Essential Cinema: Fast Women of the Pre-Code Era

MADAM SATAN

Directed by Cecil B. DeMille

USA, 1931, 1h 56min, 35mm

Essential Cinema  Fast Women of the Pre-Code Era

There are no current or future screenings planned for this film.

“It contrives some of the most ludicrous moments ever flung on screen … probably the wackiest semi-musical-comedy/romance/drama/disaster film you’re likely to encounter in this lifetime.”
The New Yorker

“The Jazz Age bacchanalia aboard a zeppelin echoes the gaudy debauches in the director’s biblical spectacles and Egyptomaniac epics.”
—Thomas Doherty, author of Pre-Code Hollywood

A bizarre and, if we’re being honest, incomprehensible musical comedy directed by that master of kitsch Cecil B. DeMille and written by DeMille’s frequent collaborator Jeanie MacPherson. Stop me if you’ve heard this before: it’s a door-slamming sex farce that climaxes in a grand masquerade ball held aboard a zeppelin in which our heroine appears in disguise as Madame Satan and drives all the errant husbands wild.

Madam Satan still

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS