MOVIE OF THE DAY: "THIRTEEN WOMEN" (1932)

 If you ever have the urge to take revenge on a bunch of old schoolmates who wouldn't accept you into their little clique, send each of them a series of phony horoscopes predicting their imminent deaths by accident or suicide. Or, even better, warning them  they're going to commit murder -- and watch them fall for it! 

Hey, it worked for Ursula Georgi in Thirteen Women! Up to a point.

I guess the novel upon which it was based was a big deal in 1932, because both the poster and opening credits are in the form of a book cover, which always promises a cool movie. 

And you know what else does? Myrna Loy in one of her many yellow-face roles before she was finally allowed to stick to her own ethnic lane. 

Ursula weighs down upon the Swami's trigger.

It's Loy who brings Ursula Georgi to life in Thirteen Women, knocking off one by one the sorority girls who made her life hell at a private school years earlier because of her Indian/Asian background. Gen Z would probably make her their poster girl (I mean woman!). 

Having teamed up with Swami Yogadachi, a real astrologer (an oxymoron, to be sure), Ursula has been sending out horoscopes that literally drive her former tormentors to their deaths. Since the actor playing the Swami, C. Henry Gordon, usually played gangsters, she might have waited until his next movie so he could just mow them down with a tommy gun.

That'll teach you to be a bitch.

Whether falling from a trapeze bar, blowing their brains out, or sticking a shiv into their husbands, the one-time snooty school girls get what's coming to them, at least by Ursula's eyes, which, of course, are made up to look slanty like all those "exotic" women in pre-code dramas. And while she's at it, Ursula hypnotizes the Swami to jump in front of a subway train. This girl's got power!

"Bomb? What bomb?"

 

Ursula decamps to Los Angeles by train, on which she drives yet another ex-schoolmate to suicide. The unfortunate woman was en route to visit Laura Stanhope, a widow with a young son named Bobby. Stanhope, another ex-sorority girl, has been receiving threatening horoscopes, just so she doesn't feel left out of all the fun. 

What Laura doesn't realize is that her mononymous chauffeur Burns is secretly in Ursula's employ as well. His main function appears to be arranging for Bobby's violent death. Looks like there was gig economy even in 1932.

"OK, kid, you might as well start calling me 'daddy'."

Enter Police Sgt. Barry Clive, who, as usual with these things, seems to start falling hard for Laura Stanhope. And even though he's got those police stripes, he doesn't even remember having met Ursula at the train station while investigating the suicide. Some cop! But since Clive is played by one of my favorite forgotten actors, Ricardo Cortez, he gets a pass from me.

Gentlemen, buy the lady in your life one
of these outfits. Better yet, get both of them.

Much of Thirteen Women centers around Laura Stanhope. Just by the name, you know she, like the other former sorority girls, comes from money. She's played to wealthy perfection by Irene Dunne, who seems to have been born articulating as if educated at Bryn Mawr. 

Dunne also appears pre-mature. That is, no matter what age she was in her life, she always carried herself off as if a decade older. And in Thirteen Women she really is a decade or so older than the actresses playing her college chums.

The title characters in Thirteen Women hang around the house in dresses that most women would be afraid to take out of the closet for fear of spilling coffee on them. You'd think everybody during the Depression lived in mansions and wore tailor-made clothes while doing nothing more exerting than traveling cross-country first-class on the Super Chief. I have a feeling a lot of audiences at the time enjoyed seeing these dames getting knocked off their pedestals.

Hollywood's go-to image for making
audiences spooked by Asians was
any statue with more than two arms.

For today's audiences who know Myrna Loy (if at all) by Thin Man movies with William Powell, her early work in stuff like Thirteen Women must come as something of a shock. Typecast early on as Asians (or, as Ricardo Cortez says here, "Half-breed type. Half  Hindu, half Javanese, I dunno."), Loy doesn't fool anyone today, and likely didn't then. 

But you know what? People went to the movies during the Depression the same reason they do now: to escape reality. Why do you think RKO cast an ofay as an Asian anyway? Well, that and racism. And if you think anything has changed, count the number of A-list Asians in movies nearly a century later. 

 

 

"Could you speak up, please? I'm afraid I'm
having trouble hearing your tirade."

So the climax comes as a welcome surprise as Loy lambastes Dunne, explaining how every white person she ever encountered, from the two sailors raped her when she was 12, right up to her snobby college classmates, did everything they could to ruin her life. 

It's a remarkable speech, one that could fit quite well in any anti-racist protest march today. But it's made by a white lady in yellow-face! Well, they had to start somewhere.

Spoiler alert: If you see this hurtling toward
you, get your affairs in order, pronto.

As with similar casting choices in The Hatchet Man and Daughter of the
Dragon, the yellow-face trope in Thirteen Women provides a look at a time when such a thing was not only acceptable, but likely demanded by audiences and studios alike. Myrna Loy didn't live long enough to be forced to apologize for her crimes against humanity, even if she does pay the ultimate price at the end here. 

Frankly, I was sorry to see her go. There must be more sorority sisters who have it coming to them.

PS: Two days after the premiere of the suicide-crazyThirteen Women, one of its costars, Peg Entwistle, made news:

 The 50-foot sign from where she jumped:

    Thirteen Women was Peg Entwistle's only movie.                                               

                                                          

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To read about The Hatchet Man, go here.

To read about Daughter of the Dragon, go here.