At her aunt's house she reads the note which explains that the seeds change men into women and vice versa.

However, as Lillian and her fiancé are shown attracted both to each other and to the same sex (albeit at different times), the film has also been considered to have the first documented appearance of bisexual characters in an American motion picture.

[15] The film includes white actors in blackface,[7] an aspect carefully dissected in Siobhan B. Somerville's book Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture.

[24] In a masters thesis for University of Florida, Joel Christian Adams analyzed the film, arguing it is transformed from the original novel, noting the connection to consumer capitalism at the time, argued it has become an "ur-text within the emergent history of lesbian and gay visibility", and said the transformations of the film's characters come within a "seemingly fixed system of gender and racial assignment.

[27] Historian Julio Capó Jr. also argued that the film introduced viewers to "gender and sexual transgression" which were possible in the cities and resort towns of Florida, including dances reminiscent of those in Chicago and New York City, and stated that "cultural understandings of race" influenced the message communicated by the film.

She also stated the film missed the mark of "codified deviance or sexual subversion" present in previous adaptations of the original novel.