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Synopsis:
Harbour Island prepares for the wedding of Ramu (Jon Hall) and
Tollea (Maria Montez). A young friend of the couple, Kado (Sabu),
encounters a stranger, Hava (Lon Chaney Jr), who is apparently both
blind and mute – but who, once the boy has left him, drops his pose
of blindness to seek out and watch Tollea. As she sits by the water,
Tollea is joined by Ramu; the two swear eternal love. Tollea then
speaks worriedly of the guard that her foster-father, Mr MacDonald
(Moroni Olsen), has placed upon her house. Ramu examines two
puncture-like scars on Tollea’s wrist, commenting that perhaps
Tollea’s mother, of whom she has no memory, might have been able to
explain their origin. A little later, the mission bell begins to
ring, and nervous bridegroom Ramu sets out for the church with Kado,
MacDonald and the priest, Father Paul (Samuel S. Hinds). A shocking
discovery is then made: at Tollea’s house a guard lies dead, fang
marks on his throat – and of Tollea there is no sign.... Kado finds
a flute that he recognises as belonging to Hava; it comes apart to
reveal a poisoned forked prong. As the frantic Ramu searches for
Tollea, MacDonald remarks sadly that he won’t find her on the
island. Later, MacDonald reveals to Ramu that Tollea is of the Cobra
People of Cobra Island. He explains that many years ago he was
shipwrecked on Cobra Island, captured, and brutally tortured. Upon
regaining consciousness, MacDonald found himself mysteriously set
out to sea again on his boat, aboard which was also a baby girl, who
he raised as his own daughter. Despite MacDonald’s dire warnings,
Ramu sets out for Cobra Island, not realising that Kado has stowed
away. Landing near the towering cliffs of Cobra Island, Ramu camps,
and that night has his life saved by Kado, who kills a panther with
a blow-dart. The next morning, Ramu and Kado make the dangerous
climb over the cliffs. In the city of the Cobra People, Tollea
learns the truth about herself from the island’s queen (Mary Nash),
who is her grandmother. The queen tells Tollea that she is one of
twins but that, as she was not immune to cobra venom, her younger
sister, Naja, was appointed High Priestess in her place while she,
Tollea, was condemned to die. The queen adds that she has had Tollea
brought back to the island to save its people from the cruelty of
Naja. Meanwhile, Ramu looks on in astonishment as a girl who he
takes to be Tollea, elaborately dressed and attended by handmaidens,
makes her way to an enclosed and guarded lake to bathe. Climbing
over the walls, Ramu swims to the girl and takes her in his arms,
kissing her passionately. The girl struggles free and returns to
shore, where Ramu demands an explanation. Smitten by the handsome
stranger, Naja (Maria Montez) answers evasively. Ramu is confused by
the girl’s attitude but reassured by the twin wounds on her wrist,
and kisses her again. Insisting that she must go, Naja tells Ramu to
meet her in the same place that night, then runs away, ordering her
attendants to say nothing of what they have seen. Ramu, however, is
captured by the guards as he climbs back over the walls and taken to
the city, where he is imprisoned awaiting execution....
Comments:
For me, the New Year always brings with it a host of new or
resuscitated projects and obsessions – most of which, to be frank,
rarely outlive January. One that is, if you’ll pardon the
expression, proving to have legs is my attempt to plug some of the
gaps in my collection of killer snake films; an effort encouraged by
the capture of a long-elusive copy of Cult Of The Cobra
occurring synchronously and serendipitously with a cable screening
of Cobra Woman. The always-capricious movie gods were, I
felt, smiling upon this particular venture.
Now, to be frank,
the inclusion of Cobra Woman in this set of films is a bit of
a cheat. Despite all the snake-referencing and the pervasive
snake-motif in the decor, it is by no stretch of the imagination a
snake film in the usual sense: there’s only one real snake on
display here, and it doesn’t even get to bite anyone! In fact,
Cobra Woman doesn’t fit any of the usual criteria for inclusion
on this site, not even those that squeak in as “fantasy”. There’s no
magic, no myths, no stop-motion monsters; just people in ridiculous
costumes on ridiculous sets speaking ridiculous dialogue in
ridiculous accents. However, if we are prepared to accept as the
definition of “fantasy” a film in which not one single aspect of
character or story or setting belongs to any kind of recognisable
reality, then “fantasy” this certainly is. In fact, Cobra Woman
is one of the great cinematic jewels in the diadem of camp, studio
film-making as escapist entertainment taken to its most ludicrous
extreme.
