Perhaps the most offbeat film of Cecil B. DeMille’s prolific career, Madam Satan (1930) begins like any typical DeMille bedroom farce and ends with a literal descent into hellfire—New York socialites frantically parachuting away from a party aboard a flying Zeppelin after it’s struck by lightning. More outlandish than Male and Female (1919) and less stylistically mature than later epics like Samson and Delilah (1949), DeMille’s mixed-genre ambitions in Madam Satan prove as bombastically eclectic as they are orgiastic. Madam Satan is, in varying proportions: a vaudeville revue, a halfhearted musical comedy (DeMille’s only, in fact), a box office flop that lost MGM 250,000 dollars, an oddly prescient disaster film released seven years before the Hindenburg disaster, and a tongue-tied morality tale that can’t make up its mind about the problem of marriage. In short, it’s absolutely bizarre.
Despite its outdated sexual politics and clumsy dialogue, Madam Satan (1930) is perhaps still the finest example of straight camp that Pre-Code Hollywood has to offer. Angela (Kay Johnson), an uptight housewife, is determined to win her husband Bob’s (Reginald Denny) affection back from the showgirl Trixie (Lillian Roth). She attends a masquerade party aboard a Zeppelin, dressed as the titular Madam Satan—a seductress touting a French accent and a fantastic dress, somewhere between a DC villain and Snow White’s evil stepmom. With all its glam and camp, the party sequence—originally shot in Technicolor, but only surviving in black and white—makes up for the film’s stagnant eroticism and strange pacing in its first act. Its hyper-gendered excess evokes a drag race; the intense female rivalries, extravagantly ludicrous costumes, and kitschy shade-throwing are almost entertaining enough to forget the banal domestic plots earlier in the film; at one point, Angela performs a sing-off on the dance floor against Trixie, amidst a circus of mesmerized men.
In a 1930 letter, Cecil DeMille described Madam Satan as a farce that would certainly go over the heads of the American public. But today’s audience will find it unbelievably camp, as an early gesture toward those misogynist, Great Gatsby-esque biblical dramas of DeMille’s late style. Indeed, each trifling moment of the film helps drive home the eternal inanity of American high society. There is something intensely Wagnerian about all the futile fanfare: “that’s the spirit of modern power,” exclaim the partygoers dressed up as animals, spirits, and racial caricatures, only to abandon ship as the Zeppelin sinks into a reservoir, while sets of parachuters land in a zoo, a Turkish bath, and a couple’s car. To the bewildered onlookers on the ground, they must have seemed like real demons raining from the sky.
Madam Satan screens tonight, September 10, at Nitehawk Prospect Park on 35mm as part of the ongoing series “Misfit Alley.”
