Phil-for-Short

What a delightful little silent film from screenwriters Clara Beranger and Forrest Halsey and directed by Oscar Apfel, who it turns out wasn't just the experienced director who oversaw Cecil B. DeMille's first films, including the dreadful "The Squaw Man" (1914). Indeed, he seems to have had a varied career, from first working for Edison and, later, making a film on the Armenian genocide, "Ravished Armenia" (1919), the same year that he made this light-hearted romance of gender play, and also made the first adaptation of "Bulldog Drummond" in 1922, which features the same star as here, Evelyn Greeley. Her knowing looks and coquettish tomboy antics are a highlight here. "Phil-for-Short" is similar to the later comedy-of-remarriage subgenre, minus the divorce, but where misogyny and making a fool of a man becomes flirting and the prospect of infidelity but foreplay. It's also akin to the sophisticated romantic comedies of Ernst Lubitsch or the sex comedies of DeMille made around the same time.

The Ancient Greek allusions here are curious. The poet Sappho is the main one, which might ordinarily suggest, especially given how Greeley's Phil, as in short for Damophilia, dresses in masculine clothing early on and where the meet-cute involves the guy running for the trees when he hears "A singing female!" and before he's calmed down by mistaking her for a boy, an emphasis on homoeroticism, but this film is decidedly a heterosexual affair. No man kissing a woman dressed in a tux and whom we're not entirely sure he realizes isn't a man here as in Lubitsch's "I Don't Want to Be a Man" (1918). Regardless, some of the intertitles and much of the plot development seems strikingly modern and sexually suggestive, especially of female sexual desire. At one point, for instance, consistently being reprimanded for her unconventional behavior or feminine wiles, as the case may be, Phil coyly quips, "I've never been taught discipline in my life---help me not to flirt." When the Greek professor and "confirmed woman hater" target of her affections pens an essay concerning how women make fools of men, she steals his glasses and pretends to be her imaginary twin brother to help him write it and, as the plot progresses, actualize his essay by her making a fool of him.

The picture is a bit slow to start, and I was concerned when we got yet another plot involving a seemingly grown woman being an orphan required to have an evil guardian who has sights on marrying her. Always with the not quite a woman but no longer a child, either, with these film depictions of females. There's also some inconsistent eyeline-match cutting involving a fence and nosy neighbors. But, once the scenario gets going, it's quite entertaining. I especially enjoyed the doubles theme: two Greek professors, two languages, two violinists to her dancing, two marriage proposals from misogynists, her pretending (an actress playing an actress) to be twins, ultimately two couples and, of course, the two sexes. The scenario was even written by a man and a woman, and the film survives in this restoration combining two prints, a 35mm nitrate and a 28mm safety print, both housed under the Library of Congress. Look out for this one when it appears on the "Nasty Women" home-video set from Kino Lorber in 2022; it's a fun one.

Damophilia or "Phil" for short is a modern girl who works the farm, wears boys clothes, and likes to perform a Greek dance dressed in toga and bare feet, much to the shock of local aging busybodies who think her attire too revealing. One of these busybodies, an old man who is a bit of a lecher it seems, makes an offer to her father on his death bed to take care of Phil by "marrying her". Instead he becomes her legal guardian by adopting her, but she soon dresses as a boy and runs away from home where she meets a young Greek professor on the road who thinks she is male. Then dressed as Damophilia, twin sister of Phil the boy, she gets hired as his assistant based on her knowledge of Greek taught to her by her father, a well known Greek professor himself. She is mighty interested in our young professor but it seems he has been burned once too often by women and is under the impression that no woman can be trusted and women are always out to make a man seem a fool - how will plucky Phil win him over?

This is a completely enjoyable film, I think Evelyn Greeley, who plays the part of Phil, is really charming and fun to watch in this - the acting quality as a whole is very good here. I also found the couple of scenes with Phil and some of her female "students" performing Greek dances interesting to watch. I actually would have liked to have seen a little more of the cross-dressing, duel brother/sister mix-up - there's more I think they could have done with this whole plot idea than they do. Still, this film is loads of fun and well worth seeing.