Madam Satan

Difficult times for affluent married couple when wife interrupts her organ playing to put drunk husband to bed with his chum for the afternoon. To condemn their wasteful leisure time may lead viewers to consider the waste of our own, until suddenly the invitation to a masked ball on a zeppelin transpires into a black and white hallucination. No, it doesn't explode at its launch tower, but the zeppelin does break loose in a storm and crash, and before doing so, instructs us how to parachute out. The movie is unforgettable. Sorry for the obscure reference, but the Kate Bush "Babooshka" song summarizes the Noel Coward-like script. The wife's costume, her singing at the drop of the hat, her performance, and her general display of dignity alert me to the possibility of enjoying other deMille films. I used to consider his flat direction of dialogue scenes stultifying (like watching skulls dry) while falling off the chair at the sight of his special effects. No, the entire film is mystical and I'm interested in seeing more. 1930!

The strangest thing in this film might be the morality of the plot. Folks today seem to think that films of the 30s were all stodgy and prudish. Well, this might be true of movies made AFTER mid-1934 when a toughened Production Code was adopted by the studios. But, before that, films were perhaps even wilder than they are today. Stuff like nudity, adultery, abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex and even bestiality were to be found in many of the Hollywood films. In fact, the films were becoming so family-unfriendly, that people stopped attending pictures and the studios started to worry about not surviving the Depression. So, in an effort spurred on far more by economics than morality, Hollywood adopted this very draconian code. Now, in the 'cleaned up Hollywood', you had wholesomeness and virtue...and it became just a bit boring at times. Now I LOVE films of the 1934-1950 era--but occasionally the morality in them seems silly--married couples weren't allowed to be in bed together at the same time, evil was ALWAYS punished by the end of the film (wow...wouldn't it be nice if real life was that way!) and women definitely did NOT enjoy sex...at least not decent women! And, as for the indecent women, as I said, in the end, evil is ALWAYS punished! But none of these Post-Code rules apply to films like "Madam Satan".

This Cecil B. DeMille* film begins with a lovely wife, Angela (Kay Johnson) waiting and waiting for her no-good husband, Bob (Reginald Denny) to return home. However, the guy has been out whooping it up with his friend--drinking (this is during Prohibition, by the way) and chasing other women. Surprisingly, Angela is rather good-natured about it--and seems to accept the age-old notion that 'boys will be boys'. However, Bob is a real jerk. Not only isn't he apologetic but blames Angela for being too boring. In fact, he later announces that he's leaving, as his mistress is much more of a woman than Angela will ever be! At this point you'd assume Angela would be ready to kill or divorce this worm--this WOULD be the case in the Post-Code world. Instead, after getting over her initial hurt and shock, she's decided to cook up a plan to get him back! After all, in this era, men must be excused their little...peccadilloes (a nice word used at the time to cover a multitude of sins...but mostly adultery).

What exactly is the plan? Well, it all unfolds during an insane society costume party--the most bizarre party EVER thrown on this planet--and not just because of its locale but because of the costumes and song and dance numbers! A bunch of rich philanderers rent out a zeppelin (you know, one of those massive airships like the Hindenburg) and invite all their mistresses for a rip-roaring good time. Naturally Bob and his floozy are there. However, just before this woman is crowned the Belle of the Ball, in steps Madam Satan--a very mysterious masked woman of the world. And Madam Satan is NOT there to make new friends or go for a zeppelin ride...nope. She's there to screw Bob...and she's not very subtle about it! Using her thick foreign accent, she vamps Bob and announces 'who wants to go to Hell with Madam Satan?'. Well, obviously Bob does, and he pursues this mystery woman like a dog chasing after a pork chop! Eventually, Bob discovers who this mystery woman is that he so wants to....um...get to know better. But, before he can deal with this, the zeppelin breaks loose from its mooring mast and goes careening through the clouds! Then, the costumed party-goers and crew jump from the airship and parachute to the ground...with a few comical (and one mildly racist) scenes as the folks land.

Does this sound completely crazy? Of course. But the craziest part are the costumes and sets. It must have cost a fortune to make the film and this was at the worst part of the Depression!! Just think of the millions of folks out of work and a film about Madam Satan vamping a rich no-goodnick like Bob! Crazy...but almost impossible to stop watching! If you want to see it, you can get a copy from Amazon, Turner Classic Movies' website or perhaps they'll show it again on TCM. You DEFINITELY ain't seen nothing' yet with this one!!

*If you are an old film nut, you'll probably recognize DeMille as the guy who brought us a long series of overblown religious epics like "The Ten Commandments".

