She
                              
Director: Leander de Cordova
Year: 1925
Rating: 5.0
The novel She written by H. Rider Haggard in 1887 is a wonderful read. From time to time, I pick up a book written in the 19th century and more often than not surrender after about 100 pages. But this one kept me going with Haggard's imagination and an exciting narrative. It was a highly influential work in the adventure genre. It was a natural for the cinematic screen and there were five shorts produced before this feature film running 96-minutes. The 1935 version with Randolph Scott and Helen Gahagan is terrific and then there is the best known one, produced by Hammer in 1965. This one is a British-German production and it is sorely lacking in excitement, glamour, imagination and grandeur. It is quite dull actually with poor acting and only saved by the story and the sets. That impression isn't helped by the version I watched that is lacking in visual detail. I read that a tinted version was released on dvd but the duration given is only 74 minutes.

 

Horace Holly (Heinrich George) is sitting comfortably in his lodgings at Cambridge University when his friend Vincey bursts into his room with a small request. I am dying. Could you become the guardian of my son? Sure. Why not. I will leave this package with you to be opened when Leo is 25. Ok - but perhaps you should go to a hospital. That's what I would say but Holly - nicknamed the Baboon which seems cruel - just lets him go and sure enough he soon dies. Jump ahead to Leo's 25th birthday - he is grown-up with a big shaggy blonde wig and no personality - played by Carlyle Blackwell. With a name like that he should be playing whist in a men's club, not acting. The father left his son a message that there is this mysterious magical woman in a lost civilization in Africa and he should go. And off Holly, Vincey and their poor manservant Job go. This is pre-internet/pre-phone mind you, so difficult making reservations. How did people do anything back then. I honestly, don't recall.

 

They make it to Libya where a ratty dressed tribe picks them up and takes them to their cave. They are all very excited because it is hotpot for supper! I am not a fan of hotpot, especially with human meat in it. But they are saved by the priest, Vincey gets sick and Holly meets . . . The Woman Who Must Be Obeyed. Which I thought was my girlfriend. Ayesha has lived for 2,000 years waiting for the reincarnation of her lover Kallikrates - who she killed all those years ago. Oops - and now is waiting by his dead body every night. She is so beautiful than any man who sees her unveiled face falls in love and becomes a supplicant. Holly is quickly down on his knees.



Now with Ursula Andress in the 1965 version I could believe that but with Betty Blythe - not so much. Even in her see-through garment. She was a movie vamp in her day wearing as few clothes as legal in her films - but to the modern eye, she is kind of doughy and dumpy. Turns out Vincey is in fact the reincarnation of Kallikrates! Lucky man! Eternal life promised. Though living in a spacious cave could get boring. No wonder the first Kallikrates had a wandering eye.  At the end of the film, Ayesha promises to come back reincarnated, more beautiful than ever - and that would of course be Olga Schoberova in the 1968 Vengeance of She.