She (Who Must Be Obeyed)

[Darrell]

The movie She is showing on TCM. I hadn't seen the film in many years, perhaps since childhood (when it made quite an impression on me). It features Ursula Andress as the mythical white queen of a tribe in Africa; the reincarnation (?) of her long lost boyfriend, an English adventurer, is brought to her, and things go from there. The movie was made in 1965; in the movie Andress is sometimes referred to as "She who must be obeyed". Interesting... that's a phrase often heard nowadays, usually referring to one's spouse or such. I looked it up, turns out it comes from H. Rider Haggard's original story, She: A History of Adventure, dating back to 1886! Fascinating. Evidently Haggard's story also began the whole 'lost world' type of fiction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She:_A_His ... _Adventure

[Darrell]

Interesting tidbit:

According to Haggard's daughter Lilias, the phrase "She-who-must-be-obeyed" originated from his childhood and "the particularly hideous aspect" of one rag-doll: "This doll was something of a fetish, and Rider, as a small child, was terrified of her, a fact soon discovered by an unscrupulous nurse who made full use of it to frighten him into obedience. Why or how it came to be called She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed he could not remember".[23] Haggard wrote that "the title She" was taken "from a certain rag doll, so named, which a nurse at Bradenham used to bring out of some dark recess in order to terrify those of my brothers and sisters who were in her charge."[24]

[Aglifter]

She is a great story - Haggard's pretty good, gets a bit repetitive after awhile, but She is, probably, his best work.

[Netpackrat]

I think I caught part of that movie a few years ago on late night TV. Odd flick.