LONDON: The Horse Hospital

Friday 3rd December, 2010

9:15pm

Event information

MARIA MONTEZ LATE NIGHT TRIBUTE
FRIDAY 3 DECEMBER 9.15PM
SINGLE TICKET, £7 (CONC. £5)
COBRA WOMAN
USA 1944. Dir Robert Siodmak.
With Maria Montez, John Hall, Sabu.
Costumes Vera West, sets Russel A. Gausman, Ira Webb. c.117 min.

A star of Universal’s Technicolor escape films in the 1940s, the Dominican-born siren Maria Montez became the centrepiece of Jack Smith’s Hollywood idolatry two decades later. The star who founded her own fan club and who reportedly once exclaimed ‘When

I see myself on the screen, I am so beautiful, I jump for joy’ was a blueprint for the (admittedly more knowing and parodic) campness and narcissism of Jack Smith’s stars. (Smith famously singled Montez out in his essay ‘The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez’.) With reference to Montez, Smith stated that bad acting can in fact expose a much more priceless slice of life, an approach echoed in Andy Warhol’s cinema. In Cobra Woman Montez is cast in a dual role as Tollea of the South Seas and her evil sister Naja, priestess of the Cobra People on a forbidden island. The film showcases her feminine charms in Vera West’s sensuously soft, pastel gowns and more gaudy outfits. West was a former fashion designer trained by Lucile and became the doyenne of costume design for horror and monster movies in the ’30s and ’40s.

Plus a DJ set by turntable goddesses the Broken Hearts who will follow the screening with ‘Stranded in the Jungle’, a selection of wildly primeval tracks featuring voodoo magic, jungle drums and swinging from the tree tops. Cannibals, savages and feral wildcats all welcome.