Australian
Screen

Clip description

Dad (Bert Bailey) and Dave (Fred MacDonald) arrive at Cecille’s dress shop to inspect their new inheritance. After some confusion with the mannequins, they meet the floorwalker, Mr Entwhistle (Alec Kellaway), a flamboyantly effeminate man who shows them around. Dave mistakes one of the models, Myrtle (Muriel Flood), for a mannequin, but he likes what he sees.

Curator’s notes

This is probably the first full-scale 'sissy’ role in Australian sound cinema. Alec Kellaway was the younger brother of Cecil Kellaway, who starred in It Isn’t Done in 1937 for Cinesound (see this site). Alec had appeared in The Broken Melody (1937), made just before It Isn’t Done (1937), but in a very different kind of role, as a Cockney thief.

The homosexual 'sissy’ was a relatively common stereotype in American comedies of the 1930s, although in somewhat more disguised form. They were often prissy Englishmen, rather than transparently gay (as in some of the Fred Astaire films). There was a similar tradition of effeminate Englishmen in Australian comedy, going back to the silent era, but Alec Kellaway’s performance here set a new benchmark – if that is the right word. The humour in this film is more openly ribald than in any earlier Cinesound film (see clip one), and the depiction of Entwhistle appears to be part of that new boldness on Ken Hall’s part. Entwhistle was certainly popular, because Kellaway played him again in Dad Rudd, MP (1940), the last of the Dad and Dave films, two years later.