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January 30 movie: King Solomon's Mines. Adventure movie based on an H. Rider Haggard story and starring Stewart Granger and his hair! Alas, this was the first major Hollywood role for Granger's hair, and it only made a few appearances. It spent most of the movie hiding under one of those safari hats. When the hair does appear, it's a mere shadow of the massive pompadour it would someday be.

Oh, and Deborah Kerr was also in the movie, playing basically the same role as Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen, but with much less gusto. The real star was the African landscape. Beautiful scenery and convincingly scary thrills, notably a stampede that nearly tramples the adventurers. There was a spider early on that was so phony it could have wandered in from Mystery Science Theater, but after that they did a great job with the animal effects. Another nice touch was using no soundtrack music except that provided by the African people they meet along the way. I have no idea how realistic their portrayal of African communities were, but at least they seemed to be aware that people in different parts of Africa would have different cultures and speak different languages.

I couldn't see Granger as Allan Quatermain without imagining him decades later as the aging opium addict in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic (the less said about the movie, the better). I've never read any H. Rider Haggard but I did read a book once (Evil Sisters by Bram Dijkstra) about negative portrayals of women in late 19th century science and literature, and early 20th century film. As I recall Dijkstra spent a lot of time on Haggard. According to Dijkstra, Haggard treated Africa as dark, mysterious, nonrational, capricious, and dangerous as a symbol of his (Haggard's) negative view of femininity, which is apparently lying in wait to snap its vagina dentata and rob men of their virile essence or something.

It's been a long time since I read that book, and I may be seriously misrepresenting it. But I do remember thinking that Dijkstra's point was a lot more convincing when he wrote about scientists who did explicitly claim that women were parasites who used sex to sap men of their life essence and intelligence through their semen. (No I'm not making that up.) But even there, I don't remember Dijkstra convincing me that this was mainstream thought at the time, or just a few wackos. And I really wasn't sold on Dijkstra's idea of late 19th century literature as rife with male authors conflating brown people with women, treating both as gaping maws of evil.

I do remember that Alien 3 came out around the time I read Evil Sisters and seemed to fit in pretty well with Dijkstra's thesis. The hero is a woman, but not all that womanly: Ripley looks quite masculine with her lean body and shaved head. On the other hand the alien is a wet, squooshy, unstoppable reproductive machine. Heck, its face kind of looks like a vagina dentata. And the tagline for the movie was "The Bitch is Back," but the alien is the bitch, not Ripley. But maybe this is one of those ideas that you see everywhere just because you're looking for it.

Well, this is a really long digression. I guess if I have a point, it's that I couldn't see Dijkstra's thesis at all in the movie version of King Solomon's Mines. Just a fun adventure movie. Which of course doesn't mean anything. He was writing about a book, not a movie adaptation made decades later.