A Film Canon

Beggars Of Life is torn between two categories of marginality - the sexual precociousness of Louise Brooks, which always finds itself simultaneously endorsed and spurned by 'acceptable' society, here personified as a lecherous father; and the drifting homelessness of 'tramp writer' Jim Tully, upon whose memoirs the narrative is based, and best defined in terms of a communal sexual illiteracy that is tantamount to homosocial attraction, equally evident in the chief tramp's obscene advances, and the protagonist's instinct to treat Brooks as a brother, rather than a lover. This explicates Brooks' outrageous sexuality for what it is - an assumption of masculinity - by placing her in a situation where she can only gain any kind of sexual currency after becoming a man, or at least making some gesture of manhood, most explicitly by playing the majority of her role in drag. Not only does this mitigate her transgressive appeal, but it reduces the tramps' mileu to its sexual economy, at the expense of its logistical challenges, many of which are interesting merely by virtue of their cinematic potential, such as the habit of catching rides on freight trains, which Wellman (incompletely) exploits through so many creative variations on the 'phantom ride'.