American Cinematographer - June 1995 - 102

role to

an RKO contractee, Helen Mack, and the
prin¬
cipal character role to Nigel Bruce, recently arrived
from England. The other players were all from the

freelance ranks.
When at last Cooper decided upon an actress
for the title role, she was Helen Gahagan, wife of
screen star
Melvyn Douglas. The tall, black-haired,
blue-eyed beauty from Boston had eight years' expe¬
rience on the New York stage and 2 Vi years in Europe
and America as an operatic soprano. She had signed

with RKO in 1932, but had never made a film until

Cooper summoned her for She. It proved to be her
only movie. Nine years later she became a member of
Congress. She retired from politics in 1950 after being
defeated by Richard Nixon in an unusually bitter Sen¬
ate

race.

The script conferences whelped forth an in¬
creasingly fantastic yarn beyond even the imaginings
of Haggard. At one point Cooper asked Rose, "Is there
anything else we can put in there to make it more ex¬
citing?" She replied, "It already has everything but a

Above: Mario

films, to write the screenplays. She agreed to write

Larrinaga's

both

concept

would be

drawing of the
Sugal Barrier.
He also did the
matte

painting

for the

scene.

Right: Noble
Johnson
introduces

Nigel Bruce to
the Nagudah
ceremony.

pictures, but stated frankly that in her opinion it
impossible to film She effectively. She never
changed her mind about that, despite Cooper's enthu¬
siasm and reassurances. He was even planning to film

Haggard's sequel, Ayesha. Schoedsack agreed to direct
Pompeii, but nixed She as being unfeasible.
Abandoning the darker concept of the
Balderston script, Cooper and Rose decided to concen¬
trate on strange adventure and stranger romance.
"Africa has lost a lot of its mystery," Cooper an¬
nounced, and decreed that the setting be moved from
the Dark Continent to Arctic Asia! No longer a hide¬
away in the jungle, the lost kingdom of Kor was relo¬
cated to a temperate zone inside a sleeping volcano
surrounded by glaciers. As she had done for Kong's
Skull Island, Rose created a tersely phrased language
for Kor, derived in part from Arabic and complete
with nouns, verbs and conjugations. Dudley Nichols
wrote some added dialogue.
While Cooper was searching for an actress
possessing the great beauty, commanding voice and
regal bearing demanded by the title role, he asked
Rose's opinion. "There's only one actress who might
just possibly put it over," she replied, "and that's
Greta Garbo." To induce MGM to loan out its cel¬
ebrated Swedish mystery lady was a task beyond even

Cooper's powers of persuasion. All the major studios
in the early Thirties had their own hopeful Garbos
under contract. RKO's was Gwili Andre, who already

unable to talk him out of it. She settled for a dead sa¬
bre-tooth frozen in a glacier. Cooper agreed, but when
the sequence was filmed he insisted upon making the
beast

large as an elephant. ("It's not big enough"
producer's most characteristic complaint).
Rose was also unable to talk Cooper out of
having a herd of mammoths attack the explorers. This
was planned as a
big production number with Willis
O'Brien animating the shaggy proboscidians as he had
done with the animals of the Kong films. Cooper reluc¬
tantly agreed to omit the sequence when it became
evident that the production was overstepping its bud¬
was

as

the

get.

had failed as a box-office draw, as had Universal's
Tala Birell, Goldwyn's Anna Sten and Fox's Greta
Nissen. Paramount's Marlene Dietrich had proved
successful in large cities, although her following in
middle America was small, and Paramount had no
intention of loaning her out. Paramount also declined

Cooper had watched the career of Irving
stage-trained actor with a yen to direct. He
had worked as dialogue director on The Most Danger¬
ous Game (1932), and
Cooper had given him co-direc¬
tor billing, then let him direct a good
modest-budget
mystery, Before Dawn (1933). Pichel had asked repeat¬

to lend

edly for further directorial assignments, but in vain

Cooper his choices for the juvenile leads, Joel

McCrea and Frances Dee, but they did offer the youth¬
ful Randolph Scott, at that time a second-string lead¬

104

sabre-tooth tiger." "Great!" Cooper enthused. "Why
didn't I think of that? A sabre-tooth tiger! Write it in!"
She tried to explain that she was only kidding, but was

Pichel,

a

until he

was

hired for She.

ing man and Western star. Cooper gave the ingenue

Experience in making King Kong had taught
Cooper that to describe a scene to a dozen persons

American

June 1995

Cinematographer
American Cinematographer - June 1995

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