YEAR 1957: KYRA ZELAS

 

I confess that I haven't seen the 1957 SHE-DEVIL in over 20 years, and haven't found even a greymarket source for a copy.  Thus I won't review the film here, but I will link to this review at DVD Savant.

This seems to be the ultimate-- in the sense of "the last"-- adaptation of Stanley Weinbaum's short story, "The Adaptive Ultimate."  I suspect that the short story's appeal to film, radio and television may have been that its "monster" was simply a woman who changed from less-than-attractive to a bombshell, in this case played by popular B-actress Mari Blanchard.  The fact that the monster needed no more than a basic Hollywood makeup job probably made it  attractive to producers than its loose adaptation of Stevenson's "Jekyll and Hyde" trope.  Still, SHE-DEVIL does deserve to be known as one example of the comparative wealth of femmes formidable- films that appeared during the 1950s decade.

One interesting addition to the standard adaptation of "Adaptive" is a memorable scene in which Kyra, having married a wealthy man, simply does away with him by crashing their car.  Her powers enable her to survive the wreck while he perishes, while the apparent circumstances give her a great murder-alibi.  Amusingly, the footage of the car-crash was lifted from an earlier femme formidable film of the period, 1952's ANGEL FACE.

YEAR 1949: KYRA ZELAS

The Stanley G. Weinbaum short story was adapted once for radio and three times for television.  As I'm not dealing with radio productions on this blog, there's nothing I can say about the first television adaptation on STUDIO ONE because, as this reference notes, the original is "lost forever." 

Versions of Weinbaum's story later appeared on the low-budget anthology serials TALES OF TOMORROW and SCIENCE FICTION THEATER, but as I recall, neither of these were particularly noteworthy.  The short story's peculiar use of science and translation of the Frankenstein theme into the sexual-fantasy sphere comes across somewhat better in the 1957 film adaptation SHE-DEVIL, but not by very much.

YEAR 1935: KYRA ZELAS

Published in the November 1935 issue of ASTOUNDING MAGAZINE, "The Adaptive Ultimate" had the honor of being more frequently adapted than the majority of pulp SF short stories: once on radio, twice on television, and once in a 1957 film entitled SHE-DEVIL.  However, it may be theorized that the main reason for the relative popularity of this Stanley Weinbaum tale is that it's a fairly talky variation on the Frankenstein theme, and didn't require much in the way of expensive sets or FX.

The idea of scientists experimenting on female subjects had been touched on elsewhere, as in Hans Heinz Ewers' 1911 novel ALRAUNE.  In this story, researcher Daniel Scott attempts to transfer the adaptive capacities of fruit flies to human beings, on the theory that they'll be able to heal diseases or fatal wounds through the power of "adaptation."  I don't think that even in 1935 any biologists would've bought into Scott's heavily hormonal theory of adaptation, but as is often the case, bad science can make a good story.

A colleague gives Scott the go-ahead to experiment on a drab, impoverished woman named Kyra Zelas, because she's in the final stage of tuberculosis.  For what it's worth, Scott does at least ask Kyra's permission before injecting her with his wonder drug.  The serum works too well: not only does Kyra recover from her disease, she loses all moral compass as a side-effect.  Almost immediately after recovering, she commits the crime of bludgeoning an old man to death for his money.  When called to trial, she simply changes her appearance to that of a dazzling beauty so that the witnesses to the crime cannot swear that she was the perpetrator.

Scott and his colleague plot to kill their pet monster, but when their first attempt fails, Kyra escapes.  Rather improbably, she comes back, apparently because she's become fascinated with her "creator."  Eventually the scientists come up with a way to kill their adaptative adversary, but in a minor ironic touch, Scott has fallen in love with her.  Even though in death she reverts to her original body, he still sees her as a gorgeous siren. One may see Kyra Zelas as the modern-day descendant of myth-figures like the Loathly Lady of the famous Gawain story.