Massive immigration, internal migration, and urbanization seemed to promise radical opportunities for self-invention in the early 20th century, when identity play could blur the lines between race, ethnicity, and even gender, especially in representations of the American frontier. Our first four films explore the thrills and dangers of these topsy-turvy reconfigurations of gender, desire, and race in the Wild West.
Of The Taming of Jane, Moving Picture World quipped: “If men understood women, which they never will, this film would possess no interest.” Cowgirl Jane (Florence Lawrence) is presented as a free-roaming animal who responds badly to her sweetheart’s efforts to rope and tie her down. Inspired by the white couple’s antics, an indigenous woman mounts her own campaign to lasso and bind her resisting beau. Only when Jane’s father tricks her into thinking she’s accidentally shot her sweetheart does Jane relent and allow herself to be bound by choice. The film’s racist double standard is typical of American Westerns: young white women with a masculine sense of independence are admirable, while indigenous women with similar qualities are the subject of ridicule.
This double standard is expanded in the next pair of films. In An Up-to-Date Squaw, an indigenous woman dressing up like a white woman is depicted as laughable. Ko-To-Sho, the wife of a Chief, observes two white women visiting her village and buying souvenirs. Impressed by their clothing, she imitates their outfits by putting a basket on her head and trailing a skin behind her. Later she sneaks into town to buy some clothes. In her new attire she attracts the attention of an English dandy, who mistakes her for “a beautiful white woman” (Moving Picture World), but the Chief discovers the two of them together and “scalps” the dandy (though he ends up only with the man’s toupee in his hands). As Western scholar Joanna Hearne has observed, in this case “the collecting of crafts and clothes…and the ability to ‘cross-over’ comfortably as a tourist in another ethnic community is socially organized to work in only one direction – that of settlers exploring Native communities – and never the reverse.”
Unlike the other films in this program, The Corporal’s Daughter is an action-packed drama rather than a comedy, but we include it to reveal how differently racial impersonation was treated, according to its intention. A young white woman, Kate, disguises herself in “Indian attire” to lead her husband and her father’s troops safely away from an Indian attack. In this instance, a white woman disguising herself as indigenous becomes a hero, and the racial masquerade is seen as convincing and heroic. The film’s star, Gladys Hulette, told journalists that she enjoyed “living as much as possible out of doors” and that up until the age of 17, she had “never got into a kitchen, even by mistake.”
In The Night Rider, Texas Guinan, “the female William S. Hart,” plays a ranch owner under siege from nighttime cattle raids. When local cowboys opine that she needs a husband to help run the ranch, she responds: “I never met a man yet fit for a husband, but I’m going to take your advice and get married.” She seizes one of the protesting cowboys and marries him at gunpoint (“This is Leap Year and when I leap for a husband I get him”), but is nonplussed when she meets a handsome newcomer, whom she eyes from top to bottom. It turns out that her husband is one of the cattle thieves, but luckily the man who married them is also a thief, not a preacher, so she gives them both the heave-ho and shakes hands with her handsome friend. Guinan played heroic cowgirls in films throughout the 1910s, and in 1921 formed her own production company. She later became New York’s legendary Prohibition-era “Queen of the Nightclubs.”
The final three films have fun exploring the slippery boundaries between woman, man, machine, and animal in urban settings. In Patouillard a une femme jalouse, Pétronille (Sarah Duhamel) disguises herself as a man to spy on her straying husband. The film alternates between physical comedy stunts (Pétronille gets dragged along the road from the back of a car, and at another point hangs off a coal-grabbing crane) and medium-close-ups of her face contorting with anger and anguish. In Lea bambola, Louis convinces his girlfriend Lea (Lea Giunchi) to impersonate a mechanical doll in order to trick his father into letting them get married. Louis is particularly eager to avoid marrying his father’s favored fiancée, a big-nosed girl (played by a male actor in a wig and dress). Like Ossi Oswalda in Lubitsch’s Die Puppe a few years later, Lea fools the crowd with her mechanical movements and rigid stance (even when her boyfriend keeps dropping her on the ground!). In The Circus Imps, former Fox child stars Jane and Katherine Lee band together with a troupe of circus “freaks.” One of the girls smears the lower half of face with jam, evoking a beard or partial blackface. The rambunctious girls also dress up a donkey and “christen” it with a bottle as if it were a ship. The girls and the “freak” performers put on a show, exploiting the spectacle of bodily difference, but only the accidental discovery of oil puts their circus literally in the black.

