Phil-for-Short

Oscar Apfel: Phil-for-Short (1919) with Evelyn Greeley. Photo:Wikipedia.

Oscar Apfel: Phil-for-Short (1919) with Evelyn Greeley. Photo: IMDb.

PHIL-FOR-SHORT (World-Peerless, US 1919)
    Dir: Oscar Apfel; sc: Clara Beranger, Forrest Halsey; ph: Max Schneider; cast: Evelyn Greeley, Charles Walcott, James Furey, Hugh Thompson; rel. 2.6.1919.
    35 mm, [5742 ft] / 5670 ft /20 fps/ 76 min, Library of Congress.
    Grand piano: Donald Sosin.
   Viewed at Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM): Fort Lee, 12 Oct 2004

Richard Koszarski (GCM): "A delightful proto-screwball comedy featuring one of World’s most durable stars, Evelyn Greeley. Damophilia Illington (Phil for short) lives a double life as a boy while pursuing woman-hating academic John Alden. Alden (who bears a remarkable resemblance to former Princeton University historian Woodrow Wilson) prefers to read Sappho in the original. Can Phil, whose own understanding of the classics goes beyond mere theory, tear this desiccated intellectual away from his library? Except for the DeMille films, few of these postwar marital comedies are familiar to modern audiences. If the rest are anything like this one, historians clearly have their work cut out for them." – Richard Koszarski (GCM)

AA: This comedy is certainly special and different, already covering some of the same territory that Katharine Hepburn occupied in her 1930s films with George Cukor and Howard Hawks. The woman-hating professor John Alden (Charles Walcott) reads Sappho's poems in the original classical Greek. Damophilia (Evelyn Greeley) "solved the problem of her name by calling herself Phil for short". "Dress like a boy, work like a boy". She also dances old Greek dances. But the film is not mere superficial amusement. There is wisdom in it about being civilized in an internalized way. The classic Greek philosophy is alive today. Damophilia practises cross-dressing to escape suffocation. A lovely heart vignette. "Teach me discipline". This leads to Bringing Up Baby (Katharine Hepburn / Cary Grant) which fails to absorb all the implications of Phil-for-Short. Actual duration of the screening: 1:22'10" = 83 min  ***