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Product Description
SHE, created by the same team of special-effects wizards that stunned Hollywood with the original King Kong, is a thrilling tale of adventure, immortality and lost love. A group of explorers, led by the dashing Leo Vincey (Randolph Scott, Ride the High Country), sets out on a dangerous mission in search of the legendary flame of life, a mysterious force that bestows immortality. The perilous journey takes them North to the heart of a remote glacier, where they are captured by the beautiful She, an independent, powerful, and fearsome woman who rules a fantastic, subterranean kingdom. Filled with art deco sets, gorgeous costumes, Busby Berkeley-style choreography, and backed by Max Steiner s (King Kong, Gone With the Wind) powerful score, She is pure heart-stopping, eye-popping adventure, sure to delight fans of Raiders of the Lost Ark. This stunning new edition of She has been painstakingly restored in High Definition from the original 35mm elements, and is here offered in both its original B&W version, and in a newly colorized version created under the direction of legendary effects master Ray Harryhausen. In addition, both films show scenes deleted from the original cut, but which have now been restored back into the film. SPECIAL FEATURES INCLUDE - 2 complete versions of the film: B&W and colorized - Additional scenes - Interview with Ray Harryhausen - Interview with Curator James V. D arc - Interview with Composer John Morgan
- SHE comparison with versions from 1911 and 1925 - SHE design process with Ray Harryhausen - SHE Theatrical Trailer - SHE Story Book - Production Stills - Legend Films Trailers - Ray Harryhausen Bio and Filmography - Behind the Scenes Photo Gallery - Advertising Art & Rare Material - Star Portraits - Preproduction Art
Amazon.com
Randolph Scott is his usual stiff but smiling self as Leo Vincey, the long-lost American heir to a British family legacy, sent by his estranged father to reclaim the legendary "Flame of Life," discovered five centuries ago by his explorer ancestor. Producer Merian C. Cooper, best known for directing King Kong, changes the locale of H. Rider Haggard's classic adventure from Africa to the Arctic (which, apart from a spectacular avalanche, looks positively stagebound), but he pulls out all stops for the magnificent underground kingdom hidden in the icy mountains, complete with a cavernous throne room with vaulted ceilings and a massive staircase that would look right at home in the Ziegfeld Follies. The cruel She Who Must Be Obeyed (Helen Gahagan) is a beautiful but icy queen driven ruthless by her centuries of loneliness. The film takes some time to get started but once She makes her impressive entrance through a mist-enshrouded arch, we're plunged into a dangerous, exotic world of strange ceremonies, human sacrifices, nefarious plots, and the gorgeous whirlwind of light that is the Flame of Life. Though the dialogue is often flat and uninspired and the performances by Scott and Gahagan rather arch (costars Nigel Bruce and Helen Mack fare much better), this grand adventure concludes with a rousing climax full of impressive set pieces and breathtaking effects. --Sean Axmaker
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 A MASTERPIECE, 2008-06-22
When I bought this film two weeks ago I was somewhat familiar with the title, felt I should check this ting out...
I saw it with Mama and we both became spellbound with our mouths wide open.....Many a film has been been released under the banner "You have never seen things like this" - and this film is it.... It is firmly in my movielibrary - every scene(except the last) is hypnotic... IT+s the Ibsen and Shakespeare of the 30s adventure film(with King Kong of course)... Be sure to see this artdeco and - oh I can`t go on - in color.... THIS FILM MUST BE PRESERVED FOR POSTERITY:-))) NB: IT\s easy to see where Disney had his inspiration for the Wicked Queen in SnowWhite and the Seven Dwarfs....
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
b/w or color, 2008-01-12
OK, we can talk long time about: color or b/w. Originally filmed in b/w but was been plans to make it in color. The DVD has both version. The bonus features is very interesting and Mr. Ray Harryhausen told about why he did this.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Great Film! Great Presentation!, 2008-01-11
This film is dated, but still Great! The digital colorization, personally supervised by Ray Harryhausen no less, is nothing short of stunning! When you watch a film like this, 70 plus years old, but made with style and enthusiasm, it is hard not to be entertained. I Love It!
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
"There are marvels to be seen here today.", 2007-12-16
"I am yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I am sorrow and longing and hope unfulfilled. I am She Who Must Be Obeyed!"
There's never been an entirely successful sound version of H. Rider Haggard's She, but on re-viewing, the 1935 version comes far closer than any of its rivals. After five silent versions of varying degrees of popularity, a lavish version reuniting many of the team behind King Kong must have seemed a box-office slamdunk (though not enough of one for RKO to approve the cost of filming in Three-Strip Technicolor), yet proved a flop on its original release. Subsequently cut for reissues, it was only because Buster Keaton had a print of the film in his own collection that it initially survived being lost altogether.