Laura Horak

THE TAMING OF JANE (US 1910)
regia/dir: Harry Solter. cast: Florence Lawrence (Jane). prod: IMP. uscita/rel: 22.08.1910. copia/copy: 35mm, 688 ft. (orig. 960 ft.), 12′ (16 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: Library of Congress Packard Center for Audio-Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA.

AN UP-TO-DATE SQUAW (US 1911)
regia/dir: George Le Soir. cast: ? (Ko-To-Sho, la moglie del capo/Chief’s wife). prod: Pathé, American Kinema (Pathé cat. no. 4876). uscita/rel: 20.09.1911. copia/copy: 35mm, 510 ft. (orig. 754 ft.), 8′ (16 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source:  Library of Congress Packard Center for Audio-Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA.

THE CORPORAL’S DAUGHTER (US 1915)
regia/dir: Langdon West. sogg/story: Captain Jack Crawford. cast: Gladys Hulette (Kate), Arthur Housman (Tom), Yale Benner (corteggiatore respinto/rejected suitor), Ben Turbett, George Melville, William West, William Burgess. prod: Thomas A. Edison, Inc. dist: General Film Company. uscita/rel: 19.06.1915. copia/copy: DCP,  14′; did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: Library of Congress Packard Center for Audio-Visual Conservation, Culpeper, VA.

THE NIGHT RIDER (US 1920)
regia/dir: Jay Hunt. cast: Texas Guinan (Texas Blake), T.N.T. Harvey [Pat Hartigan] (Dick Carlton). prod: Reelcraft Pictures Corporation. copia/copy: DCP, 23′; did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: Lobster Films, Paris.

PATOUILLARD A UNE FEMME JALOUSE (Patouillard heeft een jaloersche vrouw) (FR 1912)
regia/dir: Roméo Bosetti. cast: Sarah Duhamel (Pétronille), Paul Bertho (Patouillard). prod: Lux. uscita/rel: 24.05.1912. copia/copy: 35mm, 106  m. (orig. 127 m.), 5’54” (18 fps); did./titles: NLD. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Desmet Collection. Preservazione in b&n del 1992 da un duplicato negativo/Preserved in b&w in 1992 at Haghefilm through a duplicate negative.

LEA BAMBOLA (Lea’s Pop) (IT 1913)
regia/dir: ?. cast: Lea Giunchi (Lea), Raymond Frau (Kri Kri), Giuseppe Gambardella (padre di Kri Kri/Kri Kri’s father), Lorenzo Soderini (la fidanzata imposta/the imposed fiancée). prod: Cines. uscita/rel: 28.07.1913. copia/copy: 35mm, 123  m. (orig. 139 m.), 6′ (18 fps); did./titles: NLD. fonte/source: EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Desmet Collection. Preservazione in b&n del 1988 da un duplicato negativo/Preserved in b&w in 1988 at Haghefilm through a duplicate negative.

THE CIRCUS IMPS (US 1920)
regia/dir: ?. scen: Philip Bartholomae. cast: Jane Lee (Jane), Katherine Lee (Katherine), Charles Martin (Tom Lee), Frank Evans (Jack Grimes), Anita Brown. prod: Louis T. Rogers Film Company / L. & R. Film. dist: Masterpiece Film Distributing Corporation (1920); Wilk and Wilk; Rialto Productions (1921). uscita/rel: 10.1920; riedizione/re-release: 1921. copia/copy: 35mm, 1447 ft., 22′ (18 fps); did./titles: ENG. fonte/source: BFI National Archive, London.