A Florida Enchantment

Remember when Florida was an LGBTQ-friendly vacation spot? Seems so long ago.

This early comedy took on gender roles in a fun and daring way over a century ago. This early feature comedy pokes fun at gender roles in what must have been a daring film for its day. The use of white actors and actresses in blackface is challenging now, but the views of early 20th-Century Florida help make up for it. Filmed on location in Florida from Fort St. Augustine to Silver Springs when the Florida tourism industry was in its infancy, it is easy to see how much the state has changed in the intervening 110 years.

But, perhaps the most fun, is the juxtaposition of current politics in the state with this early satire of gender more than a century be before.

A women finds 4 seeds in an antique chest that turns men into women and vice versa. The fun begins when she takes one and forces her colored maid to take a second and gives the third to a man who annoys her. Plenty of cross dressing and making fun of sexual stereotypes.

Wonderful Florida location shooting, including old Saint Petersburg.

It's incredible I hadn't heard of this movie until very recently.

If you ever wanted a queer film from before WWI then this is about the closest you're going to get.

It isn't really though. It's a neat concept and gimmick but they don't do much with it.

I would have thought that they would have spent more of the third act really establishing character dynamics that display the relationship between the sexes for them to build on later.

Watching this lady make out (barely) with other ladies is the only thing they really do to make her out as *now acting like a man*.

It's about the right length for what it is and the actor in blackface is something that needs to be acknowledged but what is there really to say at this point?

A worthy movie if, like me, you're doing a "one movie for every year" kick.

Wanted it to be funny, waited for it to be funny, not even remotely amusing. Could I have done better? Certainly not. Should this have been better? Decidedly so!

This early feature-length film, "A Florida Enchantment", has a novel and goofy story of a woman discovering old seeds that reverse one's gender. She and her servant take one each and, supposedly, become men (although they're still played by the same actresses and, often, appear to the other characters to be female when they're wearing dresses). She also gives one to her fiancé, and he is thus feminized. The narrative, however, is lacking beyond the comedy of genders exaggerating the characteristics of the opposite sex. There are party and travel scenes that don't progress the plot. This gender-bending comedy probably would've fit the one or two-reel format better than it does the hour-plus length. In fact, an early short film, Alice Guy's "The Consequences of Feminism" (Les Résultats du féminism)(1906) was a similar gender-role-reversal farce. Additionally, this narrative suggests some homosexuality and, especially, cross-dressing, but not in any daring way, but rather as an extension of the gender-reversal amusement.

The gender transformations are less than convincing, but I suppose that doesn't matter. More bothersome is the servant characters in blackface and the otherwise rather racist characterizations of blacks in this film. The goggled eyes and jokes based on the servant's stupidity or the lead character striking her maid made valet are insulting rather than funny. Otherwise, the film is of little cinematic interest. It's rather prosaically filmed. There are a few abrupt cuts, which don't distinguish the passing of time (i.e. direct cuts instead of fades or something similar). Overall, "A Florida Enchantment" is, at best, mildly amusing in parts.