|
Synopsis:
Egypt, 350 B.C. Amenartes (Viola Alberti),
the pharaoh’s daughter, tries to persuade Kallikrates (James Cruze),
a priest of Isis with whom she is in love, to elope with her. The
priest struggles against his passion for the girl, but finally
succumbs to temptation. The two flee Egypt, travelling together for two years, until
their boat lands upon a rocky shore of Africa.
Unbeknownst to the pair, they have entered a realm ruled by a
mysterious immortal woman known only as “She Who Must Be Obeyed”
(Marguerite Snow) who, via her mystical powers, becomes aware of the
travellers. Summoning up a vision of the two, ‘She’ gazes intently
at Kallikrates, and conceives for him a desperate passion. ‘She’
sends her guards to bring the travellers to her presence. When they
arrive, ‘She’ hurries excitedly towards Kallikrates, but he moves
with deliberation to Amenartes’ side. Recovering herself, ‘She’
tells the visitors of a magical flame capable of bestowing eternal
life upon those who bathe in it. After conferring, Kallikrates and
Amenartes accept her offer to lead them to the flame, although at
the last moment, Amenartes decides to leave her baby with a servant
girl. When the three reach the flame, however, ‘She’ declares her
love for Kallikrates. He rejects her, and the outraged ‘She’ strikes
him dead. The distraught Amenartes reclaims her child and flees,
swearing that her descendants will return to take vengeance upon
‘She’. ‘She’, meanwhile, preserves the dead body of her love, vowing
to wait through eternity for his reincarnation....
England, 1885 A.D. The orphaned Leo
Vincey becomes the ward of Horace Holly (William C. Cooper). Years
later, on Leo’s twenty-fifth birthday, he comes into possession of
family documents, including a letter from his parents, in which he
is charged to travel to Africa, to find and destroy ‘She’....
Comments:
After a couple of false starts as a
novelist, in 1885 Henry Rider Haggard drew upon both his own
experiences as an official in British colonial Africa, and the
public’s ongoing fascination with various archaeological discoveries
in Egypt and events such as the excavation of Troy, and published
“King Solomon’s Mines”. This hugely popular novel was almost
single-handedly responsible for the birth of the fantasy of the
“lost world”, in which explorers, generally English, would stumble
across ancient cultures somehow cut off from the rest of the world,
discover fabulous treasures, make repeated hair’s-breadth escape
from threats of death, and in most cases bring about the utter
ruination of the civilisations that had been doing just fine for
thousands of years before the arrival of the story’s “heroes”. Leave
it to the British. Haggard himself was swift to take advantage of
his initial success, following “King Solomon’s Mines” with a sequel,
“Allan Quatermain”, and with “She”, a tale of yet another lost
world, its beautiful, immortal, evil queen, Ayesha, “She Who Must Be
Obeyed”, and the English explorer whom Ayesha recognises as the
reincarnation of her long-lost love.
The
tale of “She” proved to hold an irresistible attraction for the
embryonic motion picture industry, being filmed no less than eight
times worldwide during the silent era, as well as being spoofed in
1915’s His
Egyptian Affinity. It was first the basis for a
short film made by Georges Méliès in 1899,
La Colonne De Feu,
which concentrated upon the visual possibilities of the eternal
flame that sustains and ultimately destroys Ayesha. The first
American version was made in 1908 by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison
Company; sadly, this appears to be a lost film. The story was next
tackled by the Thanhouser Company, and it is this production,
released in December of 1911, that is the oldest surviving version
of the tale. Thanhouser was one of the most important production
houses during the development of the cinema in America. Based in
New Rochelle, New York,
the company turned out over a thousand films in the period between
its founding in 1909 and 1917, when it ceased operation. Between
these bookends, the company’s original owners sold their interest in
it to the Mutual Film Corporation, famous firstly for being the home
of the Keystone Cops and Charlie Chaplin during this period, and
secondly for in 1915 being on the receiving end of the Supreme Court
ruling that declared film to be a business and not an art form, and
therefore not protected by the First Amendment; a ruling not
overturned until 1952. (Today, Thanhouser Company Film Preservation,
Inc., run by the grandson of the company’s founders, is even more
important, being devoted to the acquisition and preservation of
silent films.)
