Imagine if Fu Manchu's insidious sadist daughter (Myrna Loy's character in MASK OF FU MANCHU -1932) went off to a ritzy college in America, tried to join a sorority, but was snubbed because of her race. She'd probably do far worse than Ursula Georgi (Myrna Loy's character in THIRTEEN WOMEN - also 1932). Ursula patiently waits, and knowing a best-served-cold special is on the way helps you endure sleep-inducing scenes of the ladies of that sorority (now 'grown' and still led by Irene Dunne) meeting on sunny Westchester verandas for tea and gossip as they note each others' deaths and incarcerations in the paper, and the curious thing of them all being predicted beforehand. It was one of their whimsical ideas to all get their charts done up by noted astrologer Swami Yogadaci (the ever villainous C. Henry Gordon), on a much cool and shadowy eastern mystic exotica set back in NYC. But that was before half-breed' Ursula (Loy) gets wind of it. Schooled in the arts of hypnotic suggestion, she seduces him into figuring out how and when the stars will allow her to assassinate said gossipy snubbers via convincing them to either commit suicide or murder a loved one and so go to jail. It's based on a novel by Fortean Society-founder Tiffany Thayer, so you know the astrology and hypnotic suggestion are legit. And Tiffany... was a man's name, baby.
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Ursula's the villain, ostensibly, but you'll be rooting for her all the way (unless you're a prom school snob who's never felt the sting of a snubbing yourself), though alas, most murders occur off camera. Laura (Dunne) is up next, so it is written, and the best way to get her is through her little boy, and so Ricardo Cortez is the detective who investigates and falls for the widowed Dunne and wants to protect her and her child. Meanwhile, wrapping things up with the lovelorn swami via a crowded subway platform, Loy moves in on Laura's chauffeur, seducing and beguiling him into delivering a very a very explosive birthday gift for young Bobby. The chauffeur is horrified by what Ursula's asking of him, but Loy's so goddamned cool and so chic and moody compared to the sun-dappled self-righteous tea-and-doily bailiwick of Irene Dunne, how can you not cheer her bloody swath of vengeance on? Here a full on-manhunt is going on to capture her before she can kill Laura and she's shacked up on the same property, in bed with the chauffeur. Genius. David O'Selznick produced, which may explain part of why the Westchester veranda scenes are so cloying. Dunne's star was on the rise, so it seems like the cool murders were cut to make room for her hearing about them while sorting flowers (I'm no fan of Irene Dunne). At least it's filmed indoors on a set; something about too many outdoor shots depresses me in a film like this. Daylight should be banned from supernatural-tinged thrillers, don't you agree?
But it doesn't matter as far as making this film a precious must, the Loy scenes all sizzle and smoke. Crowd scenes at train platforms (LA's La Grande doubling for the Hudson Line out of Grand Central) help make the film feel realistic and expansive.
This film didn't do very well, and still hasn't earned the cult reputation it deserves, perhaps because the well-scrubbed rubes in the audiences of 1932 hated to be reminded that their callous racism was inevitably coming back to haunt them via the slow, inexorable spin of karma, both manipulated and artificial. And men don't like realizing just how easily their hormonal desires can be used against them, that falling in love with a pretty exotic girl may have less to do with our own free will than even we thought, that love might be something easily harnessed and co-opted as a weapon rather than a wondrous magical blah blah. In most such miscegenation fantasies it's never in doubt that the woman is in some way inferior to the white man she woos, and usually has to die in the end so the white guy can marry the long-suffering dull-as-dishwater white girl waiting at home. But here there's never a doubt that Ursula is superior to every other character in the film. Her only mistake is in letting the desire for vengeance cloud her judgment. But in her crazed behavior up until then, seducing and beguiling every man in a ten mile radius, Loy's Ursula is pre-code gold. As I've written before, the censors let sexy Asian characters get away with all sorts of kinky madness no white chick would ever be permitted (as long as they were really white, in make-up, to avoid riots --see my award-free series, Skeeved by an Asian).
And so it is that Loy goes down swinging, head unbowed, even robbing Cortez of the special joy of nabbing her. And once she does, the film ends, with nary a shred of follow-up to the damaged white imperialist swine souls she's left dead, alive, and/or distraught.
That in itself make you want to see again and again, especially since parts of it are better than Nyqil, which then makes the weird Loy sequences all the more dreamlike as you gaze on them with one eye open, and the great rushing shooting star dissolves into the camera lens and all the stars and victims and treasures are no more (in other words: it's pretty short, 59 minutes, no word exists on why they edited the women down to eleven. Did Selznick think women couldn't count that high? Maybe in the end that's the reason, Hollywood just couldn't handle that many women at once. Too dangerous to the status quo. Peg Entwhistle--as if inspired by her role as one of the THIRTEEN WOMEN--leapt off the Hollywood sign to her death shortly after this film opened.
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| Top: Entwistle as Hazel Couisns in THIRTEEN WOMEN (premiere: Sept. 16, 1932); bottom: Entwistle as herself in NY TIMES (death: Sept. 20, 1932) |
In the end, Hollywood rewards more than anything tenacity and gumption. Loy suffered through a solid decade, from silent to sound, waiting for Hollywood to stop saddling her with exotic vamp roles. But she always tackled them with sensual relish nonetheless. And if Peg had hung on for another few days she would have been alive to get a starring role in another play -- as a girl who commits suicide. And so it is, life imitates art, nonstop... maybe acting it every night (she'd played the part before, allegedly so good she inspired a young girl to become Bette Davis).
But Peg's saga doesn't end there. Her host still haunts the 'H' according to sources (including some ghost shows like PARANORMAL WITNESS.) And strange occurrences and encounters continue, with the lady in white leaving the scent of gardenias (her favorite flower) in her gliding eerie path. (See Stephen Wagner's: The Ghost of the Hollywood Sign or the short film and e-book by Hope Anderson.)
I hope one day we'll find the original preview cut of THIRTEEN WOMEN, and be able to see her full part at last. Maybe once the murder of Hazel Cousins' husband is finally seen in full, Peg Entwistle can rest in peace, and a cool, cult-ish film will finally be weird and pre-code violent enough it can stand up to anything, even the flowery sediment of Irene Dunne and the hack ladyfingers of O'Selznick. Alongside the Welles cut of AMBERSONS, and the excised Myrna Loy in her underwear singing "Mimi" clip in LOVE ME TONIGHT, this is my biggest 'lost reel excavation' fantasy. And don't think it can't happen! It's already happened to FRANKENSTEIN, BABY DOLL, and THE BIG SLEEP!
Peg Entwistle,
may you find the peace in death
you could not get in Los Angeles
and long may film preservationists and exhumers of dead reels,
right the hasty butchering by
our Hollywood fathers,
and return you to THIRTEEN
in full shimmering husband stabs.
Forever on Blu-ray
or at least DV-R.
Amen.