Welcome to a new regular feature dedicated to under-recognized movies that deserve more attention. Whether brought back into print by Manufacture-On-Demand (MOD) services like the Warner Archive Collection or bootstrapped and/or Kickstartered by obsessed entrepreneurial cinephiles, attention must be paid. These are the more obscure, the less-replayed, and those long absent from repertory cinema. Subsequent installments will cover everything from individual movies to TV shows, and multi-movie collections to blessed occasional Blu-rays.
l. to r. Bob (Reginald Denny), wife Angela (Kay Johnson), Bob's pal Jimmy (Roland Young)
This (unfortunately) obscure Cecil B. DeMille picture is one of my favorite discoveries from my college days. My "Dance in the Movies" professor showed it to us not just for the electricity-themed, spark-plugs-and-current song and dance number. The real fireworks are the gender politics and (dare I say it?) what we would today call cosplay. Quite notably, the three credited screenwriters are all women, and as much as feminism existed in the early 1930's, this Pre-Code, dark-musical-comedy-disaster movie was as feminist as motion pictures got. Even though the next still frame features a gun, "dark" is relative to the musical comedies of the 1930's.
the best friend, the wife, and the mistress…and a gun
Scorned wife Angela (Of Human Bondage's Kay Johnson) turns marital deception around on her philandering husband Bob (Rebecca's Reginald Denny). Demure, sweet, and unassuming otherwise, she eventually takes on a costumed persona who goes by only Madam Satan: an exotic "French" woman full of spice and sin, burning to take a naughty man back to "hell" with her.
miniature work par excelence
By design, her husband finds "Madam Satan" completely irresistible and loses interest in his brassy mistress (Animal Crackers' Lillian Roth). The husband's best friend (Philadelphia Story's Roland Young) gets tangled up in the whole affair doubly, since the climax of the movie occurs at a party he throws on a fancy-schmancy zeppelin. The poster shows parachutes and an exploding zeppelin, so I'll leave it at saying the actors all do their own stunts.
DeMille is best-known and best-remembered for large-scale epics, and the climactic party on a zeppelin here does not disappoint. Elaborate costumes, a bizarre and decadent tribute to technology in the form of dance, and the bacchanalia of the party itself is an interesting antecedent to the golden calf rave in The Ten Commandments.
I don't care how they accomplish the majority of CG shots in the modern day, but boy am I fascinated by how they pull something like this off.
Titular star Kay Johnson had a much shorter career than one would hope (she's magnificent here), but in case you weren't aware, she also happened to be the mother of the great James Cromwell. Lillian Roth underwent the early 1900's version of today's booze-fueled tabloid starlet meltdown, complete with eight marriages. She would eventually become the first celebrity to publicly associate herself with Alcoholics Anonymous, something she deserves as much credit for doing as she does getting herself clean.
Pre-Code movies in general haven't had the best of luck seeing disc or streaming release anywhere other than WB, and especially Warner Archive (who have recently restarted the magnificent Forbidden Hollywood series). There was a VHS, but I don't think Madam Satan ever hit laserdisc, let alone DVD before WAC released it at the end of this past July.
Early talkies have a charm all their own, but this one has more than the average share of surprises and delights. You can buy Madam Satan on DVD for $16.95 by clicking/tapping here or the image below, or try a 2-week free trial of the Warner Archive Instant service and watch it in SD on their site or in HD on a Roku set-top box. Their HD-supporting, AirPlay-enabled iPad app launches soon, too.
Archival is a recurring feature that shines a spotlight on more obscure catalog content, much of which has rarely (if ever) been available to own on home video.