You'll never guess which is the
evil one.
There’s very little
point in talking about the plot of Cobra Woman, but such as
it is, here goes: twin sisters separated in infancy battle it out
for the rulership of an island kingdom, surrounded by a lot of
pidgin English-speaking natives, a papier-mâché snake, an
angry “fire mountain” and a comic relief chimp. Little effort is
made to flesh out these bare bones. Cobra Woman’s one claim
to fame, script-wise, is its central good twin/evil twin gimmick.
Although Lionel Atwill, Boris Karloff and George Zucco had all faced
off against themselves in genre films before this, Cobra Woman
is the earliest example I can think of, of this phenomenon occurring
on the distaff side. Even so, little is actually made of the film’s
central premise. The bulk of the film’s action could have been
lifted from any of the serials that even this late in the game, made
up part of any good matinee program: the various characters spend
much of their time running around and getting sequentially captured
and rescued, these episodes being enlivened by the occasional
fist-fight or dramatic swing upon a rope. (I will give Cobra
Woman this: it may be the only “jungle adventure” in the history
of the cinema whose climax is that a volcano stops erupting!)
These episodes are linked by a screenplay that can’t even be
bothered thinking through its own back story. We hear about the
infant Tollea failing her High Priestess exam by not proving immune
to cobra venom (she is condemned to death for this, which under the
circumstances would hardly seem necessary!), and hear also about the
capture and torture of MacDonald, and his subsequent regaining of
consciousness upon his own boat, upon which he also finds a baby
girl. The means by which not one, but two miraculous escapes from
death row were achieved remain blithely unexplicated. Being left to
plug the gaps for ourselves, we can only infer that the queen, the
twin’s grandmother, somehow arranged them. Another mental leap is
required for our heroine’s name: “Tollea”, you would think, is
hardly what a Scottish sailor would come up with, left to his own
devices. Like a cabbage-patch baby, Tollea must have come with her
own certificate of authenticity.
(One more inference
lurking in all this is that the girls weren’t named until after the
cobra venom ceremony: calling the High Priestess “Naja” is the one
remotely clever thing on display here. “Tollea”, conversely, must be
native-speak for “loser”.)
If we are going to
compare this film to a Saturday serial, it must be admitted
that even by these undemanding standards, Cobra Woman’s good
guys are a pretty lacklustre bunch. Ramu, our bare-chested,
two-fisted hero, actually contributes nothing but a little
assistance to Hava during the climactic brawl; Tollea’s
confrontation with Naja ends not with the bitch-slapping we’ve all
been eagerly anticipating, but with Naja’s accidental death without
a hand being laid on her. Subsequently, Tollea’s attempt to rescue
the condemned Ramu and Kado fails dismally when, upon being
confronted by the cobra around which, as “Naja”, she is expected to
dance, she faints dead away; and it is left to Koko the comic relief
chimp to actually save the prisoners’ sorry asses. To make things
worse, it is then Kado, not Ramu, who saves Tollea from the cobra,
and Hava who disposes of Martok, the evil “law-giver”. Ramu, left to
his own devices, can’t tell Tollea and Naja apart, not even once he
knows for sure he’s dealing with twins. Kado, conversely, takes one
look and rightly pegs Naja as being “pretty like Tollea, but with a
mean face”. (To be fair, Martok, who is in love with Naja, can’t
tell them apart either: Tollea is able to fool him by tagging each
sentence she speaks with Naja’s catch-cry, “I have spoken!”) Heroism
as Informed Attribute© is certainly nothing unusual, but
you’d go a long way to find a more uninspiring pair of heroes than
Tollea and Ramu. In fact, their one outstanding characteristic, as
we shall see, is their utter selfishness in the name of love.
