Yankee Doodle in Berlin (1919)

The picture stars Bothwell Browne, who was Danish and a female impersonator. (Note that you don’t have to be Scandinavian to be a female impersonator in the movies, but it helps. Just look at Garbo.) 

Anyway, Browne is Capt. Bob White of the American Army who accepts the job of infiltrating the German high command during WWI in the guise of a sexy woman. He will then vamp the Kaiser (Ford Sterling, leader of the Keystone Kops) and his son, the Crown Prince (Mal St. Clair), and seduce from them all their military secrets. Think of him as Mata Harry.

The comedy comes from shameless slapstick and the conceit that the Kaiser is nothing but a henpecked husband who is constantly under the thumb of his frau (Eva Thatcher). Add that to the propagandistic notion that Germany was being ruled by a pack of numb nuts and idiots (played by silent comedy stalwarts Ben Turpin, Chester Conklin, Bert Roach and others) and you have a fast-paced 58 minutes of funhouse slapstick that makes Mel Brooks look like Alan Rickman. 

The picture was directed by F. Richard Jones (The Extra Girl 1923, The Gaucho 1927) and is pure Mack Sennett, loaded with pratfalls, mistaken identities, domineering women, seltzer bottles, sexual innuendo, collapsing beds and more goofy facial hair than a barber shop full of adolescent werewolves. Settle back to laugh, kick off your shoes, lower your brow, and pop the cap off a beer. Keystone, of course. 

Producer and writer Mack Sennett said in an interview that this film was the final word on WW1. It was released just four months after the war had ended. My German grandfather once told me that he emigrated from his homeland because, during WW I, he didn’t want to fight for the Kaiser, who was, in his words, “full of crap.” He saw no use in the war. “When German men can’t stand listening to their wives anymore,” he said, “they pick up a gun and start walking toward France.” You couldn’t disprove either assertion by watching Yankee Doodle in Berlin.