A Dangerous Woman

Well, so they are not on an island but stuck in some godawful jungle outpost in British East Africa. The set is a hoot with all that vintage wicker furniture and a grand piano which in that humidity could never have stayed in tune. BACLANOVA,in her second talkie and in her only starring role, was hardly intelligible in English. But no matter as she is fascinating to watch as she gesticulates and undulates during seizures of unbridled passion and JUNGLE MADNESS. Early in the film she is seated at the piano carrying on a conversation during which time she curiously turns to the sheet music to consult her phonetically prepared script. The nitrate print at the UCLA Archives which I viewed many years ago thanks to Robert Gitt seemed to have run 80 minutes. My 16mm print runs 72 minutes. The missing scenes include Olga breaking a phonograph record of the financee of her next male target, her brother-in-law. Shortly after that her husband Clive Brook is moodily pacing with a revolver in his room. The jungle scene in which Olga and Neil Hamilton watch the natives dance permits our star to stage a near orgasmic display. The film is racist and sexist seen in today's sactimonious PC perspective but hardly offensive to anyone when taken into historical context. I won't give away the ending but BACLANOVA did survive in order to appear in Wm. Wellman's THE MAN I LOVE -1929 released by Paramount the same month in which she devoured several men daily during tea time. She was getting in training for FREAKS -1932 !!! Seriously, she was a genuine talent who had been superbly directed in her silent films by Von Sternberg, Stiller,Leni and Schertzinger. Her talkie films were mostly directed by hacks, Do I need to name them ?

Clive Brook and Olga Baclanova were two of Paramount's biggest silent stars. Clive Brook had often played men who were better than their lot in life, working class guys with maybe a hint of nobility and refinedness. Olga Baclanova played the temptress. But then sound came in. Clive Brook's aristocratic British accent meant that he had to play more refined individuals. Baclanova had a deep Russian accent. This actually went with the parts she had been playing, but with sound film she needed to integrate talking and action into a coherent whole and she seemed to have trouble with that, plus the parts they gave her over at Paramount did not help, this one being exhibit A and her first talking film. It was Brooks' second talking film.

The film opens in Africa, with Frank Gregory (Clive Brook) holding court over the natives' civil and criminal squabbles. He then goes back to his quarters where his wife Tania (Baclanova) is doing a passive vamp (it's the only way I can describe it) of one of Frank's men. Rejected, the man later shoots himself. Frank, aware of the situation, has the death certificate indicate it was an accident while cleaning his gun, to cover up the scandal for the sake of the man's family. Then word comes that Frank's much younger brother, Bobby (Neil Hamilton), is coming to visit, and Frank is worried that the bored Tania will test her feminine wiles on him. Complications ensue.

This is one of the earliest talking films and it is trying to transition two of Paramount's biggest stars to the new medium, so I am willing to cut it some slack. I will say its pace becomes tortuously slow at points, but some of the improbable dialogue makes up for it. My personal favorite is the discussion between Frank and Bobby where Frank says the secret of keeping control of the natives is to dress for dinner and shave daily so they can see you are anchored in civilization and order. Hmm. And here I thought it was all of the big guns that the British brought with them, with the natives realizing that the British would have no compunction about blowing them to smithereens if they got out of line. And then there is the insinuation that the native mating dances are capable of hypnotizing the British residents into such a state that they are compelled to commit immoral acts.

Recommended for those interested in the earliest talking films. The odd dialogue and acting style somewhat compensates for the glacial pace.

