"Masculine women and feminine men - variance in gender expression has been around for a while!"31 December 1932Music9 mins
Popular musical hall singer and pianist Norah Blaney performs a ditty about the gender nonconforming ways of modern young things for the camera in this early sound film. Blaney was known for her partnership with cellist Gwen Farrar in the late 1920s, performing duets which put an innuendo-laden queer spin on popular (heterosexual) hits.
Scheduled for demolition, Hotel Continental has seen 50 years of romance, intrigue, and tragedy. The last night attracts many nostalgic patrons, including a gangster planning to grab the loot that he hid there many years ago.
The architect Georg Wall is sitting in his spacious Stockholm apartment. He has been waiting several hours since lunch for his significantly younger wife, Lola Wall, to appear.
Thelma and Zazu are on a leisurely excursion in a borrowed car. Thelma lets Zazu drive. When she brakes to avoid a bull pulled along by three rustics, her foot gets stuck and the car crashes through a barn.
Guests at a luxury hotel are horrified when they witness a man literally "disappear into thin air." The vanished man's relatives hire a detective, who goes to the hotel to investigate the disappearance.
A foreword warns against the peril of yellow journalism, and the story illustrates it by following events in the upstate New York town of Cornwall after prominant financier George Ferguson is killed.