Although the film is not without its points, it is perhaps fair to
say that She
is more interesting than good. In this era of two-reel film-making,
literary adaptations were of necessity superficial; yet there is a
wide gulf between, for example, James Searle Dawley’s
Frankenstein, which
manages in a brisk quarter of an hour to hit upon most of the main
headings of the tale it is telling, and this frequently confusing
rendering of She.
Perhaps an assumption was made that the audience was so very
familiar with Haggard’s novel, there was no need to put much effort
into narrative coherence. At any event, the existing film gives the
impression, rightly or wrongly, of having been rather carelessly cut
down from a longer version. What remains is skeletal at best, and
there is a bewildering arbitrariness about the material that was
left in – such as the devotion of a title card, in a film that
desperately needs every title card it can get to explain what is
going on, to the cheerful announcement that Leo Vincey’s guardian,
Horace Holly, is “for his ugliness known as ‘The Monster’” – an
announcement, by the way, that is as untrue as it is unnecessary:
Holly has a silly beard, granted, but this
is supposed to be
Victorian England!
Equally
strange is that easily half of
She’s
running-time is devoted to its prologue. We open in Egypt, with the pharaoh’s daughter,
Amenartes, successfully seducing her priest-lover, Kallikrates, away
from his religious duties and persuading him to elope with her. The
two run from the temple to a caravan that Amenartes, the confident
little minx, has waiting; and as we watch them flee
Egypt, we learn that these two are
surprisingly progressive in their ideas: while
he rides a camel,
she walks. Two
years pass in the twinkling of a title card, and the couple and
their retinue – and
their baby – end up landing a boat upon the eastern coast of Africa,
near a rock that we are assured is called “Negro’s Head”: a slightly
unlikely name, it seems to me, for an African landmark of 348 B.C.
(In the novel the rock is referred to as being “like the head of an
Ethiopian”; it is Horace Holly, in his role as narrator, who uses
the term “negro’s head”.) The arrival is sensed by the mysterious
‘She’, who uses a nifty device like a private cinema screen to
observe Kallikrates and Amenartes, and instantly conceives a fatal
passion for the former priest. When the travellers are brought into
her chamber, ‘She’ behaves as if Amenartes didn’t exist, to the
displeasure of both her visitors. Kallikrates and Amenartes recover
their good humour, however, when, in the most casual way imaginable,
‘She’ offers them immortality. Thanks to the messy execution of this
scene, you would be forgiven for thinking that ‘She’ does this as a
kind of welcome gift for every casual visitor who happens to come
her way, in lieu of a muffin basket, perhaps, or a nice selection of
toiletries.
And
“messy” barely begins to describe the construction of the next
sequence where, if not for another helpful title card –
‘She’ strikes the
Egyptian dead when he spurns her love – we would not
have a clue what was going on. Instead, we cut from ‘She’ in the
eternal flame to Amenartes fleeing in horror; neither the offer of
love nor its spurning nor the striking dead is anywhere in evidence.
We see ‘She’ kneeling mournfully over Kallikrates’ body, which she
will subsequently preserve and keep in her chamber for the next
twenty centuries, and then cut to the bereaved Amenartes, who
dedicates her son – “or his descendants” – to the eventual
destruction of ‘She’.
And as
it turns out, it’s just as well that Amenartes included that
“descendants” clause. The story here leaps over two thousand years,
stops briefly to show us the orphaned child, Leo Vincey, becoming
the ward of the reluctant Horace Holly, then lurches forward again
to Leo’s twenty-fifth birthday, when instead of the horseless
carriage he was probably hoping for, he gets orders from his dead
parents to travel to Africa and avenge his exceedingly distant
ancestor by killing ‘She’.
