Algie, the Miner

This very brief film is about a man called Algie Allmore played by Billy Quirk who is a young man who appears as a sissy or pansy and his intended father-in-law wants him to prove he is a man in one year if he wants to marry his daughter. So, Algie heads West dressed up like a funny cowboy with a very tiny pistol and a weird looking western hat. Algie meets up with some very rough and tough cowboys who laugh their heads off just looking at poor Algie. However, Algie gets broken in with his surroundings by finding a gold mine, riding a horse and the ability of knowing what to do with a gun and and is able to stand by himself against all the cowboys. Funny film and enjoyable.

It's interesting to watch this "sissy" get challenged by his prospective father-in-law to prove himself in "becoming a man" by going out west for a year before he can marry the man's daughter, and then to try to interpret it. The guy kisses a couple of cowboys when he meets them at the train station, dresses like a fop, and carries a teeny weeny gun that the "real men" have a big laugh over. As he develops a friendship with one of them, it's hard not to see gay overtones in all this and wonder what producer (and possibly director) Alice Guy-Blaché's intention was.

Is he gay or bisexual and out of conformity to the times going to marry a woman? Or is he just a wimpy guy from the east who has to prove himself to his would-be father-in-law and a bunch of masculine cowboys? Regardless, the characterization is ultimately positive - this effeminate misfit of a man saves another's life in more ways than one and "makes good," rather than not being able to cut it. Is it saying we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and be tolerant to different ways of being a man? Or is it saying that effeminate weaklings can and should be toughened up?

It may be a Rorschach test or another example of the old saying, "we see things not as they are but as we are," especially 108 years later. Anyway, the story is linear and simple which is a little unfortunate, but in the vignette of the male characters (even exaggerated as they are), and in their relationship to one another, it's fascinating.

Algie (Billy Quirk) is a high society man, but the father of the girl he wants to marry considers Algie a weakling and not good enough for his daughter. He signs a promise saying that if Algie can prove himself a man inside a year, then Algie can marry his daughter.

Off Algie goes to the west. He tells the ruffians that he meets there his mission, and they put him in the care of "Big Jim", who has Algie bunk with him and teaches him to ride a horse and to prospect. Algie is a quick study, and even fights off a couple of robbers who intrude on the mine, winning Big Jim's respect.

But there is an odd side turn in the plot. Apparently Big Jim is an alcoholic, and Algie is shown tending to Jim when he comes home so drunk he is hallucinating before he passes out. Then Algie tells off anyone who offers Jim a drink when they go to the bar, which makes me wonder - Why would you go to a bar if you intend to not drink? The odd side plot is this rather pro prohibition message before prohibition begins, and so I looked up Alice Guy Blache and the other directors of this film to see if they were pro prohibition, but couldn't find anything on the subject. But there was propaganda in films, even from the beginning, so it could be.

Overall, this film is still studied because, although the leading character is straight, Algie is a very early case of gay stereotyping in film - the loud clothes, his flamboyant gestures, and his tiny toy like gun being just some of those. That is probably why Turner Classic Movies restored it in 2007, and it's a shame they don't have a restoration budget anymore with which to restore more rare gems.

Billy Quirk himself had a rather sad ending. He was a director and actor during the very early days of cinema, but he couldn't cope when films became much longer in the late 1910's and he had a nervous breakdown in 1920. His health continued to deteriorate, and he died in 1926 at only age 53.

The idea of the Wild West being a cure for homosexuality - and the film is unusually frank for the time in that respect - is not exactly very advanced but it is entirely typical of the Solax mix of quite cever ideas with rather crude plot development. Perhaps the most interesting aspect is not the way the West reforms the cissy but the reverse - the way the cissy beings an element of "caring" into the life of the Wild West in his motherly concern for Big Jim.

The film was also clearly an influence on one of Buster Keaton's most underestimated films Go West (1925). Not only does this feature the same notion of the "little gun" to indicate inferior manhood but also plays quite interestingly with the element of "caring" (Big Jim replaced by the cow) and uncertain sexuality (Keaton coems within an ace of choosing the cow in preference to the girl in a very neat double-take at the end of the film).

"Algie, the Miner" is one of the better and certainly more intriguing Solax productions. Although, according to Alice Guy expert Alison McMahan (author of the book "Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema" and who provides commentary for the film on the Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers set), it wasn't directed by the world's first female director, instead credited to two male filmmakers, it was supervised by her as were all productions at her studio. Contradictory, the booklet included with the Pioneers set lists Guy as director in its credits for the title. Regardless, it represents a continuation and maturation of the subversion of gender norms with hints of homosexuality seen in some of the best of Guy's oeuvre. In this one, a flamboyantly effeminate city slicker named Algie must prove himself "a man," to a father in order to marry his daughter. So, Algie travels to the gun-toting, horseback-riding, hard-drinking and gold-mining West to kiss and shack up with Big Jim, whereupon the two teach each other something in the ways of manhood. In the end, Algie takes Jim back east with him to prove to the father what a man he's become and be rewarded with that lavender marriage.

Surprising stuff for 1912. While never being more explicit than a rebuked kiss and Algie and Jim's two-bed, one-room shack, it would've presumably been obvious even to sophisticated early-20th-century audiences that with his make-up, styled outfits, stereotypical gestures and initiation into masculine activities and appearances that Algie was coded as queer. Moreover, the humor becomes that this sexually-reversed "Taming of the Shrew" instruction doesn't really make him any more of a heterosexual; it just allows him to superficially pass as one. And, even if not, he's now packing more than merely a dainty pistol that he suggestively smooches.

"Brokeback Mountain" (2005) nearly a century prior would be the obvious comparison here. Algie's handling of his tiny gun also reminds me of such subtle and rather Freudian hints of homosexuality during later heavy Hollywood censorship as Peter Lorre's use of a cane in "The Maltese Falcon" (1941). Such subversion had already been part of Guy's prior films, too. Crossdressing or women playing male parts, such as in "Midwife to the Upper Class" (1902), and the reversal of traditional gender norms, as in "The Consequences of Feminism" (1905), particularly stand out. Besides the subject matter, it also helps that "Algie the Miner" is better acted and features quicker cutting than prior and some later Solax films I've seen. Despite the reputed "Be Natural" sign Guy installed at some point in her studio, as depicted in the documentary "Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché" (2018), the actual acting and direction of the company's productions didn't always reflect that motto. "Algie, the Miner" does in more ways than one.

(Note: Some significant, blotchy decomposition from the surviving 35mm print.)