“Don’t destroy their faith in the occult, Swami.”
Using nothing but the power of persuasion, a vengeful woman attempts to take out thirteen women who bullied and harassed her at an all-girls school in 1932’s Thirteen Women. The thirteen women were part of a sorority that taunted the woman, Ursula Georgi, so much that she was forced to leave the school. The film is considered to be an early influence on the slasher genre and one of the first films in which the antagonist builds a “body count” as the story progresses. It is also regularly mentioned as one of the first female ensemble films and an early example of societal racism addressed in film.
The film stars Myrna Loy as Ursula, a woman of mixed race, who uses her influence over a swami to manipulate the sorority sisters into going insane, committing murder and suicide, and believing that the dark predictions made by the swami will come true no matter what they do in order to prevent them from occurring. Standing in Ursula’s way is Irene Dunne as Laura Stanhope, one of the only women in the group who isn’t convinced that the predictions are real. Laura teams up with police sergeant Barry Clive (Ricardo Cortez) to stop Ursula when she targets Laura’s young son, Bobby (Wally Albright).
The movie is well executed. It does a fine job of showing how easily manipulated people can be with just a few strategic events and persuasive suggestions. We get to see how Ursula uses the beliefs, fears, and superstitions of her victims to have them kill themselves and others. The version of the film that I saw was only fifty-nine minutes long. The original film featured roughly fourteen more minutes of footage, mainly of some of the victims succumbing to Ursula’s influence, but when they didn’t work well with test audiences, the film was heavily edited. In fact, entire character arcs were edited out of the movie with the film only focusing on roughly six of the thirteen women.
The cast was excellent. Along with Dunne, Loy, Albright, and Cortez, the film featured Jill Esmond, Mary Duncan, Kay Johnson, Florence Eldridge, C. Henry Gordon, Edward Pawley, and Blanche Friderici. Phyllis Fraser and Betty Furness had roles in the original film but were completely removed from the final cut. Peg Entwistle appears in the film but had roughly twelve minutes of her performance edited out of the final cut. This is notable due to the fact that Entwistle committed suicide roughly one month prior to the film’s release and it is believed that she had become depressed with the way that her film career was going. Thirteen Women is her only on-screen credit but she was a prolific stage performer, starring on Broadway in many plays prior to her death at the age of twenty-four. Entwistle climbed to the top of the “H” in the Hollywoodland sign in September of 1932 and jumped to her death. Both Dunne and Loy would go on to have prolific careers in film and television.
I highly recommend this film. It’s well done and features a solid cast. It’s also chock full of firsts and early moments in cinema. Entwistle’s tragic story in real life only adds to the lore of this film. If you haven’t seen it, look it up on streaming services or on DVD. As far as I know it has not been released on Blu-ray.
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