THE SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK (1946, d. Arthur Lubin)
We all know the story, right? At some point after the release of the Sherlock Holmes movie THE SPIDER WOMAN (1944), someone at Universal decided to make the character played by Gale Sondergaard a recurring one, so they signed her to a multi-picture deal with Ford Beebe as producer-director of the series. It's an interesting idea --- Uni didn't have a multi-film female monster, and the strikingly fabulous femme fatale with an exotic air and an icy, sinister smile was a smart choice.
But then the thing came apart. Brunas, Brunas & Weaver don't explain why, saying only that Beebe was out and Lubin and Howard Welsch were brought in for THE SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK. And who knows what the original script was like? B, B & W say that shooting was delayed for four months and allude to script re-write problems (I would add that there was a big labor strike going on at the time as well). Whatever the case, by the time everything was finally good to go, Sondergaard was playing a different "Spider Woman" and no subsequent films about the character were made. (The Cold War made it all a moot point, anyway --- Sondergaard's husband Herbert Biberman was sent to jail for being politically incorrect; Sondergaard was subsequently blacklisted, thanks in part to the open hostility of some of her more narrow-minded former co-stars who --- whether from self-serving fear, ignorance, or crass opportunism --- had hitched their wagons to HUAC's witch-hunt cult.)
In THE SPIDER WOMAN, Sondergaard played Adrea Spedding, a "female Moriarity" (as Holmes calls her) of unknown origins who masterminds a criminal gang in wartime London. The gang is getting rich by arranging for desperate "sportsmen" to sign over their life insurance policies to them, and then the gang murders them to collect. (The gang disguises their killings as suicides; I'm not a historian of the life insurance industry, but has there ever been a policy that pays off on suicide?)
The "spider" part of "Spider Woman" Adrea Spedding is both figural and literal, because she's an attractive woman who lures men into an ensnaring web of deceit, and because she relies on the deadly poison of a rare tropical wolf spider --- the Lycosa carnivora -- to do the deed. (As I watched this again the other night, I could've sworn that there were characters who referred to the arachnid's "venom" as "the spider's virus" on a couple of occasions, but I was watching an old battered VHS copy of the movie that I found on a bottom shelf at my local public library, so sound quality wasn't that hot.) In the end, after a very silly and contrived effort to execute Holmes via some wartime propaganda, Adrea Spedding is arrested and last seen walking off arm-in-arm with Inspector Lestrade to be booked, but the viewer can easily imagine her charming his pants off and escaping, leaving the opening for future sequels.
The Spider Woman of THE SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK is not Adrea Spedding but Zenobia Dollard of Dominga, Nevada (population 1,492). "Miss Zenobia" is respected by the dairy farmers in Dominga for her philanthropy (she donates cash to kids' summer camps and knits sweaters for needy boys); she's the last surviving scion of one of the town's original powerful land-owning families (like the Cartwrights on "Bonanza") that has since fallen into decline, leaving only a run-down manor house where Zenobia lives with her disfigured mute (not "deaf-mute," as Universal Horrors says) man-servant, Mario (Rondo Hatton). For a couple years, Zenobia travelled the tropics seeking a cure for her blindness, but she has quietly returned to the Dollard homestead.
THE SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK opens with the arrival from San Francisco (on what looks like the same ill-fated Hungarian bus ridden by Peter, Joan, and Vitus Werdegast) of Jean Kingsley (Brenda Joyce, who played Jane in TARZAN & THE AMAZONS, TARZAN & THE LEOPARD WOMAN, TARZAN & THE HUNTRESS, TARZAN & THE MERMAIDS, and TARZAN'S MAGIC FOUNTAIN). Jean is under "doctor's orders" to move away from the city and get some rest, so she's given up her career to work as Zenobia's live-in companion in rural Nevada. The first person she sees in Dominga is her old college boyfriend Hal (Kirby Grant, later TV's "Sky King"), who now works his dad's horse ranch.
Jean's nerves, already shot from her high-pressure urban existence, begin to further fray soon after she moves in with Zenobia and Mario. For one thing, Zenobia and Mario make her drink milk every night, and though she sleeps deeply throughout the night, she's plagued by nightmares and awakens exhausted. She wonders about the chain of caregivers that preceded her at the Dollard house and their sudden, solitary departures; also, Mario unnerves her by lurking around her constantly (to the sound of extraordinarily uninspired and tedious musical cues). And I'm sure being stalked by her ex Hal isn't helping matters much, either…
Well, it turns out, of course, that Jean's Jane Eyre stylings are not the product of an anxiety disorder: Zenobia's not a kindly blind philanthropist, but a revenge-crazed killer who's got a MANEATER OF HYDRA secret laboratory in the basement where she grows a huge carnivorous tropical plant called the Drochenema that feeds on black widow spiders and human blood. Zenobia harvests the blossoms from the plant and makes a deadly poison from the petals that she uses to kill the neighbor's cows, hoping to chase them off of their land which she will then buy up cheap to restore the Dollard family fortunes (it sounds like a plot of an episode of "The Big Valley," doesn't it?). Mario is deeply involved in the care and feeding of the Drochenema, and, in the middle of the night, he also plays cattle mutilator by going out to poison the cows and contaminate the milk (people are starting to sicken and die).
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As near as I can tell, Zenobia's been faking her blindness so that she can lure young, unattached woman to come live with her, whereupon she drugs them at night and drains blood from them to feed her plants. When the women eventually die, Zenobia and Mario cover up the death and hire someone new. There's not a lot that's "spidery" about Zenobia when you compare her to Adrea Spedding --- there are no men lured into her web by her beauty, and the actual arachnids don't really play a role as compared to the Drochenema plant. In fact, there's not a whole lot about Zenobia that would suggest any kinship with Adrea: for instance, whereas Adrea went head-to-head with the world's most famous detective without breaking a sweat, Zenobia gets rattled by dumb lug Hal and a biologist from the Department of Agriculture (Milburn Stone, the guy who played the crusty, ear-pulling Doc on "Gunsmoke"). Watching THE SPIDER WOMAN and THE SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK raises all kinds of questions for me about what happened behind the scenes to so completely change the character and derail the idea of launching her as a franchise monster.
PS for those who own a copy of THE SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK: The Brunases and Weaver provide some tasty tidbits of data about missing scenes in Universal Horrors which they got (I'm guessing) from the shooting script. The omissions are obvious --- folks listed in the opening credits who never appear anywhere, for example, or the scene toward the end when Jean goes to Hal's ranch and we miss her conversation with Hal's mom & the argument she had with Hal that he alludes to later when talking with Zenobia. The entry in Universal Horrors mentions these (and other) missing scenes, but I ask about this because my version of the film --- transferred from a splicey, ragged, and bruised 16mm print --- clocks in at a little under 58 minutes, but THE SPIDER WOMAN STRIKES BACK is listed everywhere as being 59 minutes long… am I missing something? Is there a more complete version? Is there at least one that looks better than mine? (if so, please PM me with details!)
