She
Dir: Lansing C. Holden and Irving Pichel
1935
Legend Films, 2007 release
“ . . . the worst picture I ever made. . . . I cheated a lot
on ‘She’.” – Merian C. Cooper, producer
“My empire is of the imagination.” – Ayesha, She Who Must Be
Obeyed
 |
| Helen Gahagan as Ayesha. |
The 1935 RKO movie version of She, produced by Merian C.
Cooper on the heels of his greatest success, King Kong, sits buried in the
heap of Hollywood’s fascinating failures. However, this ambitious project was
important at least to the late special-effects master Ray Harryhausen, who
worked strenuously to restore it to its original length and to colorize it, in
accordance with Cooper’s initial plan.
The 1935 She is a catchall of hokum and wonder, thoroughly
and indiscriminately intermixed. Its visual inanities, patently false but still
breathtaking landscapes, and Art Deco conceits all combine to create a fever
dream of a fantasy that is still powerful in a hallucinatory way.
It is best remembered, if at all, by the mainstream as the
film debut AND farewell of the actress who played She, Helen Gahagan, who was
blamed for the production’s revenue shortfall of $180,000 on a $500,000
budget.
However, blame might more accurately be placed at the cold
feet of the usual suspects – RKO’s studio administrators. But did what many
thought was major miscasting, a budget halved, sets and costumes chosen for
color film but forced to be shot in black and white, and a stiff script doom the
movie to failure?
“If you make fantasy too real, it loses the quality of a
dream,” Harryhausen once said, and the 1935 She is the best filmed version of
the story to date, due precisely to its unreal, madly stylized atmosphere.
The popularity of Haggard’s 1887 novel (83 million copies
printed as of 1965, making it one of the most widely read works of fiction in
history) would seem to make any adaptation a winner, but all nine more-or-less
loose film versions and derivatives (Vengeance of She, anyone?) have failed
to make a strong impression.
 |
| The Gates of Kor (repurposed from "King Kong") |
In the original text, Haggard continues to build on the
“Lost World” genre that he founded with King Solomon’s Mines in 1885. In She, a dead
father’s legacy gives his son, Leo Vincey, an ancient map that describes a lost
kingdom in the heart of Africa. Leo and his mentor Professor Horace Holley
travel there, finding the lost city of Kor and its inhabitants in catacombs
beneath a dormant volcano.
The civilization is ruled over by Ayesha --
She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, an immortal, mysterious, and powerful woman who has
waited 2,000 years for the return of her lover Kallikrates, whom she slew in a
jealous rage. She believes Leo is that reincarnation of Kallikrates, and
eliminates her competition for Leo, the native girl Ustane.
Ayesha now tells of her plan to enter the larger world and
conquer it – and Holly has no doubt but that she can. She then takes Leo and
Holley to the pillar of flame that confers immortality, ordering Leo into it so
that they can be together for eternity. Leo is afraid, so she steps into the
flame, as she first did 2,000 years ago, to reassure him – but a second exposure
to the flame causes her to age immediately, crumbling to dust before their
horrified eyes.
 |
| Ayesha ages. |
“She” is a great story, painfully written. Rider was not out
for complexity or subtle effect; everyone says exactly what’s on their minds,
no character development occurs. Occasional bursts of sophomoric speculation
and philosophy, including a pretty constant stream of misogyny, out of the
mouth of Haggard’s narrator Holly, bog down the action. Haggard’s eye for
atmosphere and description, however stilted, combined with the fantastic
elements he conceives, sustains the reader enough to get him or her through to
the end.
Haggard was a staunch imperialist. Aside from his respect
for the Zulu people, developed during a seven-year sojourn in South
Africa, his books are riddled with what is considered now an appalling,
matter-of-fact racism. In She, blacks and Muslims are fit only for service
and as cannibal food; She herself indulges in a long anti-Semitic rant at one
point. Like most adventure stories of the period, Haggard is at once entranced
by the strange sights and cultures revealed by Western explorers, and
determined to show that white men are naturally inclined and intended to
dominate, document, classify, exploit, subordinate, and assimilate these
“foreign” discoveries.
 |
| Nigel Bruce is agog as natives try to make a Hot Pocket out of his cranium. |
If She is a presentiment of women’s liberation, it is a
nightmare vision of it. The appeal to man and boy, Haggard’s primary readers,
is the dizzying fantasy of domination by an omnipotent, sexually hypnotic woman
– a pornographic Queen Victoria. Holly’s misogynistic narrative makes it clear
that he is repulsed and terrified by She, but compelled to shadow and obey her
due to her beauty, bearing, and psychic power. Mike Madrid, in his excellent book Supergirls, succinctly describes her –
. . . an intoxicating savage princess . . . a creature that provokes
both fear and lust. Ayesha was the ultimate fantasy of civilized man: the
beautiful, savage white queen, ruling a kingdom unhindered by the laws of
modern morality.”
