She Movie Review

Willis O'Brien's team of f/x wizards assembled for the original King Kong worked on many RKO features afterwards. One is She, and their handiwork is the film's chief glory. They whip up H. Rider Haggard's lost city of Kor, transferred from Africa to the Arctic and warmed into life by underground volcanoes. Kor is a combination of Egyptian, Greek, Mayan, and Art Deco motifs (including the King Kong gates), and at the heart of it all it Ayesha, alias She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, a woman over 2,000 years old made young and immortal by stepping into the Flame of Life, a strange phenomenon that burns fitfully in a secret grotto. Three adventurers arrive in Kor; Ayesha is convinced that one of them is her reincarnated lover and urges him to take a pyrological bath. Sumptuous spectacle and a rousing Max Steiner music score make this the best version of the oft-filmed story. Alas, a stop-motion mastodon sequence planned by O'Brien was never filmed. Commercial VHS and laser prints run a few minutes short, inexplicably missing a key scene between Nigel Bruce and the high priests of Kor.

1935 95m/B Helen Gahagan, Randolph Scott, Nigel Bruce, Helen Mack, Gustav von Seyffertitz; D: Irving Pichel, Lansing C. Holden; W: Dudley Nichols, Ruth Rose; C: J. Roy Hunt; M: Max Steiner. VHS KIV