Unlike the flicks that Ted Turner colorized (using a much inferior process) in the 1980s, “She” is a title not much known outside film buff circles. It was not included in the huge package of RKO titles acquired by General Tire in the 1950s, whose U.S. rights are now controlled by Turner and its corporate parents at Time Warner. It was considered a lost title until film archivist Raymond Rohauer discovered a print in Buster Keaton’s garage. Rohauer cleared the rights and began distributing it to revival theaters in the 1970s. It has rarely been on TV and made its DVD premiere a few years ago courtesy of the niche label Kino International. A box-office failure at the time of its release, “She” is based on a much-filmed adventure novel by H. Rider Haggard. In this version, Randolph Scott travels to the Arctic, where he encounters the immortal “She Who Must Be Obeyed.”
She is played, in her only screen appearance, by a rather frosty singer-actress named Helen Gahagan. The wife of actor Melvyn Douglas, Gahagan is better known as the California congresswoman who lost her seat to a red-baiting newcomer named Richard Nixon a decade later. Direction of this spectacular production is credited to actor Irving Pichel and architect/production designer Lansing Holden. “She” was produced by “King Kong” co-creator Meriam C. Cooper, who was also forced by RKO to abandon plans to shoot “The Last Days of Pompeii” (1936) in Technicolor. Cooper then enlisted C.V. Whitney to underwrite Pioneer Pictures, which released the initial two three-strip Techicolor features (“Becky Sharp” and “The Dancing Pirate”) through RKO. When these flopped, Whitney folded Pioneer into Selznick International, which used Technicolor for such successful flicks as “A Star is Born” and “Gone With the Wind.”