Olga Baclanova was a fairly major star of the legendary Moscow Art Theater (MAT), and the people she worked with there should have ensured a lifetime of acting success. However, when the MAT visited New York City in 1925, Olga jumped ship, so to speak, and remained here. While this may have been a great move for the quality of her personal life, it was something of a disaster for her career, and even for her reputation, as an actress. Since her early talking films, of which this is the worst I've seen, evidence a decided lack of familiarity with the English language, she did not 'catch on' in the era of other European imports like Garbo, Velez and Bergman, and would be totally forgotten today if not for her extraordinary performance in FREAKS (1932), in which her English is better but hardly in the Garbo class. Anyway, she was apparently supposed to be the reason to see this film, but there was really no good reason to see this film except for its very early talkie status, and that is the only reason it might hold a viewer's attention today. Everybody overacts here, except maybe Clyde Cook as a guy who has "gone native". The other four white characters are pretty miserable in their surroundings, so that Baclanova becomes their sole interest. But, and I'm sorry to say this, Olga was 36 when she made this, but could easily pass for 45 or 50 (which was a lot older then than it is now). Also, she seems to be a good 20 to 25 pounds overweight. Nothing wrong with that, but in 1929 Hollywood it was definitely not the thing to be. She looks more like a healthy middle-aged opera singer (of Leonie Rysanek proportions) than a jungle femme fatale. (In FREAKS she seems to have slimmed down some, but still, the thought of her as a trapeze artist is laughable, unless the catcher was Victor McLaglen or Arnold Schwarzenegger). Clive Brook gives his standard stiff-upper-lip performance, but is not as embarrassing as that good actor Neil Hamilton or that even better one Leslie Fenton. Fenton played some pretty strong characters later on (like Nails Nathan in PUBLIC ENEMY or the Chinese two-timer in THE HATCHET MAN), but here he is a weakling who has one (pretty awful) scene at the beginning of the film before he runs off to shoot himself, possibly in a successful effort to extricate himself from the film. I would never have thought this of Fenton, but he looks like he might have worked out beautifully as Renfield had Dwight Frye not been available for DRACULA. Oy! The only redeeming part of the film is when Baclanova sings - if, indeed, she is doing her own singing, but I think she is - for she gives out with a very strong mezzo-contralto with the kind of chest tones made famous by her great predecessors in Russian song, Varya Panina and Vialtseva. It's worth the price of the film to hear her, if not to see her. There's a bit of a twist ending that satisfies, but one must suffer for over an hour to get to it. Brook gave about 220,000 similar performances before they dragged him back to England, Hamilton stayed around until the Batman TV series, and Fenton turned into a pretty decent director. Cook stuck around for years as the ideal good-natured Cockney, and pretty much reprised this particular role in the Laughton-Lombard WHITE WOMAN, but that was a much better picture than this one. Still, it's worth a look just to see people complaining about the sun and the stifling heat and then dressing for dinner (served near a grand piano, just what every African hut of the era needed!).

Clive Brook is the administrator of a stretch of territory in British Africa. His mistress is Olga Baclanova. She has a hobby of captivating men and driving them to suicide. When Brooks' younger brother, Neil Hamilton, is on his way to join him, he tells Miss Baclanova she must not captivate the boy. She decides to do so anyway.

Miss Baclanova - she is credited here only under her last name - is a rather wan woman who maintains a fine hairdo in the jungle. The movie is severely compromised for the modern viewer because of its extensive use of blackface (including Snitz Edwards, in his talkie debut, as a local chief), a silly Vamp plot, the lackluster appearance of Miss Baclanova, and her nearly incomprehensible line readings. Contemporary audiences were undoubtedly interested in hearing her speak, but soon lost interest. Her movie career was essentially over by 1933. She appeared on the stage for a decade or two, returned to the movies for a one-shot recreation of a stage role in 1943, and eventually retired to Switzerland. She died there in 1974, aged 81.

There's a lot of talk about voodoo and witch doctors in this film, but not a lick of the supernatural, so this is not genre, just a drama that happens to be set in the jungle, but it could be anywhere, that's how extraneous the setting seems to me.

Let's give credit here for the casting because they play it straight and heartily, but the rest of this is overdone, particularly the vamp plot. Forget your peeves regarding blackface, it's just part of the process, and not a reason to like or dislike the film's intent or the film itself.

Online free as "A Woman Who Needed Killing" but only 70 minutes rather than the listed 80 minutes..