Last night I took another look at Cecil B DeMille’s 1930 musical/romance/sci-fi mishmash Madame Satan.
It’s not a great movie. It’s not quite sure what it wants to be. Our heroine’s husband is playing around, and of course it’s all her fault :roll: --prime “women’s picture” material. There are some wanna-be screwball comic scenes. And some lackluster musical numbers. And the climax: A ball at which the heroine appears as the masked Madame Satan and seduces her husband (who is attending with Trixie).
But the ball is held on a zeppelin! And then the zeppelin gets struck by lightning, and begins to break up! Panic, screaming, heroism! Reconciliation, of course; a little epilog, and fade to black.
The zeppelin is wonderful. Our first sight is a full view of it moored over an airfield: Moving traffic on the highway, a boat on a nearby river, absolutely lovely model work. The zeppelin model must be ten feet long. An airplane comes in to land at the airfield. The Thirties were the Age of Aviation, and DeMille is giving the crowd its money’s worth.
Several zeppelin sets: The passengers boarding via a ramp at the nose; a procession along the zep’s keel beam walkway (fairly authentic, as near as I can tell); a huge ballroom, with perforated beams galore (not, ahem, authentic…).
The passengers leave the stricken zeppelin via parachute. The parachutes are stowed in down-pointing canisters lined up along the upper edge of the windows. You put on your harness (comedy, or at least comedy-like scenes, ensue as the passengers puzzle out the complicated harness), step up to the window, snap your harness to two straps hanging from a canister, and jump; that pulls the parachute down out of the canister, unfurling above you. It actually seems as though it’d work.
This whole scene is emblematic of the problem with the movie: It mixes scenes of terror and panic with comedy scenes of people messing with their harnesses with romantic scenes with scenes of heroism. And although other filmmakers have managed it, DeMille can’t quite pull it off.
But if you rent it and fast-forward to 50:00, when the zeppelin is introduced, and then to 1:25:00, when it gets hit by lightning, you’re going to see some primo model and effects work. DeMille specialized in spectacle, and when he’s in his element, he really delivers.