At first sight there are a lot of changes from Haggard's novel. Leo Vincey is no longer the reincarnation of She's lost love of centuries earlier Kalikrites but a descendent of a 15th century explorer She fell in love with. Thematically the novel's repressed homosexual undercurrent is (understandably for 1935) lost, as are its early reflections on people's assumptions that those blessed with beauty are also exceptionally gifted, intelligent and innately decent (in the novel Leo is distinctly dim and ultimately lacking in moral stature despite his looks, while the slightly deformed but good-hearted and extremely intelligent Holly is regularly taken for a sinister dullard). Even the nature of Leo's quest has been changed - no longer a search to find She and his own destiny but a search for the Flame of Life and the lost kingdom of Kor, now relocated from Africa to the mountain ranges of Muscovy. Yet even with the reinvention of much of the first third of the book (borrowing heavily from the Tibetan mountain setting of the first of Haggard's three follow-up novels, Ayesha: The Return of She), Ruth Rose's adaptation cuts to the heart of the book: this is about the desperate desire for what we cannot have and how that longing can erode what makes us human.
Just as Leo's uncle has destroyed himself with his experiments to artificially create the Flame of Life with radioactivity, She's all-consuming obsession with a love that never really was has burnt out her very heart and soul, her passion, like her empire, one of the imagination: it's the possibility of immortality that Leo's fascinated by, not her, and he'll play her toyboy and cut out his companions without a second thought to attain it. Gifted with one of the great screen entrances of all time, silhouetted behind a wall of smoke at the top of a flight of palatial steps, Helen Gahagan is a very different interpretation of the role from the usual babe you'd crawl over broken glass to get to, more a matron weighed down by time and loneliness and freed from the moral code of mere mortals. Her scream of pain on seeing Vincey for the first time in several lifetimes is a genuinely shocking moment.
Broadway star Gahagan would take the lion's share of the blame for the film's failure, never making another movie and going into politics where she later become smeared as `the Pink Lady' by Nixon during the McCarthy era, though not before popularising his nickname `Tricky Dicky.' In truth the film's failure might be more down to its lack of action (though it does throw in a terrific avalanche and a vivid escape sequence at the end) and its lack of obviously sympathetic characters. Randolph Scott is suitably bland as Leo while Nigel Bruce, still four years away from his bumbling Dr Watson, is a convincingly determined and grounded figure here to act as counterpoint to the hero's growing loss of self, but it's left to Helen Mack's romantic interest to carry the torch for basic human decency. The greatest impact is made by former silent film director Gustav Von Seyffertitz, a combination of the figure of Friederich Von Leidebur and the voice of Bela Lugosi, as a wonderfully imposing high priest Bilali: when he says "There are marvels to be seen here today," you believe him. (The eagle-eyed may also spot Native American Olympic medal winning athlete Jim Thorpe, later played onscreen by Burt Lancaster, also in there as the captain of the palace guards.)
Although more than ably directed by Irving Pichel and Lansing C. Holden with some superb and ambitious camera work courtesy of J. Roy Hunt, it's clearly producer Merian C. Cooper who's the driving force here. The model for King Kong's showman Carl Denham, he goes all-out to best his previous pictures here and nearly manages it despite the odd bit of studio penny-pinching. He certainly got his money's worth from Van Nest Polglase's truly magnificent design which shows real vision in details great and small, from the massive ceremonial halls to the mausoleum steps worn away over the years by She, although criminally the film's sole Oscar nomination went instead to Benjamin Zemach in the "They had an Oscar for THAT?" category of Best Dance Direction for the film's most relentless sequence of prolonged camp prior to a human sacrifice.
For a long-forgotten flop, it certainly left its mark on many who saw it. Just as the novel was clearly an influence on James Hilton's later Lost Horizon, the film is very obviously a big influence on Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with She Who Must Be Obeyed rendering judgment in a costume the wicked queen would borrow for her little chats with her mirror. Ray Harryhausen took much from the film for his last Sinbad adventure, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, as well, not least the frozen sabre-toothed tiger that comes memorably to life, a sequence that at one time been mooted for Cooper's film before budget cuts meant dropping Willis O. Brien's planned stop-motion animation setpiece and leaving the beast encased in ice.
Harryhausen, along with Cooper biographer Mark Cotta Caz, provides the audio commentary on Kino's new 2-disc Region 1 NTSC DVD, but sadly much of the commentary is about the colorization process (the film is included in both black and white and colorized versions), which is considerably less than state-of-the-art. While Cooper had intended the film to be shot in color, it's doubtful he'd be impressed with the results. The ice sequences and avalanche look impressive, but flesh tones are still unconvincing and much of the colorized version has the look of an old magic coloring book. On the plus side, for the first time the film has been fully restored with the deleted scenes sourced by James D'Arc at the Brigham Young University (where Cooper and composer Max Steiner's collections are held) put back into the original black and white version as well as the colorized one. There's also a good interview with composer John Morgan about Max Steiner's acclaimed score.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Colorization BETTER than Ever...!!!!, 2007-12-03
A truly remarkable film and an overlooked classic. Great Special Effects for the time period and a totally entertaining action/adventure film on par with King Kong. The colorization of this film under the supervision of Ray Harryhausen is awesome. This is a FUN film that should be seen....
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