She (1925)

Director: Leander de Cordova
Writer: H. Rider Haggard
Stars: Betty Blythe, Carlyle Blackwell and Mary Odette

Index: That's a Wrap!

Oh, dear. Much of the point of this project is to highlight just how good and/or interesting feature films made a hundred years ago were. Sure, we’ve made technological strides in the decades since 1925, but silent movies were not just melodrama and wild gesticulation.

Well, except this one. This seventh take and first feature adaptation on H. Rider Haggard’s classic adventure novel She—it was first filmed in 1899 by Georges Méliès as a one minute long trick short—is absolutely melodrama and wild gesticulation.

What’s really frustrating is that it isn’t a lot else! It may be the first huge disappointment that this project has turned up thus far, which is a shame because I’m a fan of Haggard and his novel She, which deepened the lost world genre that he had so memorably pioneered in King Solomon’s Mines.

The most interesting aspect to the picture is that Haggard apparently wrote the title cards himself. However, he died the month before it was released so apparently never got to see it. Unfortunately, they’re not particularly strong, perhaps because the skill needed to write good intertitles isn’t the same skill needed to write good novels. However, nothing else is strong either and it’s hard to find any positives.

I have to say that I’m watching a rather bad copy. It’s the entire 95 minute original version rather than the 69 minute American edit, but it’s so washed out that it’s hard to see any sort of detail and that’s potentially a very big deal. I was so stunned by Flicker Alley’s restoration of Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal and what I could now see happen in a film I’d only experienced in awful public domain copies, that I wrote an entire book about Charlie Chaplin’s first year in film. This is an awful public domain copy.

I would love to see She in a similarly strong restored version and I’ll hold back some of my harsh judgement until then. I can certainly see the potential for a number of scenes to hold a lot more power than they do today.

That’s especially likely because this movie is unusually told almost entirely in long shot, as if we’re intended to focus on the surroundings as much as any of the characters. The tribe in Lybia emerging behind huge jagged rocks may well be a good shot. The especially distant shot of characters walking across a plank between a pair of insanely high mountain ledges may be too. Of course, the pillar of fire that provides eternal life looks like it should be another. All are simply too dark for to really tell, which is especially frustrating when Ayesha prepares a strange pageant in Leo’s honour, for both the living and the dead. I wish I could see it!

Just in case you don’t know the story, it’s a pretty faithful adaptation of Haggard’s novel, published in 1887, merely simplified down to feature film length. And I do mean simplified, because it really preserves the story beats and then gestures melodramatically around them.

We start at Cambridge University, where an old man, Vincey by name, just about makes it to Horace Holly’s place. He shows up in horror movie fashion, his arm entering first, fingers splayed, like he’s the Phantom. However, he’s at the verge of exhaustion and prepared to die except for the bombshell he drops on Holly, an old friend affectionately known as the Baboon.

Vincey has a son, Leo, whose mother died as she gave birth to him. He wants Holly to be his guardian, to direct his education down specific lines and to give him, when he turns twenty-five, the chest that he hauled in with him.

We blink and leap forward that quarter of a century so Leo can open the chest, which tells of his heritage, all the way back to a Greek by the name of Kallikrates a couple of millennia earlier, who looks just like him. A queen called Ayesha fell in love with him but he rejected her for his lover, Amenartes, so she killed him. Amenartes dictates a curse, requiring her son and all his line to avenge Kallikrates by killing Ayesha, who is supposedly immortal.

So off goes Leo to Lybia, with the Baboon and Job, their trusty English butler, to follow a trail laid down for him that leads to Ayesha or She Who Must Be Obeyed. And, because this is like that, we blink and we’re landing in Lybia, the Ethiopian’s Head landmark behind them.

Somehow in this section, Leo gets married. I still can’t quite figure out how it happens and maybe he can’t either, as Carlyle Blackwell, an acclaimed actor, sleepwalks through this film as if he’s totally lost but far too polite to ask anyone for directions. He’s exactly the sort to marry a lady he just met entirely by accident but then live a long life with her rather than point out it was all a misunderstanding.

She’s Ustane, played by Mary Odette, who’s a French actress who resembles a sunburned Tracey Ullman. She overacts horribly but she’s leagues better than Blackwell because at least she acknowledges actually being in the movie and plays the character as whom she was cast. Partway through, I realised that Blackwell has a striking resemblance to H. P. Lovecraft, so it it’s no stretch to imagine Leo confronted by an endless flow of indescribable eldritch horrors as the film runs on, instead of the doors and temples and, well, women, he actually sees.

Surprisingly quickly, we meet the star of the film, Betty Blythe, who specialised in playing exotic, scantily clad characters like the Queen of Sheba and Ayesha. There’s one shot, again a long shot, in which it looks like she’s topless. Another, a rare close-up shot, shows that she’s clad only in a transparent blouse with nothing at all underneath. Eventually she strips off to bathe in the Pillar of Fire, her nakedness kept concealed by her flowing long hair, Eve style.

Ayesha has spent a couple of thousand years mourning the loss of Kallikrates and waiting for his reincarnation to arrive. Guess who that will be? Guess who will hardly even notice and respond like she’s yet another eldritch horror? Guess who’s going to be vanished into thin air because nobody can stand in the way of twue love? Right on all three counts and that’s close to being the entire plot. Trust me, there’s a lot more in the novel.

I’ve seen many European productions—this was a UK production shot in Germany—which were ruthlessly chopped down for American release and I can’t remember appreciating the effort on any other film. Here, I understand it. It’s a long, drawn out film in which the female stars overact with abandon and the male star apparently doesn’t want to be in the movie. It hardly does anything and, at least right now, I can’t see much of what’s happening. Oh, dear.