Ayesha is much more of the femme fatale, the enchantress,
demon-lover, akin to Lilith, Lamia, Circe, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Hans
Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen, and the heroines of operas such as Turandot and The Makropoulos Case. She is the timeless rock upon which men crack their
souls; her image debases into the stereotype of silent screen star Theda Bara
and other irresistible “Vamps,” bad girls, and the like.
 |
| Ayesha and Leo. |
If Ayesha is the anima-shadow of Haggard, she enables him to
release his inner, inconquerable drama queen. Ayesha is a powerful projection
of male desire/terror onto the female – woman as a temptress whose caresses will
drive men mad, make them do her bidding, drain their seminal power through
sexual vampirism, and then kill them . . . usually lopping something off them
to boot as a symbolic castration, as in the stories of Judith, Delilah, and Salome.
In She, Ayesha is the source of both sex and death – infinitely, absurdly
faithful, possessed of never-changing beauty.
(Rider does have an accurate sense of how limited Ayesha’s
appeal would be to women -- in the novel, Holly writes: “We never had the
advantage of a lady’s opinion on Ayesha, but I think it quite possible that she
would have regarded the Queen with dislike, would have expressed her
disapproval in a more or less pointed manner, and ultimately have got herself
blasted.”)
Haggard was not averse to spinning out a money-making
concept; there are four Ayesha books in all, just as there are 19 Alan
Quatermain (the narrator of King Solomon’s Mines) novels – and even a
crossover work that puts Ayesha and Quatermain together.
The book inspired
film adaptations, almost as soon as film was invented – seven in the silent era
alone. It would take a showman with an epic appetite to do justice to Haggard’s
story.
Merian C. Cooper, producer of the 1935 She, was compelled
to live on the adrenaline edge. A hellion who was kicked out of Annapolis
during his senior year of 1914, he worked as a seaman, a journalist, and worse,
and when World War I came, he became an aviator, enduring being shot down by the Germans and
imprisoned. After the war ended, he joined the Poles in fighting Russia's new ruling Soviets,
and was once again shot down and stuck in a prison camp.
Freed at last, Cooper began to make his name as an
explorer, focusing on the still-medieval delights of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia and
Eritrea). Finally, Cooper, his friend cameraman Ernest B. Schoedsack, and
reporter (and spy) Marguerite Harrison, decided to document the lives of nomadic
Persian herdsmen, creating one of the first ethnographic documentary feature
films. (These were still the days of The Great White Hunter, Frank Buck and
“Bring ‘em Back Alive,” and Lowell Thomas “with Lawrence in Arabia.”) Grass (1925) was a runaway hit, spurring a thematic sequel Chang set in Thailand,
and propelling Cooper and Schoedsack into the movie business.
The two freelanced the 1929 silent Four Feathers for
Paramount and then collaborated on the mutual high point of their careers, King Kong. Now both served as screenwriters, directors, producers. Cooper’s
looming tenure at the top of RKO seemed to presage more hit projects to come.
Cooper replaced a resigning David O. Selznick as head of the
studio almost exactly on the day of King Kong’s release, March 7, 1933. His
ambitious plans for RKO were never realized due to a number of factors.
First, RKO went into equity receivership shortly before he
took the helm – the Depression had hit all Hollywood studios hard, and as the
weakest of the “Big Five” major studios, RKO hit bankruptcy. Budgets were
slashed and dozens of talented RKO employees were let go.
Next, Cooper suffered a heart attack six months into the
job, keeping him out until mid-December, 1933; another health issue compelled
another long vacation in Hawaii (which also served as a belated honeymoon) for
Cooper and his wife. When he returned in May, 1934, he resigned his RKO
position, but retained the commitment to make for them two big-budget
spectaculars in the newly-developed three-strip Technicolor – She and The
Last Days of Pompeii, another effects-heavy historical epic based on the title
(but not the plot) of the 1834 novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Schoedsack would direct
the latter.