Here is a film which defies catagorizing. It is, at once, a bedroom farce, a musical, a comedy and a disaster film. The musical end of it is pretty good, with everyone using their own voices. Kay Johnson, in the name role, does a pretty good job as the good woman wronged by an oaf of a husband. The legendary Lillian Roth is super as Trixie. She hits just the right note as the tough-as-nails showgirl who has designs on Reginald Denny. The film really picks up when we get to the masquerade party aboard the Zepplin. This was reportedly filmed in two-color Technicolor, but released in black-and-white, presumably due to the fact that musical pictures had gone out of favor by late 1930, and MGM was trying to cut it's potential losses by not paying up to print the sequences in color. The Adrian costumes are positively jaw-dropping. The drag queens could get some great ideas by studying these. (The gorgeous creation worn by Kay Johnson is in the Museum of Modern Art in NY). In all, this is a film which, despite it's obvious flaws, makes for an unforgettable viewing experience. It is a unique film even by the standards of the great DeMille.

When I first saw "Madam Satan," on Turner Classic Movies, Robert Osborne said it might be the strangest movie ever made by the great director Cecil B. DeMille. I tend to agree with him. This was one of three films he had made at MGM, during the only time he was away from Paramount. None of the three films were apparently very good. Not only was DeMille frustrated by studio chief Louis B. Mayer was disappointed and infuriated; little wonder that DeMille and Mayer soon parted company.

In any case, "Madam Satan" is rather slow-moving, clumsy, and awkward, much as is the case with early sound films. It never makes up its mind either as it delves into melodrama, comedy, music, and even a little horror. Nevertheless, it has some garish, spectacular moments. The mechanical ballet on the moored dirigible is rather fascinating and certainly quite peculiar. It is the height of Hollywood kitsch. The best sequence is when the dirigible is struck by lightning during a ferocious thunderstorm and everyone on the airship must parachute to safety.

We will always wonder what DeMille had in mind when he made the film. It was certainly risqué and daring for its time, but it actually didn't do very well at the box office and the critics were puzzled by it. It remains today as a curiosity at best.

This is a totally bizarre amalgam of at least three different films: a wisecracking sex-comedy, an unsuccessful operetta, and a bedroom-hopping farce. Add into that mix 'disaster movie' and 'fashion parade', and you get a film that's worth seeing just for its jaw-dropping novelty value alone.

It's actually pretty good: most of the humour is intentional, and some of the rest of it may well be. (I'm not sure quite how seriously the film takes itself: I got the impression that the heroine is pretty much in the know about what is going on, for example, and is simply playing innocent when it suits her... either to get the information she's after, or merely in order to watch her misbehaving husband squirm.) Farce isn't my thing, but those scenes are pretty slickly done, while a lot of the risqué dialogue sparkles.

Sadly the film suffers from primitive sound recording techniques, to the extent that most of the lyrics of the musical sections are incomprehensible -- not too much of a problem for the stand-alone numbers, but a big issue for the ensemble songs that are supposed to drive the later part of the plot. A lot of the verbal punchlines to the visual jokes at the masquerade disappeared into the background fuzz, as well: for example, I still don't know what on earth Bob's costume was supposed to be, because I missed the announcement as he entered.

As a musical "Madam Satan" is not very successful: it's a story of missed opportunities (Cole Porter, Rudolf Friml, Oscar Hammerstein II, Sigmund Romberg and even Albert Ketelbey of "In a Monastery Garden" fame were all considered to write the musical numbers at one time or another, as were Jeanette MacDonald and Gloria Swanson for the lead). The operetta numbers are unmemorable -- the 'popular' numbers from Jack King and Elsie Janis have worn better in performance style, although you still won't find yourself whistling them as you leave.

There are lengthy ballet/costume sequences in the second half of the film that appear to be basically the equivalent of the gratuitous fashion parade colour reels that crop up in various 1930s films -- simply inserted into the story as an excuse to show off the spectacle. They are staggeringly extravagant, but to my taste the display dragged a bit after a while. (Watching all the revellers subsequently attempt to don parachute harnesses on top of these costumes, however, tends to confirm me in my suspicion that the film really doesn't take itself seriously!) And we learn, to my amazement at least, that on a dirigible the parachutes are not actually packed on the wearer's back but attached to casings in the hull itself -- no wonder the harnesses look weirdly skeletal. You can't simply jump free wearing a parachute: you have to be clipped on first...

The parachute sequence is another piece of disaster-comedy that has to be seen to be believed. On the whole I'd say that the film is at least 60% successful: MGM might have done better if they had ditched the musical elements altogether, since this is probably the weakest strand and the box office was saturated by musicals at this point, and gone flat out for shock value. It's certainly worth seeing for sheer bizarreness.