Treize femmes

This is a very unusual film, not least because Myrna Loy, best known for cheerier films, here plays an extremely sinister character. What is more surprising is that she is extremely convincing in that kind of role. There must have been another side to Myrna! Even more unusual, she plays an Anglo-Indian woman. For those who don't know, that means people who were born in India during the Raj who were half English and half Indian. The Anglo-Indians experienced a great deal of prejudice in India because they were not accepted by the Indians, being 'half-breeds', and were also looked upon as inferior by the English. Here, Myrna has a huge chip on her shoulder and is obsessed with resentment at having been treated in a humiliating manner at her boarding school by the other girls. She is, not to put too fine a point on it, dangerously mad. She is determined to get even despite the fact that it is so many years later. She tracks down the other twelve 'girls', now obviously women, and starts killing them one by one. I first came across this film under the title TREIZE FEMMES ('thirteen women'), and wrongly dated 1936, as a DVD release in the RKO Series by Editions Montparnasse in Paris. On its rear cover is the boast, in the form of a quote from Serge Bromberg: 'A rarity never distributed in France' (in French of course.). Well, things have changed, it is now widely available, as more and more forgotten old movies get released. Another reason for the French to get excited was that the film was directed by the French-born director George Archainbaud, who emigrated to America when he was 25 and became a director of 146 films, including the TV series THE LONE RANGER (1949-50), HOPALONG CASSIDY (1952-54), ANNIE OAKLEY (1954-57), and a host of other such Americana. He was therefore very drastically 'un-Frenched' in his new environment, something that the French find incomprehensible, fascinating, and also alarming. The film includes a somewhat subdued performance by Irene Dunne, who four years later would become an eternal icon for her starring role in SHOW BOAT (1936). Both Irene Dunne and Myrna Loy doubled up and played two of the other twelve girls who were minor characters, though this was not revealed in the credits. Another interesting feature of this film is that Myrna uses hypnotic powers to wreak her vengeance. Spell-binding stuff!

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.

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.

This fascinating, hypnotic RKO 'A' film bombed so badly that the studio withdrew it from release, chopped out 15 minutes (from 74 to 59), and disposed of it on the bottom end of double bills. The question is: Why?

Even after 70 years, "Thirteen Women" is an eerie, lushly produced thriller that provides more genuine chills than in any of today's counterparts. For movie buffs, the real treat is seeing Irene Dunne and Myrna Loy (both of whom within a year or two would emerge as two of Hollywood's most bankable and respected leading ladies) slumming in a nasty pre-Code creeper about a half-caste sorority girl (Loy) who enlists the aid of a sinister spiritualist to exact revenge on the prejudiced campus "ladies" who expelled her from their club a few years earlier. One by one, and by devious means, Loy (still playing slant-eyed fiends, but not for much longer, thank God!)meticulously plots and carries out the not-for-the-squeamish deaths of her victims--until the last one alive, Irene Dunne, happily married with an adorable young son, remains her sole surviving target. After her plans to poison the toddler go awry, Loy goes bonkers and boards the train where the police (it certainly takes them long enough to figure out what's going on) have secreted Dunne until they apprehend Loy. The climax--with a dagger-wielding Loy chasing the terrorized Dunne through one car to the next--is a corker--meticulously copied and working equally well a half a century later in the climax of "Terror Train" (with Jamie Lee Curtis duking it out with a transvestite psycho). Even chopped to 59 minutes, "Thirteen Women" is still a landmark horror film. The most baffling mystery is why audiences rejected it in 1932. Perhaps it was ahead of its time. Depression-era loved mysteries--but uncensored exercises in sheer terror like "Thirteen Women" were too scary for comfort (even today, it provokes an unsettling series of shocks that make it the "Psycho" of the '30s--and even the "Psycho" of 30 years later had to overcome initial critical pans before audiences pounced on it and lapped up every sick, terrifying minute.) Hopefully, the 15 minutes a worried RKO cut from the original prints of "Thirteen Women" will be discovered and restored so we may someday see this unexpected treasure as it was intended to be seen. Meanwhile, even the expurgated version (shown occasionally on Turner Classic Movies--check the listings) is as dazzling and brazen a shocker Hollywood turned out in the early 1930s--before the Hayes Office took over and thwarted any further movie from going as gleefully and sadistically over-the-top as the delicious "Thirteen Women." (Even MGM had to severely edit "Freaks" to placate horrified censors and audiences.)

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.