She
Starring: Randolph Scott, Helen Gahagan, Nigel Bruce
Directors: Lansing C. Holden and Irving Pichel
The film: Adapted for the screen more than a dozen times, H. Rider Haggard's 19th-century novel She was most successfully interpreted in 1935 by King Kong producer and director Merian C. Cooper. He and colleague Ernest B. Schoedsack had spent years exploring and filming in distant corners of the globe before settling in Hollywood and their taste for adventure (although Schoedsack wasn't involved in this project) is vividly reflected in the spirit of this entertaining, if at times unevenly paced, film.
Whereas Haggard's novel had darkest Africa as the destination for its protagonists' search for the mysteriously immortal Hash-a-Motep, or 'She who must obeyed' (played in this version by future US congresswoman Helen Gahagan in her only film role), here the action takes place somewhere in the Russian Arctic, in an art deco underworld that is exposed after a remarkably well-staged avalanche. Heading the expedition is Randolph Scott (Ride the High Country, China Sky) whose ancestor disappeared in the region 500 years previously and to whom Scott's character bears an uncanny resemblance.
Reincarnation and immortality were heady subjects for 1930s Hollywood and a Christian monologue halfway through the film seems to have been inserted to reassure American audiences that they weren't getting out of their spiritual depth. The film never reaches the intellectual levels of Haggard's original yarn, though, and while comparisons can be made to Frank Capra's later Lost Horizon (1937), its Saturday matinee feel and sometimes stilted dialogue keep it a scene or two short of 'classic' cinema.