Despite Kong's success, Cooper’s elaborate plans for
bigger and more elaborate features, incorporating the latest technological
advances – in a way, he was the James Cameron of his time, in more ways than
one (1) -- were subverted by RKO’s death grip on the purse strings.
In fact, after Cooper returned from Hawaii he found that,
instead of having $1,000,000 to spend individually on “She” and “The Last Days
of Pompeii,” he had exactly half as much to spend on each production. Cooper
had intended for “She” to be the first feature film shot entirely in
three-strip Technicolor; instead, that privilege went to the prestige
production “Becky Sharp,” by the same studio, later in the same year.
Instead of securing Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich as
Ayesha and Joel McCrea as Leo, he went with the less-known and more affordable
Broadway actress Helen Gahagan (Douglas – she and actor Melvyn Douglas were
newly married at the time) and Randolph Scott, who was just moving from
supporting roles to leads.
 |
| Helen Mack on Ayesha's terrace -- note RKO's signature black parquet flooring. |
Ruth Rose, a former naturalist married to Schoedsack, who
penned the script for Kong, adapted Rider’s novel to the screen. Little was
changed from the original, save for changing the location of the lost city of
Kor from central Africa to the Arctic (presumably on orders from producer
Cooper, who was probably looking to vary his spectacular film effects) and,
most importantly, altering the romantic subplot.
In the novel, Leo is wived by comely native girl Ustane
before reaching Kor; later Ayesha kills Ustane with her mental powers, and
makes love to Leo, quite literally over her dead body. In the film, Leo is
beguiled by the sweet, spunky orphan Tanya (Helen Mack) en route to Kor. This
being Hollywood, Tanya is imperiled but not destroyed, and lives happily ever
after with Leo in what seems at the fadeout to be a hymn to domesticity, and a
firm turn of the back to wonder and mystery. In this version of “She,” true,
mortal love conquers all.
 |
| Tonya's sacrifice. |
Matthew C. Hoffman, in his notes for his “Screen Deco” film
series, notes astutely that Van Nest Polglase, long-time RKO art director, had
supervised the design of previous shiny, stylized productions such as the Astaire/Rodgers
vehicle The Gay Divorcee. The pleasures of geometry, symmetry, high-contrast
shading, and the high-gloss, slick surfaces of plastic, Bakelite, and chrome
are indulged as nowhere else in the film designs of the period. (Pre-production
artwork indicates a much softer, more organic design for the film.)
Under Polglase’s supervision, special effects wizard Vernon
Walker, who made his reputation overcoming the mind-numbing difficulties of
camera effects for King Kong, took up the challenge yet again, and the 1935 She is a masterfully crafted blend of process shots, matte paintings, and set
design. The fact that designs were made with color in mind, designs that were
scotched at the last minute, means that the question of whether or not to show
what its color production might have looked like is a good one.
 |
| A matte shot of the throne room. |
Legend’s two-disc set contains the colorized and
black-and-white versions, an interview with Ray Harryhausen, a
self-congratulatory and somewhat defensive Legend feature on the colorization
process (hey, they’ve been fighting critical disdain and creator outrage since
Day 1), an interview with Cooper archives curator James V’Arc, key scenes from
silent-era productions of She, production stills, promotional art and
material, a photo gallery, the original She storybook, an interview with
composer John Morgan, freshly composed trailers for this and other Legend
re-releases, and a reel of “sci-fi toy” commercials from the Space Age.
The digital colorization process we see in this DVD release
still lends only a muted, musty tonal quality to the onscreen palette,
 |
| Randolph Scott as Leo, in color -- sepia tones . . . |
but it
gives us at least a hint of what might have been. Décor, dress and props are a
steroidal concoction of styles – Deco underlying a mad blend of Oriental,
Mesoamerican, Egyptian, Sumerian, Atlantean – and the baroquely wrought spears
look remarkably like those used in
The Wizard of Oz four years later. Hoffman
describes this amalgam succinctly as “Barbaric Moderne”; blogger Ryan Harvey
expands, “
She’s kingdom is a 1930s wonder of faux-futurism,
a collision of art deco and the Roman Empire that only grand old Hollywood
could have crafted.”
