Thirteen Women

"I dread sending you this horoscope...But it is written....."
Warner Archives has just released the elusive DVD transfer of 1932's "13 Women". Ursula Georgi is an East-Indian half-caste, scarred by her taunting white sorority sisters, who all lived together at a private school north of San Francisco. The years have passed, and Georgi has teamed with bogus Swami Yogadachi(her lover, who she soon murders). Georgi sends round-robin letters; astrology forecasts warning all 13 of her class-mates that sudden death is next on their agenda. Georgi threatens them, and their families, and then uses poison, bombs, hypnotism, and auto-suggestion to carry out her plans. A spell-binding performance, Myrna Loy is icy and chilling as Georgi, a dark vamp who uses sex to trap her lovers into completing her strategies. Irene Dunne plays Laura Stanhope, a sorority girl, now married with a young son. Warm family sequences with mother and son are played against Loy's arcane devil-plotting in her secret lair. The cast also has Ricardo Cortez, C, Henry Gordon, and Leon...

Great Film
I truly enjoyed this old fashioned movie with a diabolical cast!
And of course, I love Myrna Loy. I highly recommend it.

A Tragic Tale of Old America
Thirteen Women is at it's very core a tragedy. The villain of the story, Ursula Georgi (Myrna Loy), is only so "cruel and inhuman" because of how she was treated by society, forced to pass for white to get anywhere in life and be accepted and treated as a human being. Ironically, the fact that she passed for white is what led to her inhumanity, scorned by the other young women in her sorority as a "half-caste Hindu" she swore revenge on these twelve other women and years later, along with a certain swami, who doubles as her lover, sends them all horoscopes foretelling death in their future, and slowly but surely death and tragedy of various kinds does seem to befall the women, some of who believe in the horoscopes and others who do not. Ursula, who possesses the power to hypnotize and control others minds to do her bidding, even goes so far as to threaten the life of the child of one of the women. A tense film, it was known as the first psychological thriller. The ending is very...

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