The Green Goddess

The Green Goddess is one of the weirdest old movies I think I've ever seen. I watched this for George Arliss, with whom I've really fallen in love. He was a wonderful actor and fascinating movie star in the 1920s. Arliss plays some "oriental" raja who is a self-styled Barbarian. He is quite polite and proper, but he acknowledges his own barbarism when he kidnaps and decides to kill three English citizens who have wandered into his domain. He tries to force marriage upon the one Englishwoman – in other words he tries to rape her – in exchange for the life of the two men; she refuses. Finally she and her lover are rescued by the Royal Air Force... and then Arliss's raja character literally looks at the camera and says Oh Well, she was probably more trouble than she was worth anyway.

What?

In other words, the film is... sort of on his side, or at the very least The Green Goddess is expecting us to enjoy this man's machinations. (I guess?) It is a confusing, odd moment in the film, and it confounded my entire reading of the movie as just a sort of typical orientalist film with its good, proper, Englishmen and its "orientals" with strange, mysterious, superstitious, violent ways.

I honestly still loved Arliss in this (he was in fact nominated for an Oscar for the role), and I'll continue to look for more of his movies. He's great.