The result is kitsch – a style that is both grandiose and
bargain-basement, which simultaneously repels the savvy viewer due to its
blatant artificiality and draws us in with its audaciously straight-faced
assertion of itself. The temples of Kor rise from the smooth, glossy black
floors of the RKO soundstage. At one point, Ayesha’s high priest Bilali is seen dressed up like a
miniature replica of the Chrysler Building. Yet in deadly seriousness the story
unfolds. The intensity of the creators’ efforts and the mismatched design
elements give the whole of the 1935 She a MORE dreamlike quality – that of the
tattered, inconsistent, and unfinished constructs of the sleeping mind.
A key example of this cognitive dissonance is the
sacrificial dance sequence towards the end of the film. Artists of the period
were obsessed with primitivism. The art, music, and dance of non-Western
cultures was explored, exploited, and assimilated – an aesthetic colonialism.
This “primitive ritual” was choreographed by Benjamin
Zemach, a Russian dancer whose early work with the Habima Theater of Moscow
exposed him to the avant-garde strategies of Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov, and Meyerhold.
After his migration to America, he was associated with Martha Graham in New
York. Zemach’s vocabulary of movement is highly reminiscent of the wide stance,
expansion/contraction, and angular, rhythmic thrust that characterizes Graham’s
work.
Anyone familiar with 20th-century dance may find
it She’s pseudo-anthropological rite ludicrous (in fact, it won the film its
only Oscar nomination). . . but it percolates into the collective subconscious
and becomes part of how future such dance/events are captured on film (Cobra
Woman, 1944; The Ten Commandments, 1956; The Indian Tomb, 1959; Cleopatra, 1963 . . . ). As is
usual with the human mind, the gaudy misperception becomes the received truth.
Another aid to the dissociative feel of the film is the fact
that two directors were used – Irving Pichel and Lansing Holden. Pichel was a
striking actor who made his directing debut three years earlier, sharing chores
with Shoedsack on The Most Dangerous Game in 1932. They were slated to work on She together again, but Schoedsack, feeling the material was too difficult to be
filmed convincingly, bowed out. Holden, a World War I flying ace, was a budding
architect and set designer whose first directing job this was. I presume that
Holden handled the technically challenging shots and Pichel handled the actors.
Would She be more memorable had Schoedsack stuck it out?
And what about the casting? Garbo’s smoldering remoteness
might have been stronger than Helen Gahagan’s more imperious directness of
manner. However, Gahagan performs as directed, with assurance and grace.
Randolph Scott is stiff as Leo. In Scott’s defense, he has not much to work
with, and is at the beginning of his career, still playing hunky secondary
roles. After decades of experience, he learned how to project complex emotions from under the mask of polite reserve
his characters always wore.
Nigel Bruce does his best in the thankless role of Holly,
who is tasked to run through the exposition and ask all pertinent questions.
Bruce had not yet gotten stuck in his usual bumbling, silly-ass-Englishman
characterization, used to great effect in the Sherlock Holmes film series with
Basil Rathbone.
The real puzzler is the casting of Gustav von Seyffritz as
high priest Bilali. Although he made his reputation in horror roles and
grotesque character parts, his accent is nearly impenetrable, and his hawkish
profile is not imposing here.
 |
| Bilali |
It shouldn’t be forgotten that this was composer Max
Steiner’s third score for Cooper, after The Most Dangerous Game and King
Kong; the latter is considered the first and still the exemplary
“wall-to-wall” film score, complete with motifs. Steiner’s seemingly
inexhaustible genius is in full force here, showing Hollywood that a pervasive,
underlying opera-like music soundtrack can charge the movie with rhythm, emotion,
and meaning.
The 2007 release of Harryhausen’s restored version gives us
not only a look at what might have been, but shows us a conceptual template
that would be imitated in countless adventure/fantasy films, down to the
present -- even inspiring the look of another classic villainess and the creation
of the superheroine.
The 1935 She made an impression, not in and of itself, but
as a stylistic template. The most immediate and marked influence on Hollywood
was the design for the gown and headdress of the Wicked Queen in Walt Disney’s Snow White in 1937. It’s pretty much a straight lift from Cooper’s
production. The icy hauteur of Ayesha was transmitted, without credit.
1937 also saw the birth of the first comic-book heroine,
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle – “The mother goddess of jungle girls,” according
to Mike Madrid. Conceived of as the female answer to Tarzan, Will Eisner
dreamed her up, and derived her name from She. (2)
A wide range of assertive female characters were emerging
culturally – in literature, film, pulps, and comics -- and as a royal figure
like Ayesha, Sheena similarly rules over her swath of jungle, never leaving to
interact with the civilized world, as Madrid states: “Sheena embodied the
colonial concept of the naturally intelligent and rational Caucasian, looking
after her gullible black underlings”.