"Oh, I beg your pardon, I thought
you were Esther Williams!"
There does,
however, come a point at which applying normal forms of cinematic
judgement to something like Cobra Woman becomes an exercise
in futility, albeit an amusing one. Here, as so often, the devil is
in the details: in all sorts of ways that its creators never
intended, Cobra Woman is idiotically entertaining. Just try,
for example, to figure out the structure of the ruling family on
Cobra Island, or the actual hierarchy of power operating there. Naja
and Tollea’s grandmother is “queen of the island”, but no king,
prince or princess is in evidence. The queen is no more than a
figurehead, held in utter disregard by her granddaughter – until
Martok presses Naja to marry him, and she objects that such a thing
is impossible without the queen’s consent. (When said consent is not
forthcoming, Martok murders her: so much for that.) The issue
of who might perform the marriage ceremony is never touched upon.
When Tollea, posing as Naja, tries to stop Ramu’s execution, the
jealous Martok insists that it is his business, not hers:
“Enforcement of the law is my concern; religion is yours!” – an odd
distinction, where all the laws seem to stem from the
religion. (Perhaps the “execution of all strangers” statute is the
one exception....although there is never any attempt to explain why
MacDonald was tortured but not executed, while Ramu is to be
executed without torture. Except, you know, IITS©.) As
High Priestess, Naja is all-powerful, relieving both her boredom and
her sadism by slaughtering her followers with impunity, and
justifying her excesses with the line, “It is the Cobra tradition! I
have spoken!” Yet when the queen is imploring Ramu not to interfere
with her scheme to replace Naja with Tollea, it is made clear that
most of Naja’s games, including the selection of two hundred
sacrificial offerings to “the fire mountain”, are made up on the
spot. (“She says ‘go’ and they die without question!?” Ramu objects,
not without justification.) Loopiest of all, however, is the queen
bringing Tollea back to Cobra Island to challenge Naja’s High
Priestess-ship on the grounds that she, Tollea, is the eldest and
therefore High Priestess by right of birth. It is already been made
quite clear that immunity to cobra venom rates higher than
primogeniture in the Cobra ritual. If so, on what grounds is Naja to
be challenged? If not – why the heck wasn’t Tollea High Priestess in
the first place??
THRILL to the seamless special
effects!
The lengthy Tollea/queen
and queen/Ramu scenes highlight another delicious idiocy of Cobra
Woman: the range of accents on display here, and completely
inappropriate way they are dispersed. First of all there is the
queen herself, who speaks not just perfect English, but perfectly
English English – ’cos, you know, she’s a queen. Mysteriously,
her granddaughter, Naja, speaks with an impenetrable Spanish
accent....and still more mysteriously, so does Tollea, despite
having been raised from babyhood by a Scotsman, with help from an
Irish priest. Ramu, on the other hand, whose origins and presence on
Harbour Island are never touched upon, speaks with an American
accent, his Indian name notwithstanding. All these characters do, at
least, get to speak their language correctly. Beyond this – below
this, we might more truthfully say – there is no “native tongue”, as
such: everyone else is forced to speak pidgin-English of the
humiliating “fire mountain angry!” variety; even Kado, who has been
educated at “Father Paul’s school”. This is not without its amusing
side, as it gives us such touches as Naja’s handmaidens, who speak
pidgin-English with Brooklyn accents; and the performances of Lois
Collier as Veeda, who intermittently forgets that she’s supposed to
be leaving out all her prepositions, and Edgar Barrier as Martok,
who doesn’t seem to have ever been clearly directed as to whether he
was supposed to be leaving his out or not. The one sad and unfunny
exception in all this is Hava, with Lon Chaney Jr, scant years after
his twin triumphs in Of Mice And Men and The Wolf Man,
already reduced to the embarrassment of mute henchmen roles.
