The way she is so loyal to Chico seems to suggest that they are lovers. Is this a winking reality that the film wants to pass on, but of course given the time period cannot?
Also: Bank President Carter at one point calls Chico "fantastic", but the way he uses it does not seem the same as the way it is most often used today. What do you think he meant by it? Exotic?
Absurd, foolish, incredible, outlandish, ridiculous, peculiar and unlikely are all synonyms for fantastic. I don't think the guy meant it in a complimentary way, when he referred to Chico as fantastic.
"Fantastic" does appear to be something not unlike "exotic" here. Or maybe "provincial." Or maybe a euphemism for something a lot less nice that begins with an 'n.'
As for the possibility of their being lovers...hmm, I can't decide (although that cabin they've got near the end on the ship to France is mighty small! Where's the other bed?). It's an unusual onscreen relationship for the time. Women had a bit more range of characters in Golden Age Hollywood than they have had in the past four decades, but even so, women (as in the film, "The Women") were portrayed as catty and in competition with each other, usually over men. Here, Lily and Chico stick by each other. No matter how big the fish Lily catches in her net, she never throws Chico over for any of them, except maybe at the very end.
In a relationship like Mae West's Pre-Code characters and their black maids, it's quite scandalous that the maid is West's sassy confidant, but she's still just a servant. In this film, Chico's about the best-dressed and best-paid woman's maid ever when she shows up dressed to the nines for her day off, and their relationship is one of two best friends sticking up for each other.
Another thing that's really unusual is that when you have a story about prostitution and you have two women friends, the white (or at least "high class") one escapes the exploitation that occurs to the other one. Think of "Shanghai Express," where both Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong are ladies of the night and comrades in arms, but it's Wong who ends up getting raped by the creepy Eurasian pimp/gangster and then killing him. Here, Lily is the one who puts herself out for sexual exploitation so that Chico doesn't have to.
So, there's a kind of closeness between them that doesn't really exist in other relationships between women of the time, but I can't decide if the filmmakers really intended it to be a lesbian relationship or if it's just a rare instance of true platonic women's friendship onscreen in Hollywood.
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Yes, yes, great post, thanks!
Probably the filmmakers pushed things as far as they could get away with considering the censors and what most of the public would tolerate.