Like She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed’s, Sheena’s kingdom remains
insular, womblike, a dream-world in which values do not change and all
relationships ossify – a dead end. Later decades would bring forth more
balanced, less isolate fictional females.
In a larger sense, “She’”s aesthetic heritage is pervasive.
Fantasy always seems cobbled of fragments of the ancient and imagined future;
we build our imaginary worlds with familiar building blocks. Cooper’s production,
addicted to gigantism, melodrama, cheesy splendor, beefcake and sinuous native
girls, and a magic sense of nature, would invade every pore of the
sensibilities of filmmakers to come.
As a project that fell between two chairs, the 1935 “She” maintains
a sense of wonder, not despite its tatterdemalion splendors but precisely
because of them.
- In 1938, Cooper proposed a
film called “War Eagles” that took place in a lost world hidden in the
Antarctic, “a super-Western of the air in which instead of riders of the
plains on horseback, we will have wild riders of the air on giant
prehistoric eagles.” [Vaz, pg. 278] The outline climaxes with the lost
world’s eagle-riders saving New York City from an enemy air force. Lost
world, Native-American-type protagonists, a fight against technologically
superior invaders from the air -- sound anything like Avatar?
Familiar faces, final fates
Co-director IRVING PICHEL ran afoul of the Second Red Scare
in the 1950s. He was named one of the “Hollywood Nineteen” and, though never
called on to testify in front of the infamous House Un-American Activities
Committee, he was blacklisted. He left the country and directed a few films
outside the United States, never regaining his reputation.
Star HELEN GAHAGAN went on to a national political career,
and infamously clashed with and lost to Richard Nixon, whom she christened
“Tricky Dick,” in the 1950 California Senate campaign.
HELEN MACK left acting and film after a few years, becoming
a producer, director, and writer for radio. She helmed such shows as “Richard
Diamond, Private Detective” and “The Saint,” and later wrote for television.
SAM HINDS (John Vincey) spent his career as authority
figure. He will be best remembered for playing George Bailey’s father in It’s
a Wonderful Life.
 |
| Sam Hinds |
RAY “CRASH” CORRIGAN (uncredited Guard) became the hero of
several B-Westerns and serials, and specialized in costumed ape imitations in
later films. His “Corriganville” Western film set brought him largesse as
Western film and TV production peaked in the 1950s.
JIM THORPE (uncredited Captain of the Guard) spent decades
after his Olympic triumphs as a Hollywood bit player, among many other
hand-to-mouth jobs.
NOBLE JOHNSON (uncredited Amahaggar chief), though
African-American, was compelled to play exotic villains, natives, “Latins,”
Indian chiefs, and the like, throughout his career. He took his earnings and used
them to produce films for African-American audiences, the so-called “race”
films that were shown exclusively to non-white crowds.
 |
| Noble Johnson |
BENJAMIN ZEMACH (Dance director) later choreographed the
groundbreaking pro-union musical revue Pins and Needles on Broadway in 1937,
as well as Kurt Weill’s epic opera/oratorio on Jewish history, The Eternal
Road, the same year.
MERIAN C. COOPER never equaled the fame of King Kong;
however, in 1947 he formed Argosy Pictures with his friend, director John Ford,
and produced most of Ford’s masterpieces – including his Cavalry Trilogy (Fort
Apache, Rio Grande, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,) The Searchers, The
Quiet Man, and Wagon Master. Ironically, Cooper was a supporter of
anti-Communist efforts in Hollywood in the 1950s, but gave work to blacklisted
Irving Pichel, who can be heard as the narrator in Ford’s 1949 She Wore a
Yellow Ribbon.
Robert Englund is best known
for his portrayal of Freddy Krueger in the "Nightmare on Elm Street"
film series. (I saw him, and he stuck in my mind, as Whitey in his first film,
the awful 1974 hick-trauma saga "Buster and
Billie," which of course we saw at the drive-in.) Englund, a classically
trained actor, has brought a strong, complex, and even . . . sympathetic? . . .
charm to the part. Like the Golden Age horror actors, he gives this and other
roles a combination of watchability, gravitas, and just enough distancing to
give the role of fillip of ironic humor. It seems to that, unlike other
typecast actors who bemoan their fates, Englund has retained a healthy sense of
balance, using his niche fame to enable him to do the projects he's interested
in, building a satisfying career.