Many have tried in past ages, and all have failed,
the letter concludes encouragingly. Remarkably, Leo seems to find
nothing unreasonable about this peculiar family legacy, nor does he
hesitate to set out as instructed. We can only assume that there was
another page to his parents’ letter that we didn’t see, one adding
something like,
Otherwise, you don’t get one red cent. What we do see is
what is referred to as “the chart”, which is meant to guide Leo to
the territory of ‘She’. Rather than attempt to describe this
wonderful visual aid, I think I’ll reproduce it....
Well,
what wonder that Leo and Horace are able to find their way to that
same rocky shore that Kallikrates and Amenartes landed on, lo these
many years ago? Watching on her Intruder-Cam, ‘She’ reacts in disbelief
to the sight of her latest visitors, because Leo is, of course, the
reincarnation of Kallikrates. And yes, I think that
does mean
that “She” is the origin of all those countless subsequent stories
that found themselves unable to say “Egypt”
without also saying “reincarnated love”. Anyway, here we are obliged
to give Leo some benefit of the doubt and assume that something
rather vital was left out of the story at this point: how else to
explain what looks like his genuinely homicidal anger when
confronted by ‘She’? I mean, for a two thousand year old ancestor?
And how, too, to explain Horace holding Leo to his mark, when the
beauty of ‘She’ makes him hesitate? ‘She’, seeing Leo torn, declares
her love for him and hands him a knife, offering herself up to the
blade; but Leo cannot do it. He and ‘She’ – if you’ll pardon the
expression – then celebrate their love in an exceedingly creepy way:
by torching the no longer required preserved body of Kallikrates,
who is of course the exact double of Leo. And then ‘She’, Leo and
Horace head for the eternal flame, where it all ends in tears. ‘She’
steps into the flame that has maintained her for countless
centuries, which this time,
Causes her to shrivel up,
grow suddenly old, and die. Why? Ya got me. (To be fair, the
novel itself is hardly clear on this point, although it spends some
time in speculation.) Leo and Horace recoil in horror from the
withered thing in the flame, and Horace forcibly drags the stricken
Leo away. A final title card informs us that,
Safely back in England,
Leo destroys all records of “SHE, the mysterious”,
and it’s – The End.
An
uneven and unsatisfactory work, then, is this version of
She. Perhaps its
main point of interest, particularly in contrast in the completely
artificial and stage-bound
Frankenstein, is that much of it was shot on location –
although it cannot be said that those locations are either
appropriate or attractive. Indeed, watching all of the cast members,
but the flimsily robed Marguerite Snow in particular, struggling
over the exceedingly rocky ground meant to represent the land of
‘She’, you really have to admire their dedication – and even more so
when you consider that this footage was probably shot in November,
and in the vicinity of New York; no-one here is very warmly clad.
Despite the fantasy aspects of the story, there is only one real
attempt at a “special effect”, with the dissolution of ‘She’ in the
flames. The flames themselves are animated, while what they leave
behind is a tiny, imp-like
thing that, we feel, is as effective as it is because we
don’t get a very
good look at it. Nor is
She much of an actor’s film. Marguerite Snow, who would
become over the next few years one of Thanhouser's biggest stars,
gets little to do here but gesture dramatically - although granted,
she gets to do that a lot. (Snow is veiled for much of the
film, which, while thematically valid, seems an odd way for a studio
to treat one of its most popular actresses.) James Cruze, an actor
who would later become a director – making both the seminal western
The Covered Wagon
and
The Great Gabbo, among other things – plays both
Kallikrates and the adult Leo Vincey, but doesn’t make much of an
impact. (Cruze and Snow were married two years after making
She
together, a marriage that would end unhappily almost a decade
later.) George O. Nichols, who directed
She,
was a perfect example of the kind of do-it-all tradesman who
flourished in the early days of the cinema, directing over one
hundred films, and acting in over two hundred. If the evidence of
She is anything to
go by, it is likely that it was not so much Mr Nichols’ artistry
that saw him employed so often, but rather his ability to get a film
in the can with great rapidity and a minimum of exertion.
----9/8/07
Image courtesy of Clifford Aliperti of
Things And Other Stuff
and Old
Magazines For Sale.
|
