William Haines

  • Speedway (1929)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) If you needed any confirmation that fast cars and professional racing have been part of Hollywood’s DNA for a very long time, Speedway should be enough to convince you. Largely a silent film (although one shouldn’t underestimate the effectiveness of juicing up the soundtrack with racing noises), big chunks of it were filmed at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, lending it a quasi-documentary appeal at times. A good thing too, because the actual plotting of the film adheres closely to the kind of ridiculous melodrama that was deservedly left in the silent era. Our story revolves around an ace driver heading to Indianapolis, but then there are romantic complications: a foster father with a weak heart and one wildly unconvincing aerial sequence. The plotting is this close to atrocious (I won’t even mention those last moments of the film, so dumb do they feel to describe), but Speedway is far more interesting when it’s geeking out about the newness of fast cars and flying pilots, presenting historical footage of the Indy 500, and showing us that it wouldn’t take much to (cough, cough, Turbo) bring much of the same material to twenty-first century audiences. Sure, the technical production values are rough, and lead actor William Haines belongs to the silent era, but the spirit of racing lives on and the film is far more tolerable than less-distinctive silent-era dramas.

  • Way Out West (1930)

    Way Out West (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) In many ways, there isn’t much to gnaw upon in Way Out West—it’s a comedy western made at a very rough stage of American filmmaking, with sound technology not meshing particularly well with the on-location shooting and a not-so-great image quality. The story, about a city slicker huckster being forced to pay back his debts on a tough-guys ranch, is amusing but not particularly revolutionary. But the one exception to this autopilot comedy western is not a small one—dating from the wilder and woollier Pre-Code era, Way Out West was freer to be quite suggestive. Lead actor William Haines was one of the few acknowledged homosexual leading men in Hollywood at the time, and if you know where to look, the film is crammed with saucy allusions about him being in a big macho camp. (As per the film’s most noticeable double entendre goes: “I’m the wildest pansy you ever picked.”) It’s not a consistent queer reading of the film, as a romance is forced into the plot and the dialogue loses its sassiness in its last act, but it does add a lot to a film that was effectively banned through the Production Code years and could have been forgotten along the way. Nowadays, well, Way Out West becomes one of the most interesting westerns of the early 1930s because it’s so off-colour.