And as go the
accents, so too go the skin tones: all the leading citizens on both
Harbour and Cobra Islands, which we take to be situated somewhere in
the Indian Ocean, are, of course, Caucasian, whether “native” or
not; and the higher up the social scale, the paler the skin. (For
the record, Maria Montez was born in the Dominican Republic of a
Spanish father and a Dutch mother, and Jon Hall in California of an
American father and a Tahitian mother; both of them thus
sufficiently “exotic” in the eyes of whitebread Hollywood to be
condemned to spending their careers trapped in sarong-draped epics
like this one.) More dubious still are Cobra Woman’s uneasy
religious underpinnings. When we first meet Ramu and Tollea, we find
that they are in the habit of doing Ruth-and-Naomi with one another,
with the “And thy God, my God” part falling to Tollea. The
suggestion here seems to be that both of them are recent converts to
Christianity, but given the prominence of “Father Paul” in the
affairs of Harbour Island, this seems unlikely: if there is any form
of native religion left on Harbour Island, it never rates a mention.
(Given her upbringing, you would expect Tollea’s feelings of
religious conflict, if any, rather to be between Scotch
Presbyterianism and Irish Catholicism, than Christianity and
Paganism.) Later on, this ostensibly religious reference turns out
to be nothing more than a way by which Ramu can tell the difference
between Tollea and Naja. Or does it? When Ramu is brought to the
queen, she begs him to sacrifice his love and leave Tollea on Cobra
Island, for the benefit of “thousands of souls who need her more
than you do”. Ramu’s immediate reaction is to shrug off the fate of
the islanders as none of his concern – but when Tollea has been
instated as High Priestess at the end of the film, Ramu departs
quietly and leaves her there. So he thinks. Halfway back to Harbour
Island, Ramu again discovers a stowaway, Tollea justifying her
desertion of her people (who have, within a twenty-four hour period,
lost their queen, their law-giver, and two High Priestesses!)
with another recitation of Ruth-and-Naomi. Given Ramu and Tollea’s
“true love” – yecchh! – we’re supposed to acquiesce in this
monumental piece of selfishness, but it leaves a pretty sour taste
in the mouth. Evidently Father Paul’s teaching of Christianity never
got up to the part where, just occasionally, you’re supposed to give
a crap about someone other than yourself.
Hmm. Well, we seem
to have wandered into some unnecessarily murky waters here. Sorry.
Another instance of my terrible habit of trying to find substance in
fairy-floss. But just because I have trouble parking my brain
in neutral, that’s no reason why you should. Because Cobra
Woman is, indisputably, fairy-floss; fairy-floss par
excellence; a glorious example of Hollywood film-making at its
most flimsily fabulous. Don’t think about it: just settle back and
let your eyeballs and your sense of humour feast. The eyeballs come
first. This is one of those films where in the opening credits the
words IN TECHNICOLOR are almost as prominent as the names of the
cast, and with good reason. Between them, the art direction and
costume design of this film could induce retina burn. With a
plasterboard volcano spitting in the background and plasterboard
palaces looming in the foreground, Cobra Woman takes place in
a world not merely of fantasy, but of drug-induced phantasmagoria.
We hardly have time to wonder, as Maria Montez parades around before
us in an ever-increasingly outrageous collection of outfits and
head-dresses and high heels, where the “primitive” people of Cobra
Island get their materials....let alone their designers. Cobra
Woman is a film that holds pride of place in the camp lexicon,
and no wonder: the unapologetic extravaganza that is Maria Montez’s
wardrobe is truly its own justification.
After the disappointment of
Little Timmy And The Shebangs, Las Vegas welcomed Naja And Her
Cobrettes with open arms.
(Speaking of the
film’s costume design, I must not let this review close without
mentioning its attempt at sparing the delicate feelings of the 1940s
movie-goer: Koko the comic relief chimp, whose prominent role in the
action of this film speaks volumes for the abilities of his human
co-stars, is forced to perform while wearing a nappy! Oh,
it’s an exotic nappy; paisley-patterned, no less; but you just
know that it had its origin in the same mind-set that, around
the same time, insisted upon Tweety Bird putting on feathers.)
