Yesterday's post focused on a "satanic" theme, so let's follow the evil thread from a glamorous perspective with an iconic black and white pre-Code Hollywood film, Cecil B. DeMille's "Madam Satan" (1930). A constant inspiration for many fashion designers thanks to its Art Deco moods and extravagant costumes by Gilbert Adrian, "Madam Satan" combines different film genres - fantasy, mystery and musical comedy - together.
The film is essentially a romantic comedy dealing with wealthy and conservative Angela (Kay Johnson) discovering her husband Bob's (Reginald Denny) affair with a woman called Trixie (Lillian Roth). Bob's adulterous behaviour drives the couple to split, but then Angela regrets the decision and tries to win her husband's affection back playing Trixie's seduction card.
Some of the strongest scenes of the film take place during a bizarre costume party organised by Bob's friend Jimmy on a Zeppelin CB-P-55, a wonderfully imaginative location, also thanks to sets by Cedric Gibbons – who was heavily influenced by Parisian Art Deco – and Mitchell Leisen.
The Zeppelin sequences were originally scheduled to be filmed in Technicolor, but the original plan was abandoned because Technicolor could not handle the high-speed photography needed for the use of miniatures. The scenes on the Zeppelin are alive and electric with stunts, special effects and outlandish costumes.
Costumes had to be modified with Hollywood censor Jason Joy who worked with DeMille to make sure the girls at the party (and Madam Satan too) wore less revealing costumes thanks to body stockings and fishnets.
The theme of the femme fatale is very important in this film: this figure is filtered through the Art Deco codes. Angela appears at the masquerade ball as the bewitching Madam Satan, turning from "Angel(a)" into "devil". At the ball she is wearing a sensual costume that evokes Hell's damnation in its velvet and sequined tongues of fire (publicity for the film described the gown as black with red and gold) that, barely covering her erogenous zones, reveal rather than hide.
Accessorised with a mask, the gown envelops and highlights her figure in a glamorously sensational way: Angela is mysterious, outrageous and gloriously stunning compared to Trixie in her rather ridiculous sparkling sequined costume sprouting incredibly long and impractical feathers.
The costume is the visual focal point of the film: Angela wears it to win back her husband, but also to find a new self, and soon, like the proverbial phoenix rising from the ashes, she emerges from the flames of fabric as the winner.
Madam Satan’s costume could definitely be defined as architectural: first of all, it is a "vertical" dress that has its most dramatic effect when the wearer stands up, as proved by the scenes in which Angela makes her grand entrance.
As Angela poses on the steps, the dress reproduces around her silhouettes, geometries, forms and shapes. The movement of the dress is also important as the gown moves and it is moved: flames of velvet and sequins wrap Angela's body, moving with it, while the dress train flaps in the wind when the woman parachutes herself to the ground towards the end of the film.
Besides, the dress transforms Angela's body and the space around her, interacting with the set decor: it creates indeed abstract patterns on the set and against the night sky backdrop as the Zeppelin floats above the city.
The costume is conceived as a creative solution: an explosion of curling flames sewn on the nude coloured soft, sheer and lightweight soufflé fabric producing an image of nakedness with those tongues of fabrics set to ignite the flames of seduction.
The dress looks as if it were sliced open on the front, and seems extreme and obscene, but, in reality, while it reveals it also conceals, overexposes and underexposes, playing with lights and shadows. By hiding behind her mask and exotic dress, Angela scandalises the party, flirts with her husband and pushes him to commit adultery with her.
Angela is literally on fire and her dress perfectly symbolizes this: the barely there costume is an abstraction that surprises with its texture, its whimsiness and glamorous starkness. Though no villainess, thanks to her costume Angela turns from an ordinary and rather cold and conservative woman into a bold modern heroine and Bob falls into her trap.
The film is a feast for the eyes with elaborate and exotic dance routines and musical numbers and performers in fantastic costumes.
There are beautiful geometries in the choreographies and hints at the cubism of Fernand Léger's experimental film Ballet Mécanique in the performance featuring the Moscow-born muscular dancer Theodore Kosloff (who performed with the Bolshoi and Kirov Ballets, joining in 1909 Diaghilev's Ballets Russes) starring as "Electricity" and kicking off the party with a pseudo pagan ceremony dedicated to electricity with a group of dancers dressed as turbines and generators.
The estranged husband and wife will eventually reconcile but first they have to save themselves from a flight accident: when a thunderstorm strikes and the dirigible is damaged and in danger of breaking apart, everyone has to parachute to the ground, including the protagonist of this film, an "angelical" woman turned into an Art Deco devilish and irresistible seductress.
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