A Florida Enchantment (1914) (2024)

Popular reviews

• Review by E yuh ★★ 6

  Did I watch this just to check if Ingo Cubirth was in the credits? Yes

• Review by Zā ★ 1

  Early queer films: Nice!
  Early blatant racism depicted in film: Yikes!

  I was really excited about this film because my professor mentioned in class once. While the queer elements were cool, she failed to mention the rampant use of black face and treatment of those characters in the film. It just made more uncomfortable than anything...

• Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★½ 15

  Silent Summer

  A Florida Enchantment is notable for its gay themes. Cross-dressing and gender-bending are essential to its story. For 1914, the film is swift and light. Though the plot is often unclear. It is also a shame that A Florida Enchantment uses blackface. Though, unlike a film such as The Birth of a Nation, it is not tied to overt political messaging. It is just an ugly feature of its time. A Florida Enchantment is not that impressive and does not possess the purest heart, but it is quite quaint and charming at times.

• Review by naughty budgie 4

  queer cinema

  jarring blackface

• Review by Jim Dooley ★★★ 2

  I recall a tagline of the movie, NASHVILLE, reading “The damnedest thing you ever saw.” Well, the creators of that tagline obviously hadn’t seen A FLORIDA ENCHANTMENT! (I make an exception for the ending. You are going to HATE the ending.)
  
  To put things into perspective, A FLORIDA ENCHANTMENT is a 1914 silent feature film. It came out a year before THE BIRTH OF A NATION. Thorne Smith’s gender-switching novel, TURNABOUT, wouldn’t be published until 1931.
  
  I would love to know what audience reactions were to A FLORIDA ENCHANTMENT at the time of its release.
  
  The story is ridiculous. A woman (Edith Storey), tired of her fiancé’a (Sidney Drew) seeming indifference, discovers a long…

• Review by Julia ★½

  What charms are present in this very early queer work are absolutely swallowed up by constant blackface, a plot stretched out to its absolute breaking point and an ending that undercuts the subversion of the preceding hour. Interesting but only as a historical artifact, not as a piece of entertainment.

• Review by Cate ★ 2

  Lilian dons female attire for the last time and leaves for Florida.

  Of course one of the coolest* treatments of queerness in this era would be housed in a film that's rampantly racist** and with a cop out ending.

  (*Lilian's embrace of his sudden transition to Lawrence, his new-found sexual desire for and prowess with women, his plans to leave town and start a new life under his new identity and bury his old one, how his monopoly with women keeps causing other men to consider each other instead, queerness spreading, the tenderness of the neck kiss he gives to his fiancée, his confidence and happiness.)

  (**The hideousness of blackface portrayals of lusty and brawling 'mulatto' and 'colored' servants, the comically stupid maid/valet who can't follow a simple instruction, how the black character is used for forced medical experimentation without consent, the magical 'tribal' seed that kickstarts the plot).

• Review by Jacob Gehman ★

  I imagine a lot of the people who've watched A Florida Enchantment in the last year are doing so because of its mention in Charlie Kaufman's novel, Antkind. Kaufman—whom you may recognize as the scriptwriter for such landmark films as Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (among others)—drops a lot of film references (the protagonist is a film critic) and A Florida Enchantment is one of them. The in-novel writer is researching his next project, wherein he traces transgender themes throughout film and A Florida Enchantment is, per his judgment, the earliest example.

  At barely over an hour long, and a snappy synopsis that sounds more like a piece of erotica than an actual story,…

• Review by sarah ★

  love the queerness, hate the blackface

• Review by jenn ✍( ಥ ᴗ ಥ ) 2

  living in the 1910s must have sucked sh*t if these were the movies they had lol anyways i watched this because it’s an early queer film, but boy it wasn’t worth it because it has mad blackface and it’s also boring as all hell. but i did get to see some cross dressing old timey folks. totally wasn’t gay enough to be worth my time though 🥴

  at least this is interesting to watch and compare to 2017’s The Wild Boys, which is about boys who eat hairy fruits that eventually make their dicks fall off. ...that was a much more interesting movie lol

  (ok i thought about this more and i guess there were bigger things that sucked sh*t in 1914 then this movie)

• Review by Beryl_Parkey ★★½ 1

  Needs more gay.

• Review by ghostdinosaur ★

  As far as I can tell this is the worst era for American filmmaking. The rise in popularity of feature films meant that everyone began making features, but cinematic storytelling was not yet sophisticated enough to handle these longer running times. So what we get is a lot of movies with a concept that might work in a one or two reel short film, but stretched out to interminable feature length.

  This film is about a couple of women who eat magic seeds that make them start dressing and acting like men. It could have been a cute, potentially even progressive, take on gender politics if told as a short form comedy film. But the length means they have to…