The Clinging Vine (1926)
In the 1920s feminine standards of beauty were being redefined. One actress took it a step further.
Something I’m learning about early Cecil B DeMille, he played to the women. He flattered his actresses and captured bold, sensational if not realistic moments of female triumph on film. Even after he moved on to directing Biblical epics, DeMille still produced smaller women-oriented farces and bedroom melodramas of cheating husbands and scheming wives, ultimately climaxing with the female star in a stunning costume as she manipulates the men with sex appeal. Women were DeMille’s largest audience, and he flattered them with female characters who fall prey to patriarichal victimization, then retaliate with glamor.
The Clinging Vine is a twist on this trope. We find the heroine in the workplace, but instead of a suffering ingenue running from a skirt-chasing boss, she is diligent, efficient, and completely masculinized. Enter Leatrice Joy as A.B. the boss’s assistant who is practically running the company. Introduced only with initials, and seated at a desk of whirring office activity, we first accept A.B. as a man. Helped by a dashing haircut and tailored business suit Leatrice Joy is the image of a young hero. Dedicated, hardworking, focused….
Much ballyhoo was made of Joy’s short hair at the time, allegedly cut on a whim to resemble boyfriend John Gilbert. Hollywood gossips dished on how DeMille was furious she could no longer play leads, and titillating stories about Joy passing for a man and flirting with women…. This was the mid-1920s. Women had shed their corsets. Flapper styles were slim and boyish. Vamps were bobbing their hair. Women were adopting the modern look, and voting and working. Hollywood ballyhoo aside, Leatrice Joy took it to the next level.
Audiences of the day of course knew that A.B. is a woman, Joy was quite famous and had starred in several films with her bobbed hairstyle. But director Paul Sloane’s camera lingers as she uses masculine body language and gestures. There is a deliberate titillation with the way she stands akimbo, pointing aggressively when she speaks, even jotting a note on her sleeve. She is not just mannish, she is a man’s man, a go-getter, a brash young hero beating other men at their own terms.
Yet poor A.B. has no romantic life at all. She reacts awkwardly when a secretary announces her engagement. The scene lingers with apparent heterosexual tension before A.B. wistfully returns to her office, wondering if she will ever have a relationship. Joy presents such a convincing, even compelling masculine physicality that it is odd when no one in the film reads her as male. In the world of the film, she hasn’t adopted the clothing of men per-se, she has adopted an executive uniform. A.B. is always a woman, just an ugly woman. The bumbling executives become afraid they may someday lose A.B. to marriage and begin scheming: to keep her in the firm one of them has to marry her, but no one wants to be the one to do it….
As overt and mannered as Joy’s transgendered presentation is, it’s not part of the original Zelda Sears play. Reviews of the day compare the film to the stage version, criticizing Joy’s interpretation of the A.B. as more off-putting than amusing. One reviewer complained “An impression lingers as one views the picture that cannot be fought off, that a female impersonator is playing the girl. It persists in the mind as the picture unreels….” Variety (July 21, 1926)
Corporate matriarch Toby Claude is a jazz-age Granny who transforms A.B. into Abigale, a “clinging vine” who is decorative and flirtatious and clings to a man’s shoulder. Sensing Abigale has no experience with love, Grandma manuvers her towards her own grandson Jimmie. Ironically A.B. has recently fired Jimmie from the company, but Abigale’s pygmalion transformation is so complete that no one recognizes her. Most of the comedy derives from Abigale’s clumsy attempts at femininization, in exaggerated puffy gowns and over-sized bonnets. Joy presents a polemic image of dualities, first a studied and serious young man, then a fluttering and ridiculous child-woman. All the men eat it up.
Even as satire, to modern feminists The Clinging Vine is a nightmarish scenario: give up a career to coddle a simpering man-child? But the film, in contrast to the play, takes every opportunity to make A.B. sympathetic, while making Abigale ridiculous. She gives up her career for marriage to an inferior man – one she even fired – and learns to pacify men by pretending to be less than they are…. It echoes when she earlier affirms her boss’s ego, letting him take credit for her work…. Worse Abigale gives Jimmie her life savings and he invests it poorly. Abigale has to use her new mutant feminine super powers to fix things.
Happily, the patriarchy falls apart when you look at Grandma. This dichotomy of young and old, who slides down banisters and dances to jazz in her underwear, embodies the ultimate matriarch. Knowing her grandson isn’t gifted with brains she marries him off to the company’s top whiz. Wise Grandma secures her own bloodline as well as her company’s future with an injection of female intelligence. It’s a typical DeMille happy ending. The men think they are in charge, while the women manipulate with sex appeal.
But that’s not quite what they put on film. Leatrice Joy’s performance might have been a Hollywood stunt, a gimmick to capitalize on her own publicity. Possibly it was a provocative ad infinitum swipe at the choices of modern womanhood. But why make A.B. so compelling and Abigale so repulsive in contrast to the script? Were they experimenting with a gendered uncanny valley? Were they fishing for the female gaze?
