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5/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 5/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Conquering the Woman remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
Plot in a coconut shell:
A pampered heiress is shipwrecked on purpose, dragged through the wringer of sunburn, hunger, and a laconic cowboy, and forced to decide whether her platinum pedigree is worth more than a heartbeat that finally pounds for something other than money.
Director David Butler shoots the South-Sea arc like a fever dream borrowed from The Shuttle: waves chew the frame, palms become prison bars, and every horizon line feels tipped toward madness. The 35-year-old nitrate still crackles with solarized flares—sunlight that actually scalds—because cinematographer Ross Fisher smeared the lens with a whisper of petroleum jelly, giving skin the texture of wet porcelain. When Judith’s satin evening cloak—once the color of champagne—slides into the surf, the dye bleeds like an aristocrat’s last gasp of superiority. That single shot, a crimson plume against jade water, is silent-era poetry fiercer than any intertitle could bark.
Florence Vidor’s Judith begins as a marionette of arrogance—eyebrows etched into permanent disbelief, laugh a brittle china bell. Watch her hands: at the start they hover mid-air as though expecting a servant to slide gloves onto them; by reel six they’re cracked and black-nailed, digging coconut meat out with the unselfconscious hunger of a child. Across from her, Peter Burke’s Larry Saunders never overplays the cowboy caricature. His stillness is surgical; he lets the jungle grow around him while she thrashes, and when he finally laughs—one husky exhalation—it feels like the island itself exhaled.
Compare this dyad to The Innocence of Lizette where innocence is a static ornament. Here, innocence is rediscovered through callouses and brine, not preserved under glass.
Frank Howard Clark and Henry C. Rowland adapt Rowland’s serialized novel with whiplash wit. One title card reads: “Civilization: a varnish that cracks under noonday sun.” Another quips: “A count’s title—like a postage stamp—sticks best with a lick.” Yet the writers also know when to shut up and let the jungle speak; ten whole minutes pass sans intertitles as Judith learns to kindle fire with Larry’s bow-drill, her face cycling from frustration to triumph in real time. That silence is rowdier than any dialogue.
The title drips with period-sauce misogyny, yet the film sabotages its own marketing. Judith’s ‘conquest’ is not carnal surrender but cognitive revolution: she seizes agency by unlearning every toxic mantra the count pumped into her vertebral column. The cowboy never ‘tames’ her; he simply refuses to bow, forcing her to meet him on the sand’s democratic plane. In 1922, that narrative subversion plays like a stick of dynamite wrapped in a love letter.
Surviving prints lack the original cue sheets, so festival programmers keep reinventing the wheel. At Pordenone 2019, Maud Nelissen floated a chamber ensemble over the island passages—violin harmonics mimicking gull cries, marimbas echoing coconut husk percussion—until the count’s yacht arrived with a Wagnerian snarl. The cognitive dissonance was delicious: paradise infected by European bombast.
Yes, the island is treated as blank canvas for white self-discovery; no indigenous faces appear except in tintyped ‘native’ postcards Judith clutches at the start, sneering at their “primitive glee.” The film half-acknowledges the horror—those postcards are later used as kindling for her first successful fire, a literal burning of colonial fantasy. Still, a modern viewer will flinch at the casual imperial gaze. Compare the more self-aware Under Kærlighedens Aag which interrogates Danish plantation cruelty head-on.
Only one 35 mm nitrate print survived the 1965 MGM vault fire, and it’s marred by vinegar syndrome along reel four. The Library of Congress’ 4K wet-gate scan arrested further decay but couldn’t resurrect lost footage; roughly six minutes of the count’s early seduction scenes remain conjectural, reconstructed via production stills and a surviving continuity script. The resulting stutter keeps the film from achieving the seamless glide of David Copperfield, yet the wounds feel weirdly honest—like scars on a reformed aristocrat.
Trade papers praised Vidor’s “molten transformation,” while regional censors in Georgia hacked 18 feet of footage they claimed showed “unmarried cohabitation among heathen vines.” The film recouped $480,000 against a $137,000 budget—respectable, though dwarfed by the DeMille juggernauts of the era. Modern Letterboxd users rate it 3.7/5, with the top review calling it “the original Sadie Thompson minus the preach.” Not bad for a picture once dismissed as a “flapper Robinsonade.”
Keep your eyes peeled for Roscoe Karns as the count’s sly valet—he slips a flask into Judith’s picnic basket labeled “coconut milk” that’s plainly bourbon. It’s the same flask Larry later uses to sterilize a fishhook, a visual confession that American grit will always trump European affectation. Also, notice the turtle-shell comb in Judith’s hair at minute 42? It reappears at minute 73, now cracked and repurposed as a fish-gutting knife—an objet d’art reborn as survival gear.
Conquering the Woman isn’t a flawless artifact; it’s a cracked goblet that still holds wine. Its politics wobble, its racial optics age like milk, yet its central volta—aristocratic arrogance scorched into humility by sun, sweat, and egalitarian desire—radiates across a century like a lighthouse through fog. If you can stomach the colonial residue, you’ll witness a heroine actually learning in real time, something even modern prestige dramas often dodge via montage. Stream it with caution, debate it with gusto, and maybe, just maybe, pack a cracked turtle-shell comb on your next beach trip as penance to the past.
IMDb —
1922
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