap that doesn't suit her, Ossi fumes, "Why wasn't I born a boy?" Luckily for her and us, it's not an immutable condition. In the morning she visits a tailor and that night she sets out to affirm Viola's Law, to wit, that a cross-dressed woman in any self-respecting comedy is pan-gender catnip.

What follows may not rank with Trouble in Paradise (1932) or To Be or Not to Be (1942), but the carnivalesque needs no apologies and I Don't Want to Be a Man asks for none. Ossi in drag stares openly at women she passes and receives appreciative smiles in return, tips her hat to a gentleman and gets her cigarette lit, wades out of the maelstrom of a swanky nightclub to enlighten the camera with her newly jaded opinions of men and women alike; absolutely no one who meets her takes her for anything but a wealthy, precocious youth about town. (I was left longing for a silent version of an opera, which I know sounds counterproductive, but if Lubitsch had ever directed an actual Fledermaus instead of its close Hollywood cousin So This Is Paris (1926), Oswalda would have knocked Count Orlofsky out of the park.) Of course she's going to run into her new guardian and he isn't going to know it, because the moral high ground in this kind of story comes with a trap door built in. Of course she'll find that playing the man attracts its own complications, like getting the stink-eye from passengers on the U-Bahn if you don't offer a lady your seat, nonplussing the coat-check queue by powdering your nose before proceeding to the dance floor, and not being sure which restroom you should be sick in after a night of partying hard. I did not foresee that at one point she would pass herself off as her own cousin, but I guess that's the next best thing in this genre to having a twin. And as soon as she spots none other than that paragon of cold fish Dr. Kersten dressed to the nines and having all the fun he forbade her, she conducts herself like a trickster of the first rank: intending to spoil his evening by stealing his girl, she goes one better and steals the man himself. It's beautiful. Not only does Kersten, true to his archetype, look considerably better with a couple of drinks in and his severely slicked hair starting to de-patent itself, there's not a jot of no-homo in his enthusiastic response as the champagne and cigars of male bonding give way first to nuzzling kisses and then to straight-up making out in the back of a fiacre, concluding only when both parties pass out and the driver has to rifle their pockets to figure out where to deliver his fares. He really seems just as happy to be going home at the end of the night with a cute young man as he was to chat up a jazzy young woman at the start of it. The cute young man, meanwhile, who demurred to give his name, seems to be enjoying the hoodwinking and the kissing equally. The script by Lubitsch and Hanns Kräly keeps the gender play going right through the denouement where Kersten in a righteous fluster marches into his charge's bedroom to reclaim his high-minded reputation and the sight of Ossi in her man's evening dress with her girl's hair loose about her shoulders—previously hidden under a brilliantined wig which we had thought was her own hair until she removed it with the unmistakable gesture of an impersonator at the end of their act—knocks him flat on his mortified, delighted ass. "That's right, it's me!" (All translations cited in this post are Kino Lorber's.) She circles him with masculine satisfaction, quoting his own words back at him: "I'll bring you into line yet! You'll be this small!" He does his best scolded schoolboy, then his best tragic maiden. They end up cuddling on her bed, still dressed like a couple of swells on the town. It's sweet and it's screwball and it's not very straight; it makes the film's concluding line, which supplies its title, feel much less like a comedown to heteronormativity than the beginning of a new game. Who knows? Maybe they'll both be ladies next time out.