And it is here that
we reach, not just the highlight of Cobra Woman, but The
Apotheosis Of Maria Montez as, in a prelude to the selection of the
next round of ritual sacrifices, Naja performs – The Cobra
Dance!!
There are hardly
words adequate to describe the demented splendour of this sequence.
Naja’s ceremonial dance plays like a deliriously camped-up cross
between Barbara Stanwyck’s hip-swinging performance to “Drum Boogie”
in Ball Of Fire and Rita Hayworth’s mock-strip to “Put The
Blame On Mame” in Gilda (and was, unmistakably, the
inspiration for Divine’s stage-act in John Water’s Female Trouble).
As Naja twists and writhes and booty-shakes around her stage,
dodging the frenzied lunges of her consort, the king cobra, and
melodramatically singling out victims for the next round of
sacrifices to “the fire mountain” – all of them attractive young
women, we note – Maria Montez’s performance reaches a level of
kitsch for which, even to this day, no adequate form of measurement
has been formulated. The icing on the cake here is the ritual
gesture that the native Cobra Islanders make in response to their
High Priestess’s gyrations, raising one arm and kind of wriggling
their wrist: they’re certainly supposed to be making the universal
symbol of the snake here, but the ultimate effect is a suggestion
that Naja’s followers consist primarily of a gathering of extremely
effete Nazis.
(We learn via
Martok that one of the accusations against Ramu is “laughing at our
faith”. If that’s a capital offence on Cobra Island, it’s a
wonder there’s anyone left standing.)
"GEEV ME THAHT COBRAH JOOL!!"
In comparison to
Naja’s solitary splendour, what ought to be the highlight of
Cobra Woman – the confrontation between the two Montez-es – is a
distinct letdown. Everything we know about the good twin/evil twin
mini-genre – not to mention the usual workings of the male mind –
leads us to expect a knock down, drag ’em out cat-fight when Tollea
and Naja finally meet. What we get instead is a minor verbal
altercation that terminates with disappointing abruptness when Naja,
lining up her sister with one of the spears that she likes to keep
handy, forgets herself and backs a little too close to an
exceedingly low balcony. The only compensation for this lack of a
pay-off is that this scene is the source of the all-time immortal
Maria Montez “line” – “GEEV MEE THAHT COBRAH JOOL!!”
(Fond as I am of
this line, I must say that the moment in Cobra Woman that
always pushes me over the edge is that which sees Edgar Barrier
shrieking in high-pitched hysteria, “HE KILLED KING COBRA!!!!”)
Cobra Woman
as a strange nexus of a film, a prime example of the cross-currents
extant in the heyday of the studio system; of the strange
bed-fellows that could be created by forced studio assignments, and
of the trials by fire that numerous individuals were compelled to
undergo before finding their individual voices. At the production
level it reunited some of the talents that together produced The
Wolf Man three years earlier: producer-director George Waggner
and star Lon Chaney Jr, both of them taking a considerable step down
here, and working with screenwriter Curt Siodmak’s brother, Robert
(who, curiously, would later return to the good twin/evil twin
device in The Dark Mirror); while Richard Brooks – yes,
Richard Brooks: The Killers, Crossfire, The
Blackboard Jungle, In Cold Blood---- THAT Richard Brooks
– paid some dues by co-writing the screenplay. Cobra Woman
was also the third re-teaming of Maria Montez with Jon Hall and Sabu,
and her second with Edgar Barrier, after her two previous
Technicolor pageants, Arabian Nights and White Savage
(the latter also written by Richard Brooks!). As for Maria
Montez herself----well, what can we say? An actress she wasn’t, but
she was unique. We need not dismiss her for her lack of
talent. These days the film world is flooded with individuals cast
for their vapid good looks, not their acting ability, and who bring
with them none of La Montez’s singular compensations. If the career
she carved for herself was limited in both scope and duration, it
has nevertheless ensured her a permanent niche in the enduring world
of Hollywood legend. Of Ms Montez and her inimitable
spangles-and-cardboard epics it can be most truly said----
They don’t make ’em
like that any more.
Want a second
opinion of Cobra Woman? Visit
1000 Misspent Hours – And Counting.
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