Crew
Director/Producer – Kurt Neumann, Screenplay – Kurt Neumann & Carroll Young, Based on the Short Story The Adaptive Ultimate by John Jessel [Stanley G. Weinbaum], Photography (b&w) – Karl Struss, Music – Paul Sawtell & Bert Shefter, Production Design – Theobold Holsopple. Production Company – Regal Films, Inc..
Cast
Mari Blanchard (Kyra Zelas), Jack Kelly (Dr Dan Scott), Albert Dekker (Dr Richard Bach), John Archer (Barton Kendall), Blossom Rock (Hannah), Fay Baker (Evelyn Kendall)
Plot
Dan Scott has been staying at the home of the renowned surgeon Richard Bach in San Bernardino as Bach funds his experiments. Dan reveals that he has created a serum that allows animals to rapidly heal their wounds, even change the colour of their fur. He wants to try human experiments next. Bach finds the perfect subject in Kyra Zelas, an unemployed woman who is dying of tuberculosis. After being administered the serum, Kyra makes a remarkable recovery. She then announces that she is going to set out to live the life she always wanted. In short order, she mugs a man in a clothing store for his money, which she uses to buy new dresses, and then avoids the police by changing the colour of her hair. Dan and Richard see that they have created something heartless as Kyra sets her targets on marrying wealthy Barton Kendall, while killing off his wife.
Kurt Neumann (1908-55) was a director who had an interesting career in 1950s genre cinema. Neumann was the child of German immigrants who came to the US in the early 1930s, where he quickly found a job in movies and was soon directing feature films, as well as is credited with the idea for The Return of the Vampire (1943). He worked in musicals, comedy and Westerns, directing several of the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films – Tarzan and the Amazons (1945), Tarzan and the Leopard Man (1946) and Tarzan and the Huntress (1947) and one with Lex Barker Tarzan and the She-Devil (1953). His success in genre cinema began with Rocketship X-M (1950), the first space exploration film of the 1950s Golden Age. From there Neumann went on to make the Arabian Nights fantasy Son of Ali Baba (1952); the quite good Kronos (1957) about an alien energy devouring machine; and his one classic, the original The Fly (1958). Alas, he did not enjoy the success of the latter and passed away a month after The Fly’s release.
She Devil was one of the B movies that Kurt Neumann made during this era. It holds allegiance to the Mad Scientist phenomenon of the previous decade – although by this point, Jack Kelly’s scientist has pivoted to being more benevolent in his intentions. There is still the sense of an abominable science experiment unleashed and at the end the film gets to trot out standard lines about the experiment defying divine provenance: “Whether she’s going to live again will be decided not by science or nature but a higher power.”
She Devil very much represents the conflicted issues towards sexuality that existed on screen in genre cinema during the 1960s. During this period, there was a whole body of films about astronauts discovering other planets ruled by woman-only societies and proceeding to put the women in their place by showing some good old-fashioned lurv. See the likes of Cat-Women of the Moon (1953), Fire Maidens of Outer Space (1956), Queen of Outer Space (1958) – indeed, Mari Blanchard had previously starred in one of these with Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953).
These films hold the recurrent idea that a woman in charge of her sexuality is something dangerous because of the seductive spell she wields over men. It may well say something about these underlying fears when here as soon as Mari Blanchard is transformed, she immediately goes shopping for dresses, mugs a sugar daddy type who is there with another girl and takes his money to pay for them. Later on in the show, we see her coming onto a wealthy married man and then killing his wife so she can marry him. “I’ll kill anybody in my way and there’s nothing you can do about it,” she announces at one point.
What we have is in effect a Jekyll/Hyde story where one woman takes a serum and in effect turns into a Marilyn Monroe lookalike. (Although unlike a Jekyll/Hyde story, the woman does not keep changing back and forward between her good and bad selves and remains bad after taking the serum). Perhaps even more so than Jekyll and Hyde, the appropriate comparison might be to the novel Alraune (1911) about a woman who is born by artificial insemination and as a result grows up without a soul and turns into an evil man-eater. This underwent a string of adaptations mostly during the silent era with the Hungarian Alraune (1918), the German Alraune (1918), Alraune (1928) and one sound version Alraune/Daughter of Evil (1930).
Mari Blanchard was a minor actress of the era. Jack Kelly was an ingénue who had previously played in Forbidden Planet (1956) and later became a regular on tv’s Maverick (1957-62). One of the most fascinating names present is Albert Dekker, an actor of the era who led a strange life and death. Dekker had previously played the title role in Dr Cyclops (1940) and other roles ranging from Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Gammera the Invincible (1965) to The Wild Bunch (1969).
She Devil is not related and should not be confused with She-Devil (1989), the unfunny film remake of the British tv series The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986), or for that matter to Kurt Neumann’s earlier film Tarzan and the She-Devil.
The film was based on The Adaptive Ultimate (1935) by Stanley G. Weinbaum (1902-34), a writer with a short-lived career who is best known for the hilariously wacky classic SF story A Martian Odyssey (1934). The same story had earlier been adapted as Kyra Zelas (1949), an episode of the anthology tv series Studio One (1949-8).
Trailer here