I know much less about German cinema in the late nineteen-teens than I do about German cinema even a couple of years later; I know much less about queer film in any country ditto and I'm a bit garbage at coding at the best of times. So I can't tell if it's meant to be part of the carnival or part of the real world that a cabbie doesn't bat an eye at two male passengers necking and a valet is unfazed to find another man asleep in his master's bed, but I feel it can't be an accident that the flowers at the table where Kersten and Ossi toast one another "Auf Brüderschaft!" and then fall to sucking face are lilacs. Masculinity and femininity are presented as equal masquerades, with Ossi in her white tie and tails and monocle slipping not actually effortlessly between them—it takes work to be either, which may be why the film ends happily in a state of in-between. I should just track down a copy of Reinhold Schünzel's Viktor und Viktoria (1933), which I have wanted to see for years anyway on account of Anton Walbrook. It feels like some kind of relative. I expect that means there are more. Basically, I knew from the summary that there was cross-dressing in this movie, but everything else about it came as a glorious surprise. There are wonderful gags that have nothing to do with sexuality or gender, like Ossi in a sullen fit of temper tossing a teddy bear over her shoulder and sending a vase of flowers flying or announcing in a state of profound inebriation, "I noticed for the first time today that the Earth is spinning." The title quote of this post is her teasing response to her guardian's last, heroic effort at indignation: "And you allowed yourself to be kissed by me?" I had never seen Oswalda before, but since she seems to have been part of Lubitsch's early stock company, I look forward to further appearances; I recognized Götz's name, but couldn't figure out why until a quick trip to IMDb confirmed that I had last seen it as "Curt Goetz" in the credits of People Will Talk (1951), adapted by Joseph L. Mankiewicz from Götz's 1934 play and 1950 movie Frauenarzt Dr. Prätorius. Actually, Cary Grant is not a bad analogue for Götz in I Don't Want to Be a Man. Screwball-era Cary Grant, prone to just going gay all of a sudden. This taste brought to you by my prize backers at Patreon.

Comments

[gwynnega]

This sounds marvelous. I'm glad you have access to FilmStruck again.

[selkie]

Squeeeee.

It's a shame I can't steal "pan-gender catnip." I like everything about this review, down to the lilacs. I'll have to watch the film somehow, being slightly slicker at coding than I might otherwise be on account of my queer antecedents who kept diaries, and tell you if anything else is sparkly enough to pick up on at this distance.

OH MY GOD we have to enable you somehow to watch (spelling interpretive, spouse not awake) Tretya Meshchanskaya. You may love it equally. You'll at least have what to say. POLY PROLETARIAT FUNTIMES.

Edit: it's on Youtube, but the cards are in Russian. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNipP_F4MxI I woke spouse with trying to remember if the men in the film were also gleefully boning. They "shared one overcoat at the front." Or, if you're Spouse and have just been startled awake, "Yes... shared... overcoat. Totally together. *gentle snrk*"

Edited edit: with English title thingies over the cards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrG3FA2lmiI

[selenak]

Well, Cary Grant if he was also George Bernard Shaw, with whom Götz is usually compared to as a playwright in Germany. ;) He is hands down one of our best comedy writers, both for the film and on stage, and at least two of his comedies are still fireproof stage hits. I must admit I‘ve never seen Götz when young, in silent movies; I‘m more familiar with him in his older incarnation, from those films he made with his wife and partner Vallerie von Martens later. Anyway, this movie sounds fantastic, and I shall look out for it now!

[ashlyme]

*Do you like ladies in tuxedos? Do you like ladies in tuxedos flirting with ladies and dudes? Do you like cheerfully bisexual resolutions plus a little role reversal for the kink of it? Have I got a film for you.*

Hell yeah times infinity. This sounds like immense fun! Great review. *wanders off to find a copy*

[moon_custafer]

and his severely slicked hair starting to de-patent itself

Based on some of the Tumblrs I follow, and which Powell & Pressburger films have fics on AO3, I can declare with confidence that this is a known kink, and a major factor in Anton Walbrook fandom.

I recognized Götz's name, but couldn't figure out why until a quick trip to IMDb confirmed that I had last seen it as "Curt Goetz" in the credits of People Will Talk (1951)

That’s wonderful! I knew People Will Talk was adapted from a German original (and that its plot may well have made more sense in that context), but wouldn’t have made the connection to this if you hadn’t pointed it out.

[larryhammer]

That sounds amazeballs.

And I am writing down that wording of Viola's Law for future use.

[sartorias]

I found Ich möchte kein Mann sein on YouTube. It's hilarious!

[asakiyume]

They end up cuddling on her bed, still dressed like a couple of swells on the town. It's sweet and it's screwball and it's not very straight; it makes the film's concluding line, which supplies its title, feel much less like a comedown to heteronormativity than the beginning of a new game. Who knows? Maybe they'll both be ladies next time out.
--I like this idea. What a lot of fun, all around.

I noticed for the first time today that the Earth is spinning --that made me smile.