She

James Cruze, who would win fame as a director, shows just why he never really made it as an actor in what is currently the earliest surviving version of H. Rider Haggard's adventure novel, which has long been a favourite of filmmakers. At 24 minutes it has to rush through the plot - a problem which is made worse by the fact that it spends much of its running time on a prologue to explain Cruze's quest to kill the title character. It's well staged and shot, however, and the final scenes are surprisingly effective.

She (1911)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

H. Rider Haggard's novel "She" was filmed several times during the silent era and this version is from the Thanhouser company. In the film, Marguerite Snow plays She, a powerful woman who waits for her lover to return from the dead. She believes that Leo (James Cruze) is her lover reincarnated but this could lead to her fall.

SHE was filmed several times during the silent era but this here is the earliest surviving version. Obviously with just a twenty-four minute running time there's not enough here to fully dive into the novel but for the most part I found this to be entertaining for what it was. The first half of the film is pretty much the backstory dealing with She, her powers and her lover who eventually dies. The second portion of the film gets into his resurrection but the direction by George Nichols just doesn't do too much here. The film doesn't really deliver us a full story and I'd argue that there's not much drama or anything else here. I did like Snow in her role and Cruze wasn't that bad either.

H. Rider Haggard's 1887 best-selling and highly influential fantasy novel "She" has been adapted to film at least eight times, most notably the 1965 version starring Ursula Andress, and as recently as 2001. The oldest existing "She" movie is Thanhouser Company's adaptation, released on December 1911.

Haggard's novel is about eternity and the pitfalls of living a life lasting forever. The Thanhouser effort was the studio's first two-reeler movie, 24 minutes in length. Marguerite Snow starred in the leading role of the eternal-living witch who spots a couple with child whose father is the Priest of Isis, James Cruz, and wants him to be an eternal companion.

"She" was one of the first movies set in ancient Egypt. Thanhouser's budget for "She" was minuscule despite the story's exotic settings. The studio used upper New York state and Long Island to film "She" scenes. Viewers can spot modern buildings in the background, clearly not African structures, as the group journeys on camel and foot towards the east African coast. In its ad campaign on "She," the studio disingenuously bragged about the film crew having to travel to "several different locations, some of them requiring the company to travel 500 miles" to film.

This "She" is an interesting early two-reel screen adaptation of Haggard's novel. American studios were just beginning to produce multi-reel productions around this time, which was undermining the Nickelodeon one-reel standard, and this film in particular seems to have been Thanhouser's first two-reeler. The additional reel really does help, too; this is the earliest of Thanhouser films that I find very interesting. For this still confined length, however, the filmmakers economically re-plotted Haggard's book into chronological order. They also made a peculiar choice in spending much, if not most of, the narrative on the past part, where She kills the one she loves. Additionally, from our modern perspective, it's obvious that they could have saved additional minutes to retain more of Haggard's narrative with the modern practice of cutting to and from scenes during the actions rather than having a scene that begins with no characters and, then, waiting until all characters have entered and left the frame before moving to the next shot, but they were using the common practices of 1911. Another easy criticism is that a couple of the sets are very cheesy.

Regardless, there are some good parts here, and, overall, this was a significant movie for 1911. The picture's second shot, I thought, had decent framing and settings, and the outside photography of the characters traveling isn't bad. There are also a few special effects. The double exposure to make James Cruze appear twice in one shot in his dual roles wasn't anything special, as George Méliès had done that more than a decade before and nearly everyone had been doing it since. She's superimposed visions appearing via a pulled curtain was a nice touch, though. There's also a slight dolly shot, which goes inward and then pulls back outward; dolly shots had also been around for a while, too, but they were more rarely used, and its employment here is effective.

Marguerite Snow plays the title role. In a 1911 "New York Morning Telegraph" poll of the most popular movie actresses, she came in second, ahead of Mary Pickford and Mabel Normand and behind only Florence Turner (a.k.a. "The Vitagraph Girl", who appeared in her own big multi-reel production in 1911, "A Tale of Two Cities"). At some point, Snow also married her co-star here, James Cruze. Cruze would have more success as a director in the 1920s, which included "The Covered Wagon" (1923).

(Note: The print is jumpy and shows its age, but that's to be expected.)