Thirteen Women

Watching Thirteen Women I wonder what Merle Oberon must have thought. She lived in real life what Myrna Loy's character was experiencing in the film. It was only after she died that it came out that Merle was of mixed racial origin. She successfully passed her entire life.

Loy who was in fact Caucasian until she became the incarnation of the perfect wife and mother played a whole lot of these exotic characters. She borrows a bit from her performance as Fu Manchu's daughter in playing a woman who is exacting terrible revenge on members of a sorority at a finishing school who discovered her background and used it to get her expelled. It was her ticket into the white world and respectability as she saw it.

Using C. Henry Gordon as a phony swami she has unpleasant horoscopes made against her thirteen enemies. Loy doesn't want to just kill them, she wants to torment them and uses Gordon as her means. Loy wants maximum satisfaction.

In the case of Irene Dunne who she sees as her chief enemy Loy also has plans for Dunne's child as well.

A whole lot of women dominate this film as the sisters like Kay Johnson, Jill Esmond, Florence Eldridge and more. Ricardo Cortez plays the police sergeant who tracks down Loy and Edward Pawley plays another of the men she uses in her fiendish schemes.

As this was a before the Code film, there was some frank talk about racism under the guise of snobbery. No doubt that Dunne and the rest were guilty of it. It drove Loy off the deep end and she enacts a terrible vengeance.

A really good before the Code film that should be better known.

Ursula Georgi (Myrna Loy) is a half-white, half-Indian girl who a missionary sends to an exclusive finishing school so that she can learn to "pass" as white. But the 13 women in a particular exclusive sorority learn that Ursula is "half caste'", expose her, and as a result she is expelled from the school. If these racial attitudes all sound very archaic it's because they are, but then this film is over 90 years old. So bear with me.

So Ursula has apparently been itching for revenge ever since. And 15 years later she puts her plan into action. One of the girls asks for horoscopes for all 13 from the imminent Swami Yogadachi. His lover happens to be Ursula who has hypnotic powers of her own. Yogadachi casts the horoscopes, which seem at least semi positive. Ursula then puts the Swami in a deep sleep and replaces the horoscopes with her own for each woman, warning of death, prison, insanity, etc. With Yogadachi's usefulness to her finished , she then hypnotizes him so that he runs into the path of a moving train. This woman is NOT a nice person!

But Ursula never seems to finish what she starts. She disposes of only three of the 13 women when they read the horoscopes, become obsessed with the inevitability of their predicted fates, and actually cause their horoscopes to come true. Ursula then becomes oddly focused on Laura Stanhope (Irene Dunne) who is urging the others to ignore these horoscopes as so much hogwash. She seems determined to break Laura, not because she was particularly cruel to her, but because she is resisting her little game. Complications ensue.

The film does have something to say about the power of the mind over situations. And Ursula is not in the least bit a sympathetic character given that she has no natural affection towards anyone. She has enemies and men she uses to get revenge on those enemies - Those are the only two kinds of relationships she seems to have as an adult.

I'd say the one hokey thing that the film does consists of the special effects. For some reason a bright star appears in the center of the screen every time a sorority sister fulfills her face or Ursula hypnotizes someone to do her bidding. It's short at just under an hour and pretty entertaining.

This campy little coo-coo bird has to be seen to be believed. Beware of anonymously sent bouncy balls. I first saw this film many years ago on the early American Movie Classics (before it was destroyed by commercials and awful movies); I made of point of watching it because I was reading Myrna Loy's autobiography at the time and she mentioned this film.

Modern viewers may be a bit surprised to find that there is really nothing new in film-making; everything in the psychological thrillers and slasher films over the years that terrified you is done here, and better. Like the rest of the reviewers, I am nearly insane with wonder at what the famous missing 15 minutes might hold (I know a scene further developing the Peg Entwistle character was deleted), but the existing version of this film is a tight, entertaining hour of suspense.

Exotic and beautiful Ursula Georgi sets out across America to reek her revenge on those upper crust white gals that ousted her from her school sorority and ruined her chance in life to "pass" as one of the elite. If you can actually locate the book this is based on, it's a very enlightening read, for therein we learn that poor Ursula was whored out as a young girl. An orphanage finally placed in her in the sorority with the rich white girls to save her from her life of degradation and exploitation. I believe Ms. Loy must have read the novel, she plays Ursula with a clear awareness of the horrors of her young past. By ostracizing and then kicking her out of the sorority, the rich snobs destroyed her chance to escape and live among the rich and respectable. No wonder she is murderously furious with them. A round robin letter, horoscopes of dread, the stink-eye from Ursula and former sorority sisters end up in the obituary column one by one.

Even today, this hour long film is tensely paced and engaging. Ricardo Cortez is always a pleasure to watch, a smooth, beautiful man and a superb actor who brings a touch of class to all of his work. Young Myrna Loy is beginning to show the prowess that would make her one of the most successful of all 20th century actors. If you love 1930's films, this is a very unique and interesting one, you won't be sorry.

This is an oldie but a goodie, albeit a short one - one of the other comments explains what happened, but no one knows the reason.

Myrna Loy is very beautiful and exotic as Ursula Georgi (which I actually think is an Italian name) who is a half-caste seeking revenge on sorority sisters who kept her out of their group. She uses the power of suggestion, switching their actual horoscopes by mail that they receive from a swami with predictions of doom. One by one, the women die. She ultimately knocks off the swami and turns her sights on the disbeliever of the group, played by Irene Dunne.

Loy would soon break free from exotica with "The Thin Man" series. Mrs. Laurence Olivier at the time, Jill Esmond, appears in the film, as do Ricardo Cortez and Peg Entwhistle. For Entwhistle, the dire predictions in the film played out in real life for her. Shortly after this movie was made, she achieved a lasting fame by committing suicide by jumping from the "Hollywoodland" sign in Los Angeles.

Spiritualism was a craze at the time this was made and hypnosis not really understood by the public at large something of which the scriptwriters took advantage. They concocted this wildly dated, at times preposterous and overwrought meller that if nothing else spotlights a couple of soon to be top stars.

This silly junk was one of Myrna's final Eurasian villainess roles. It's interesting after years of exposure to her as the perfect wife or the level headed, spunky All-American woman to see her in a role that was typical of her pre-stardom days, that of the foreign mantrap. She looks great but is far better than the part deserves. She is noticeably understated while most of the other performers over emote.

Made when sound was in its relative infancy many of the performers are still reliant on over-sized, distracting stage gestures. Irene Dunne starts the picture in subdued fashion but ends up as over the top as everyone else, she's been much better elsewhere. Same goes for Florence Eldridge, a very fine actress usually though she's overblown in this.

Full of actresses of note for one reason or another. Besides Myrna and Irene there is Jill Esmond, first wife of Laurence Olivier, Kay Johnson, a DeMille favorite and the mother of respected character actor James Cromwell and Peg Entwistle, the infamous and tragic actress who threw herself from the Hollywood sign in despair a few days after this film premiered, it's her only film credit. Except for the two leading ladies each only get a scene or two to make an impression.

Fun in a ludicrous way but aside from the cast this is a routine, if outlandish, programmer that were it not for them would be utter forgotten.