She (RKO). A cynic might argue that the activities undertaken in the name of science in the cinema are not more absurd than those undertaken in the name of science in reality. It would not be an easy argument to win. In She, for example, the dying physicist, who is as essential to this school of film as the corpse to a murder mystery, announces a hypothesis that life may be indefinitely prolonged in a human being by broiling him over a phenomenally hot flame. With this point firmly in mind, the scientist's nephew Leo Vincey (Randolph Scott) and his associate (Nigel Bruce) begin paddling off to the Siberian wilds where a family legend indicates that an ancestor named John Vincey encountered such a flame 500 years before. Thereupon She ceases to be concerned with test tubes and laboratory riddles, becomes an honest and ingratiating example of the pipe-dream cinema, full of glaciers, cannibals, underground kingdoms, mystic vapors and supernatural dilemmas calculated to arouse in audiences a mixture of amazement and despair.
First, the Vincey expedition meets a wild British fur trader living in a snow hut with his lovely daughter Tanya (Helen Mack). Next they find old John Vincey's body sealed in a glacier, like a lamb chop in aspic. Hacking at the glacier the fur trader starts an avalanche. The avalanche opens up the entrance to an underground kingdom where Leo, his associate and Tanya are assaulted by cannibals, lugged off in time's nick to a porphyry castle, where a queen named She (Helen Gahagan) mistakes Leo Vincey for his ancestor, explains that she has been in love with him for 500 years. The hospitality at the castle is good; the Queen's character, bad. When she tries to dump Tanya into a cauldron, Leo Vincey rescues her, runs away. He and his associates find themselves trapped in the cave of the mystic flame. The Queen jumps into the flame to show Leo that it will do him no harm. Instead of rejuvenating her, it turns her into an old lady. Muttering, in effect, "What am I up against?" she wilts to the ground. The Vincey expedition starts for home.
Admirers of the late Sir Henry Rider Haggard will observe that She is a rough adaptation of his novel, written in 1887. Equally apparent is the fact that the narrative is less immune than its heroine to the ravages of time. A sequel to King Kong and other such RKO extravaganzas, marred by idiotic dialog and the wooden acting of Randolph Scott, it can be recommended only to cinemaddicts who find bizarre landscapes and immense improbable interiors adequate substitutes for genuinely imaginative fantasy. Typical shot: She's No. i henchman (Gustav von Seyffertitz) ducking his head and mumbling prayers when Leo Vincey shows him a talisman inherited from old John Vincey's widow.