Sept ? movie: Thirteen Women. From this movie I learned that before the studios discovered her talent for comedy, Myrna Loy often played exotic vamps. (Yes, this is the third Myrna Loy movie in a row. They must have been running a special on her on TCM last month.) Here she plays one of those vaguely ethnic exercises in Hollywood xenophonia: she looks somewhat Chinese, has an unplaceable accent, hangs out with an Indian swami, is described as "half-Asian," but has a sort of Russian name (Ursula Georgi).
Anyway, the movie. There are these twelve white women who all went to school together, and now they've all had their horoscopes done by the swami. Who predicts death and doom for all of them. Except that really Loy is forging the horoscopes as her revenge on the women. She was at their school too, but they were racist and drove her out, thus depriving her of a better life. And somehow she's hypnotizing them from afar into doing whatever the bogus horoscopes say they will do. It's actually much less interesting than this description might lead you to believe. I was hoping for a sort of Abominable Dr. Phibes with Myrna Loy as Vincent Price, but no such luck. Thirteen Women was actually more about Irene Dunne (one of the intended victims). Still, it was worth watching just to see Myrna Loy vamping it up.
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