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| gromit |
 Posted: Wed Sep 30, 2026 12:02 pm |
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Joined: 31 Aug 2004
Posts: 9034
Location: Shanghai
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Madam Satan (1930) is a crazy Cecil B DeMille mashup of genres. Starts as a bedroom comedy of the sort DeMille cranked out for Paramount throughout the 1920s. Then switches into a crazed musical with a wacky costume party aboard a zeppelin moored above NYC. Some numbers look like lost musical scenes from Metropolis, especially the ode to electricity and mechanics. And finally closes as a disaster drama when a storm rips the zeppelin in half. Everyone parachutes to safety, with many of the landings played for laughs.
Its really an odd film, and the zeppelin party scene, the 2nd half of the runtime, was filmed in two-strip color. Unfortunately by the time it was released in Sept 1930, the Depression was grinding on, the musical film market was saturated, and audiences weren't much interested in watching rich people bumble around with rich people problems. To make it worse, MGM tried to save money by releasing the film mostly in black and white, losing some of the spectacle. I watched a version on youtube colorized by a fan to recreate the lost Multicolor (a cheaper rival to Technicolor) look.
Ultimately the film is overlong (nearly two hours) and doesn't cohere. The switch to the zeppelin costume party is so abrupt it feels like a completely new film begins. Surely a brief connecting scene of them planning the party, talking about going, or somesuch would have helped. Costumes are interesting, singing is mostly operatic or trilling except for one Bessie Smith style blues number. Songs mostly forgettable, though I like that they define the characters or move the plot forward. However the words at times difficult to decipher, likely due to early sound limitations.
I imagine the scenes of rich people jumping out of the zeppelin over NYC must have had echoes of the previous years Wall St. office building suicides by financiers who lost fortunes in the stock market crash. Probably why they take pains to show newspaper headlines emphasizing that everyone was saved from the zeppelin. For modern audiences, the zeppelin crash evokes the 1937 Hindenburg disaster. But for 1930 audiences they'd probably think of the 1925 Shenandoah zep tragedy when a storm in Ohio severed the cabin control room and ripped the 680 foot military vessel in half. Otherwise the disaster in the film probably made most think about the Titantic. |
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| Syd |
| Posted: Thu Oct 01, 2026 9:39 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 12979
Location: Norman, Oklahoma
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Nancy Peay posted a picture of Kay Johnson's dress as Madam Satan, which looks terrific in black-and-white and color. I believe it used to be in the Smithsonian, and may be now.
The film is amazingly odd and generates all sorts of weird images. I confess, I remembered Kay Francis as being in the film. Johnson had a fairly good film career, but this seems to be her highlight, and, alas, it's mostly forgotten. It's unfair to compare her with Kay Francis, one of my favorite actresses, but Ms. Johnson was pretty good herself |
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