That wide-eyed, shrewd New England sage Ralph Waldo Emerson urges us all “to improve the time.”  Whether I managed to improve that small portion of otherwise “empty” time at the end of a weekday afternoon in New York City by doing what I decided to do, I leave up to the reader.
     A few years ago, at the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, located at Lincoln Center, where I had gone to meet my wife, I found myself with time on my hands as I waited for her to finish up her day’s research into the dramatic career of the American playwright Lillian Hellman.  To kill the intervening half hour, therefore, I did what I would like to think many others have done in similar circumstances: I headed for the card catalogue.  On similar occasions with time on my hands, I had ferreted out some useful links between well-known American writers of fiction or poetry and the dramatic arts, but this time I decided to go in a different direction.  I looked up the word “Portuguese.”  There were entries. 
     One of those entries was headed “The Portuguese Centaur,” a 1911 film.  It referred to a review in The Moving Picture World for 25 November 1911, which reads, in its entirety:
     The Portuguese cavalry depicted in the Eclair release surpasses in dash and execution the crack regiments of Sunny Italy.  The spectator is held in suspense at the sight of these Centaurs of old, riding down deep declivities, bounding over hill and dale; and again, after a precipitous flight down a stone staircase, they speed away, climbing mountains with the ease of antelopes, surmounting, with apparent ease and little effort, all obstacles that lie in their path.  One admires equally horse and rider for sure-footed agility, strength, and graceful equestrian ability (p. 660).
     A second card brought me “Portuguese Army,” a film from the same era.  It led me to a review, again extolling the virtue of the Portuguese cavalry, that appeared in The Moving Picture World for 11 June 1912:
     On the same reel [with “Tit for Tat,” a French comedy] is this series of views of the army of the new republic.  The infantry is not very formidable looking, but the cavalry seems to be in better shape.  These latter views are the popular feature of the picture; they show some good riding. The photography is very fair (p. 1128).
     The third and fourth entries were for “Portuguese Joe” (or “Portugee Joe”), a film released in 1912.  The earlier of two reviews (actually a preview) appeared in The Moving Picture World on 22 June 1912.  “Portuguese Joe” was scheduled to open in the theatre in a week:
     The sailor-men patronize the saloon kept by Portuguese Joe and his pretty wife and they put it over the simple dago in a peculiarly sailor-like fashion.  They get their drinks and are not willing to pay.  One day one of them carried the scheme so far as to get a drink on the nod and then to swallow the contents of the glass, into which he had poured a white powder that he carried with him.  Feigning death, he was dragged out of the hotel by Joe, who was alarmed lest the police should appear and a dead drunk be found on the premises.  So Joe put the man on the street.
     Several of the sailor-men habitues seeing the powder, tasting it and finding it only sugar, pointed out how Joe had been stung.  Joe’s little wife, like himself, conceived a suspicion of sailor-men in the future and Joe thereafter was more careful of his naval guests (p. 1162).
     It is worth noticing that judging from this plot summary, one naturally questions what Joe’s being “Portuguese” had to do with the movie, if anything.  One possible answer is that, as the reviewer indicates, “Portuguese” seems to be synonymous with “dago.”  The term “dago” now refers almost exclusviely to Italians, but at one time it referred-a catch-all-to  the “lower-class” Latin.  For example, in Joseph C. Lincoln’s The Portygee  (1920), a Cape Cod novel, “Portygee” is itself employed to refer to all such Latins.
     The second notice of “Portugee Joe” appeared on 6 July 1912, a week after the movie appeared in the theatre.  Briefer than the preview release, the review reads:
     A lively farce comedy of free drinks.  ‘Portugee Joe’ (Mr. Cumpson) is the keeper of a water-side grog shop. His customers are sailors and they successfully fool him to get free drinks.  It is short, but clever; it is well-acted and photographed and amusing.  The scenes and backgrounds are new and interesting (p. 43).
     The final entry brought me to a couple of reviews of “Portuguese Gal,” a 1930s play about life on a scow with the character indicated in the play’s title called “Pepita Guinaldo,” a most unlikely given name for a woman who presented as Portuguese.  One review described the play as a labored, ineffective comedy, doomed at the start, it seems, for in the second act of its very first performance one of the actors-not the tipsy policeman he was playing, mind you, but the actor himself-died on stage and the curtain dropped when his fellow actors tumbled to the to the fact that his fall was not a part of his act.[i]  When the curtain was again raised, after his body has been removed, the play-as it must-continued to the end of the act and beyond with the director taking over as the policeman, script in hand, to the play’s somewhat anti-climactic end.  The play closed during its pre-Broadway run in Philadelphia and never made it to New York.
     What conclusions might one draw from my hour with these Portuguese “finds” in the still useful card files of the Billy Rose Theatre Collection I leave to the reader’s speculation and judgment.  Perhaps the films will turn up some day in New Jersey, in a warehouse in Jersey City or the Ironbound district of Newark.  That would be fun and, possibly, informative.  And if a script for “The Portuguese Gal” were to turn up, there might well be someone curious enough (and well enough funded) to give it another chance.
     The moral?  Well, man does not live by Fernando Pessoa alone. Or, perhaps, try to get a life.

George Monteiro
March 2012

George Monteiro is Professor Emeritus of English and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University, and he continues as Adjunct Professor of Portuguese Studies at the same university.  He served as Fulbright lecturer in American Literature in Brazil–Sao Paulo and Bahia–Ecuador and Argentina; and as Visiting Professor in UFMG in Belo Horizonte.  In 2007 he served as Helio and Amelia Pedroso / Luso-American Foundation Professor of Portuguese, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.  Among his recent books are Stephen Crane’s Blue Badge of Courage, Fernando Pessoa and Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Literature, The Presence of Pessoa, The Presence of Camões, and Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop and Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Among his translations are  Iberian Poems by Miguel Torga, A Man Smiles at Death with Half a Face by José Rodrigues Miguéis, Self-Analysis and Thirty Other Poems by Fernando Pessoa, and In Crete, with the Minotaur, and Other Poems by Jorge de Sena.  He has also published two collections of poems, The Coffee Exchange and Double Weaver’s Knot. 

[i] The Los Angeles Times decribed the incident in appropriately theatrical terms: “Death stole a scene in the second act of Lenore Ulric’s new play, ‘Portuguese Gal,’ tonight at the Broad-street Theater” (“Actor Succumbs While on Stage,” Sept. 3, 1935, p. 1).

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