Universal Studios Cobra Woman released during World War Two (1943) sounds like a horror movie, a throwback to the classic monsters like Frankenstein, Dracula, and the werewolf that the company produced during the Depression. This is misleading. In fact, the picture is an exotic escapist fantasy, a brightly lit technicolored dream, more akin to The Wizard of Oz or The Thief of Baghdad -- indeed, many of the Moorish-style sets with domes and filigree-covered windows look like they were borrowed from the latter picture. This is a war-time diversion, brilliantly lit and expensively colored, that also doubles as a rather lurid erotic spectacle. The picture is extremely entertaining in a garish, hallucinatory way: every frame of the picture is designed to monopolize your attention -- if things seem to lag, the director Robert Siodmak spices things up with nubile slave girls, human sacrifices, threats of torture and an avuncular chimpanzee as jester, ambling around in a weird batik apron and diaper. The cast is good for this sort of thing: Jon Hall plays the love-smitten jungle explorer hero with a big square head and big square jaw and an "aw-shucks" demeanor. Hall's character, oddly named Ramu, is passive, generally spending his time tied-up in a dungeon or, otherwise, ineffectually mooning over this missing girlfriend. The girlfriend, indeed, Ramu's fiancee, is the lissome Tollea, played by Maria Montez, as beautiful and remote as a Greek statue or the moon. Tollea has a twin sister (also Montez of course) who is more lively -- she's the titular cobra woman, the High Priestess of a snake cult on a small island dominated by a smoking and, sometimes, fiery volcano that looks just something contrived for an eighth grade science fair. The High Priestess is more lively than her sister, a sadist who requires her longsuffering people to hurl themselves into the volcano to preserve her dictatorial rule. The Cobra Woman's muscle is priest called Martock, who runs around in a brilliant scarlet robe with a hat that looks like an oversized tulip just sprouting from the earth. (The movie seems to put most of its budget into resplendent costumes: the Cobra Woman wears a meter-high tiara of coruscating gold and gems -- it looks like a peacock's tail extended over her head -- and her slinky, high-fashion vestments are embroidered with more jewels that glitter against the red fabric. The women in the Court are all showgirls -- they wear clothing that is so tight-fitting that that they might as well be completely topless. Although the story takes place in a South Seas jungle, the girls all prance about in high-heels.) Lon Chaney Jr., who always looks as if he's being tortured, plays the part of a beggar whom we first see with gruesome white eyes -- he can't talk because his tongue has been ripped out. The beggar, in fact, is an emissary from the old Queen of Snake Island, the mother of Tollea and her evil twin, the High Priestess; the picture is about regime change -- the old Queen Mother wants to install the more humane and reasonable Tollea in the role of High Priestess; the evil twin is a kind of usurper. When Chaney's enigmatic beggar abducts Tollea and takes her to Snake Island, her aggrieved fiancee Ramu (Jon Hall) pursues her, crossing over to the dangerous island where all strangers are tortured to death. Accompanying him is Kado, played obsequiously by Sabu, the handsome and loyal jungle boy with his pet chimpanzee named Koko. On the island, action is non-stop and breathless and the action proceeds on the principle of "one damn thing after another." A black panther stalks Ramu but the jungle-boy uses a blow-pipe to kill the critter mid-air as it springs from a cliff onto the hero. The protagonists climb a cliff, nearly falling off and, then, see Tollea with an entourage of Vegas-style show girls bathing in the sacred pond -- Ramu leaps in and Siodmak cuts to underwater shot in which hero and heroine embrace in the turquoise-colored depths. Ramu is captured by Martock and thrown in a dungeon. The poor jungle boy gets savagely tortured by being stretched by the tension of a bent tree while his feet are fettered. ("Take him to the tree of torture!" someone commands.) The feisty ape frees the jungle boy who is none the worse for wear. The High Priestess does a cobra dance wiggling around while a gigantic serpent glares at her. The serpent rests on a sort of silver platter, the kind of thing on which you might be served paela in an expensive Spanish restaurant. (Siodmak is a product of the German film system -- the dance sequence is indebted to the similarly erotic performance by the robot Maria in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.) Two-hundred peasants are selected for human sacrifice in the gullet of the volcano which rumbles threateningly. Ramu escapes from the dungeon and, finally, there's a huge brawl in the ornate cobra temple with the jungle-boy and great White hunter swinging back and forth on conveniently placed ropes tethered to overhead candelabra to lunge onto their enemies while the chimp gloats, turns his lip back over his lower jaw, and pitches pieces of fruit at the combatants. During this battle royale, the volcano erupts and spews rocks and red hot magma all over the place. All ends well. The oppressive reign of the Cobra Woman comes to an end and peace and harmony are restored on the island.
The dialogue is precious, little chunks of overheated nonsense chanted by the characters: for example, a villain characterizes the Queen Mother's hopes for the future as "the wild dream of her decaying brain." During the brawl, the two-hundred human sacrifices are heard climbing the "thousand steps to the volcano's" top, singing their "fire death hymn". The sacred pond is a round pool in an idyllic forest edged at the far side with a whole flock of flamingos -- the flamingos never move and its obvious that their just lawn ornaments seen from a distance; the filmmakers hope you won't notice but you do and that's part of the charm of this picture. Similarly, the mise-en-scene alternates shots of a real cobra looking rather timid and beleaguered with a prosthetic creature, probably a puppet, that's twice as large -- again the filmmakers sort of hope that you won't notice the discrepancy but, of course, you do. The opening titles assure the viewer that you're in for a good time: two massive bronze braziers are burning with orange flame -- they produce vertical columns of bright green smoke that flank a huge gilded image of a cobra about to strike.
Reputedly, Cobra Woman was Kenneth Anger's favorite film, admired by the director of the libertine The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Lucifer Rising among other pictures. I should also note that Cobra Woman has a peculiar message or moral: "Fear has made them (referring to the Snake Islanders) religious fanatics." Curiously, the picture suggests that the problem on the island is that Martock representing law (secular authority) has got entangled with the religious sect of cobra worship. This seems a sort of "Why we Fight" aspect to the film. In an oblique way, the film seems to be a part of the war effort.
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