THIRTEEN WOMEN (1932)

Director: George Archainbaud

Writers: Bartlett Cormack, Samuel Orniz adapting the 1932 novel by Tiffany Thayer

Producer: David O. Selznick

Cast: Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, Ricardo Cortez, Jill Esmond, Peg Entwistle, Mary Duncan, C. Henry Gordon, Kay Johnson, Florence Eldridge, Harriet Hagman, Edward Pawley, Wally Albright, Blanche Friderici, Lloyd Ingraham (uncredited), Phyllis Fraser (cut scenes), Betty Furness (cut scenes)

Ursula Georgi (Myrna Loy) is a Eurasian beauty with the mystic ability to force her will on others. She has controlled an astrologer, the Swami Yogadachi (C. Henry Gordon). He had made horoscopes for twelve sorority sisters who were Ursula Georgi’s American finishing school classmates. Georgi forges new horoscopes from the swami and sends them to each of the sorority sisters. Each of the mailed horoscopes now predicts doom and seems to compel each of the women receiving them to perform self-destructive acts.

The Flashback Fanatic movie review

Myrna Loy probably found her greatest film fame as half of the crime-solving couple of Nick (William Powell) and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934) and its five sequels. Prior to that, she had been fighting typecasting as exotic, non-American vamps. Her most notorious role was as the depraved daughter of Boris Karloff’s diabolical criminal genius Dr. Fu Manchu in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932). Just one month before that film’s release, Loy appeared as the sensuous and sinister Eurasian Ursula Georgi in Thirteen Women.

Loy’s performance is restrained, yet she commands every scene she is in; you just can’t take your eyes off her. Her lovely features are suitably enhanced with exotic eye makeup that suggests her mysticism and hypnotic power. During the film’s climax when she is venting about her backstory and grievance that provide her murderous motive, Loy’s performance still maintains enough dignity that we can empathize a bit with her.

At first glance, it may seem that this is just another foreign stereotype of Asian villainy being set up as a film baddie. But this movie eventually reveals how the casual cruelty of American attitudes about class and race cause this foreigner to strike back. That oh so American virtue of pulling oneself up by their bootstraps did not spare the Ursula Georgi character from being ostracized due to the desperate circumstances of her impoverished background and “half breed” status.

That final vendetta reveal, as well as the victims-picked-off-one-by-one storyline, is why Thirteen Women has been cited as a precursor to the slasher film. Many vengeance-seeking slasher villains are revealed to have suffered a trauma dealt to them at a young age or in a school setting. But Loy’s Ursula Georgi doesn’t need to bloody her pretty hands when the weapon she wields is the power of suggestion.

The application of that deadly control is rather vague. It seems that the sorority sisters who are targets for Ursula Georgi’s rage are all susceptible to suggestion by the horoscopes of the Swami Yogadachi predicting their fates. Yogadachi’s horoscopes originally foretold happiness for the sorority sisters. As the swami’s secretary, Georgi writes new horoscopes foretelling doom that she sends in his name to her hated former classmates. Due to their faith in the swami’s horoscopes, these women are compelled to behave in ways that assure their downfall. The Swami Yogadachi is one mystic foreigner who, in turn, is under the sway of another, the hypnotically alluring Ursula Georgi. Her mysticism is weaponizing his. We soon meet another man (Edward Pawley) who is practically Georgi’s henchman because he is also similarly smitten with her. Georgi can also command people to instantly fall asleep. Originally, this film tested poorly with audiences and later had 14 minutes cut from it. Perhaps the missing footage explained more about how all this occultism works. It is just as likely that the filmmakers did not bother. American filmgoers would accept mysterious foreigners from exotic places having strange abilities westerners just can’t understand. However, all this inexplicable mysticism does enable a fitting irony and ambiguity for the film’s climax.

Irene Dunne distinguished herself in screwball comedies and had been nominated for an Oscar five times without winning. She earned her first nomination in her second film, the 1931 Western Cimmaron. The following year Dunne is starring in Thirteen Women as wealthy single mother Laura Stanhope. Of all the victims of Ursula Georgi’s wrath, Laura earns the most of our sympathy as Georgi targets her young son (Wally Albright) for death. Despite this stress, Dunne’s Laura Stanhope seems the most levelheaded of all the potential horoscope victims.

Ricardo Cortez plays the detective investigating the strange series of deaths inflicted by Ursula Georgi. As Police Sergeant Barry Clive, he meets Dunne’s Laura Stanhope, and something tells me he likes what he sees. Cortez had co-starred with Dunne earlier the same year in the drama Symphony of Six Million (1932). He already had an extensive filmography and had played detective Sam Spade in 1931’s The Maltese Falcon, the first film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel.

This strange thriller’s acts of self-destruction were tragically prescient for an actress portraying one of the doomed sorority sisters. In Thirteen Women, stage performer Peg Entwistle had her only film credit playing the small role of Hazel Clay Cousins. Unfortunately, just one month before the film's premiere, Peg Entwistle would achieve her greatest fame by committing suicide leaping off the top of the famous Hollywoodland sign. Her motive for this tragic act is left unclear by her cryptic suicide note. Such a sad fate for an actress whose stage performance had inspired none other than the great Bette Davis to pursue acting.

If one attributes any significance to karma or superstition, it may come as no surprise that Thirteen Women was unlucky at the box office. In retrospect, this weird film is appreciated as another pre-Code curiosity that was edgy, unconventional, perhaps eventually influential, and now seems to have a reputation verging on cult status.