She (1925)

Directed by

Leander de Cordova, G. B. Samuelson

Genre

fantasy film, silent film

Country

United Kingdom

Runtime

1h 38m

Rated

NR

Rating

6.2 of 10 from 4 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A group of explorers travels to a remote African kingdom searching for a legendary immortal queen. They encounter ancient secrets and a powerful woman who rules the land.

nostalgicadventurousmysteriousepicdatedfaithfulsilent-erafantastical

What happens

She is a 1925 British-German fantasy adventure film made by Reciprocity Films, co-directed by Leander de Cordova and G. B. Samuelson, and starring Betty Blythe, Carlyle Blackwell, and Mary Odette. It was filmed in Berlin by a British film company as a co-production, and based on H. Rider Haggard's 1887 novel of the same name. According to the opening credits, the intertitles were specially written for the film by Haggard himself; he died in 1925, the year the film was made, and never got to see the finished film. The film still exists in its complete form today. The book has been a popular subject for filmmakers in the silent and sound eras, with at least five short silent film adaptations produced in 1908, 1911, 1916, 1917, and 1919 respectively. The 1925 version was the first feature-length adaptation, although it was trimmed from its original 95-minute running time down to 69 minutes for US release (it was only released in the US by the Lee-Bradford Corporation in 1926). (A sound version was made in 1935 by RKO Pictures, and again in 1965 by Hammer Films of England.) The 1925 film is the most faithful of the three feature-length adaptations to date and follows the action, characters and locations of the original novel closely. Heinrich Richter handled the sumptuous set designs and impressive landscape shots. Hollywood actress Blythe traveled to Europe to appear in the film, as the producers hoped to cash in on her "vamp" appeal, placing her in a see-through negligee for the part. She later was quoted as saying "A director is the only man beside your husband who can tell you how much of your clothes to take off". Critic Christopher Workman opined "Lead actor Carlyle Blackwell (who played a dual role in the film) was much too old for the part of the youthful Leo Vincey, and the pasty-faced makeup and ludicrous blond wig he is forced to sport only make his age more obvious....He walks through the part without showing the least bit of interest in any of it." (He later appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger (1927) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1929).) Alexander Butler, who plays Mahomet in the film, was actually a director who had made some earlier silent horror films, including The Sorrows of Satan (1917) and The Beetle (1919). (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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