Lea Jacobs

Men Without Women: The Avatars of What Price Glory

W e 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. The rather complex plot concludes when the pirate Solanis, afteroutfightinghis enemies in manyseabattles 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. 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. 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’: