Men Without Women: The Avatars of What Price Glory

Abstract

We have come to associate stories of male adventure with the suppression of sentiment, but this is far from always having been the case. A somewhat obscure example from the nineteenth century, The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main (Tom Sawyer's favorite adventure story), is cited by Henry Nash Smith in a discussion of mid-nineteenth century low-brow fiction.1 The rather complex plot concludes when the pirate Solanis, after outfighting his enemies in many sea battles and killing some of the governor's best men, brings together the governor who seeks his arrest and a nobleman who, like himself, had been deprived of wife and child. Through a series of wordless tableaux, clearly modeled on Diderot's Discours sur le fils naturel, the pirate re-enacts the separation and reunion of both families, thereby softening the governor's hard heart and bringing all together for a happy end.2 While boy's literature did not often borrow so directly from the proponent of the comédie larmoyante,it remained a sentimental genre well into the twentieth century. Franco Moretti's well known essay on sentiment, 'Kindergarten', often cited by film scholars interested in the creation of tears or pathos, is an essay on boy's literature, not women's fiction.3 For the American cinema, the 1920s seems to be the decade in which sentimentality began to be judged as inappropriate for masculine action stories, a process I hope to investigate here. Nonetheless, it should be established that many films of the 1920s that may be classified as male adventure, and which were so seen by the trade press at the time, do not manifest the kind of 'tough stories in a tough manner' that critic Robin Wood has held to be epitomized by the work of Howard Hawks. Many low-budget action films, sometimes described as 'action melodramas' by Variety, manifest a sentimental as well as a thrilling, 'blood-and-thunder' melodramatic strain, and some of them are assumed to appeal to a juvenile audience. Speed Madness (1925), independently produced, starring stunt man Frank Merrill (whose stage name is itself taken from boy's adventure fiction) and distributed by Peter Kanellos is described by Variety as 'aimed at 11-year-old intelligences': The dear old homestead mortgaged to the mustachioed, foreign villain. And the kindly but weak old mother who consents to her daugh-ter's marrying the cur to save the farm. And finally the hero who says 'Nay' and nearly breaks his neck selling his auto valve patent, chasing the heavy all around the place and finally crushing the little lady to his athletic bosom.4 Such films were not only targeted at boys. Hook and Ladder No. 9, distributed by FBO Pictures in 1927, concerns two firemen in love with the same girl. Dan is shy and by the time he has proposed, Johnny has wooed and won her. The two men fight, and Dan refuses to accept the situation after Johnny marries the girl, but when the big fire inevitably occurs, Dan nobly rescues Johnny's wife and child (according to Variety there is some doubt about whether or not he dies in the attempt). Variety describes it as 'straightforward handkerchief melodrama' which will 'be most appreciated by unsophisticated customers'. It recommends: 'Best for the neighborhoods and small towns. In the blasé places it would encounter tough sledding'.5 But it was not only films for the neighborhoods or subsequent run theaters which provided this mix of pathos and action. Wings, one of the biggest hits [End Page 307] of 1927, was classed by Variety as of 'vital and universal appeal', belonging to an elite group which included only six other films: The Birth of a Nation (1915), Way Down East (1920), The Ten Commandments (1923), The Covered Wagon (1923), The Big Parade (1925) and Ben-Hur (1925). This classification was based upon the spectacular aerial battle...