Watch She For Free

Best movie of this year hands down!

That was an excellent one.

Really Surprised!

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

I chose to watch the colourized version of this 1935, fantasy-adventure story. I was mainly interested in watching "She" because it was produced by Merian Cooper who, 3 years earlier, had dazzled and terrified movie-audiences everywhere with that all-mighty, movie classic, King Kong.Unfortunately, "She" was a pretty tame and, yes, mediocre follow-up to the likes of King Kong, where only on but a few occasions did it ever come close to living up to its anticipated potential.By its general appearance (due to some very outlandish, over-sized, art deco sets), "She" actually reminded me a lot of the Flash Gordon Serial which was popular movie-fare during this same time-line in movie-making history.All-in-all - I neither loved "She", nor did I loath it. It was OK, at best. And, yes, it was certainly worth at least one view.

Watched again this film after many many years and frankly it was better not to. Besides the magnificent, bizarre sets, there's very little memorable in this movie. Everything feels really dated. It's a pity because there are elements in the story which great potential for a good film. I missed more craziness. It looked like the film didn't dare to go all the way with its intentions and stayed half-way through story and tone-wise. Take another film made that same year, "Mad Love", with Peter Lorre. That's a film that wasn't afraid of ridiculousness. And it still works. The acting in "She" is bad, the dialogue is pedestrian and the story is contrived and clichéd. Watch other Merian C. Cooper productions instead, like "King Kong" or "The Most Dangerous Game".

By today's standards, this is a pretty bad movie. However, for lovers of classic Hollywood films (particularly escapist adventure movies), this is a very rare treat--and thanks to Buster Keaton for saving a single copy so we can see this amazing flick today.The film begins in Britain. An American young man (Randolph Scott) has been called back to his ancestral land to see his Uncle--a man he has never met. The Uncle is dying but wants to convey a strange story to him--a story about a distant relative who disappeared 500 years looking for a magic radioactive flame that has the ability to keep someone young forever. Scott is somehow convinced to leave with his Uncle's good friend (Nigel Bruce) in search of this odd flame. Along the way, they meet up with a nice lady (Helen Mack) and they head to the mountains to where this relative went centuries earlier.Once they find this fanciful land, they and the audience are in shock to see amazing sets, weird and highly choreographed dancing, "King Kong"-like sets and a very bitter woman who is "She". It seems that She has been waiting for Scott to arrive...waiting 500 years for his return! Unfortunately, She is also a very bitter and nasty lady--and yet she offers him the secret of eternal life! The film is crazy to watch today because of the incredible scope and sense of silly escapist fun--something you rarely ever see any more (except, perhaps, with the Indiana Jones films). It evokes a fun time in film making when movies like "Lost Horizon", "The Cobra Woman" and serials were all the rage. Sure, the dialog is a bit heavy-handed and silly and the dancing is darn funny--but it's also very captivating and pleasant fun.Oh, and the film's female lead, Helen Gahagan, later was famous as the woman Richard Nixon beat through a rather disreputable smear campaign. In response, she coined the term "Tricky Dick Nixon".

From the creator of King Kong comes another balls-to-the-wall fantasy adventure full of spectacle, set-pieces, and technical bravado in special effects that never really age but become all the more impressive in the detail and skill put into it. The story is recognizable: the Fountain of Youth is out there, and we must find it! However, once the adventurers have arrived, what is there to see but crazed natives, magical empresses, and frozen saber toothed tigers tucked away in the corner of an unforgiving arctic landscape? Everything for this movie was prepared on a large budget before actual filming began, at which point the budget was pulled and it was forced to be shot in black and white. Nevertheless, the money still survives in the set-pieces and special effects. And these aren't your average corner of the studio setpieces, this is grandiose, extras-filled spectacles with stairs stretching for forever and perfectly composed backdrops for cliffs falling off to infinity. The movie absolutely delights in motion, light, and magic, as She is introduced behind a veil of smoke, natives fall from a cliff in long shot, a corpse is disintegrated on-screen in a prolonged combustion matching live action sweep of She's arm, and aging occurs between bursts of vibrant white light.Yes, there are still ways that the film is painfully dated. The acting style is the stagy and overbearing declarative statement style of early sound era in order to appropriately capture the dialog with limited camera movements within the sets, the representation of natives will illicit giggles from those who aren't outright offended, and if you're the type of person who HAS to be a killjoy and think King Kong is all racist and stuff, She will probably feel a bit misogynistic (it's pretty much about a woman trying to hold on to a man who doesn't want her, preferring a new younger woman instead). However, there's some stuff that is still just downright delightful, including a prolonged Busby Berkeley-like dance interlude, a large avalanche, and the tongue-in-cheek sendup of characters like Holly, supposed anthropologist sitting back with a bemused expression and a pipe watching in fascination as cannibals get ready to eat him.It may not have created as iconic a character as King Kong, or made dinosaurs come to life sixty years before Jurassic Park, but She is still a wonderful movie.--PolarisDiB