Thursday, January 08, 2009

Every B Actress in Hollywood a Queen

Chandu the Magician (1932)
directed by William Cameron Menzies & Marcel Varnel
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

An altogether silly ancient Near East radio caper that nonetheless cements the influence of James Wong Howe on the special effects cinematography of Dean Cundey. Miniatures and matte paintings were the computer-generated imagery of their day, and Howe softly x-rays sun-baked mud brick temples in a holy quest for levitating yogis, Zoroastrian death lasers, and Medjay guards risen from their tombs. The only intrusion on this appealingly insulated hotbed of mysticism is, of course, the helpless, inexplicable Regent family, humorless colonialists.

June Vlasek (later Lang) plays daughter Betty Lou Regent; her kidnapping and auction at a smutty bachelors bazaar is an odd and unrestrained commentary on Hollywood's lust for eager young starlets transformed into unwilling exhibitionists. Sexuality made monstrously aware of itself, more often behind the camera than on, but here encapsulated in fifteen year-old Lang's prelude to the satin-draped screams of King Kong's Fay Wray. As shocking for its off-handed execution as its perversity, the scene - awash in light, with a crowd of stereotyped Persian traders rattling their coins at the feet of one more forgotten face and body - is, in its unnoticed backlot way, a much more compelling example of martyrdom than twenty stoic Passion of Joan of Arcs.



Cigarette cards and platinum hair