Thirteen Women (George Archainbaud, 1932)

Irene Dunne and Myrna Loy in Thirteen Women

Cast: Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, Ricardo Cortez, Jill Esmond, Mary Duncan, Kay Johnson, Florence Eldridge, C. Henry Gordon, Peg Entwistle, Harriet Hagman, Edward Pawley, Blanche Friderici, Wally Albright. Screenplay: Bartlett Cormack, Samuel Ornitz, based on a novel by Tiffany Thayer. Cinematography: Leo Tover. Art direction: Carroll Clark. Film editing: Charles L. Kimball. Music: Max Steiner. 

Myrna Loy was born Myrna Williams in Helena, Montana, but you wouldn't know it from the way Hollywood often cast her at the start of her career in the '20s and '30s. Her role in Thirteen Women is probably the purest example of her work as the stereotypical sinister Eurasian. She plays Ursula Georgi, whom the cop played by Ricardo Cortez scorns as "Half-breed type. Half Hindu, half Javanese, I don't know." (Actually, Cortez himself knew something about crossing ethnic lines: He was born Jacob Krantz in New York, but Hollywood changed his name to capitalize on the vogue for Latin lovers like Rudolph Valentino and Ramon Novarro, and later claimed first that he was French and later that he was born in Vienna.) Ursula seeks revenge on the women who belonged to a sorority at a girls' college and blackballed her when she sought admission. She seeks out a phony seer known as Swami Yogadachi (C. Henry Gordon), whose horoscope readings the girls sought out, and hypnotizes him into sending them poison-pen readings that predict dire events. Two of the girls, the sisters June (Mary Duncan) and May Raskob (Harriet Hagman), have become trapeze artists, and June is so unnerved by the fake reading that she lets May fall to her death during a stunt and goes mad as a consequence. As others fall prey to Ursula's schemes, some of the survivors gather at the home of Laura Stanhope (Irene Dunne), who thinks that their hysteria over the deaths is absurd. Laura is the single mother of a son, Bobby (Wally Albright), who is one of those cloyingly cute movie children -- he calls her "Mumsy." But even Laura's calm vanishes when Ursula makes Bobby her next target. In addition to being stupidly racist, the movie is sheer hokum, a cockamamie blend of revenge thriller and police procedural, and it was not much of a success at the box office, even after RKO cut 14 minutes from it after test screenings -- one of the reasons why we learn the fates of only 10 of the 13 women. One of the performances cut to only four minutes was that of Peg Entwistle, who played Hazel, the one who kills her husband and goes to prison. Entwistle was reportedly so despondent about her movie career that she climbed to the top of one of the letters on the Hollywood sign (reports vary on whether it was the H or the D) and jumped to her death. As for Loy, this was her last outing as a Eurasian vamp: The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934) changed her screen image to that of the witty and soignée wife, most often of William Powell.