NathanMcDunnough
You can get the plot details somewhere else, bub. Marion Davies plays the part of Gail Loveless, who becomes a Union spy, and once in Confederate territory disguises herself as a black slave. She goes undercover as a slave, performing the services of a maid, doing laundry. She somehow passes for a biracial woman. To disguise herself she wears a lightly toned blackface. She looks like a woman with a spray tan. Her blackface makeup never wears off—Never! —Not when she washes clothes, not when she is splashed by water as a horse stomps in a creek, not when tears roll down her cheeks. The only thing worse than Marion Davies's blackface is her black-voice. It makes you cringe. I had a strong urge to turn the TV off, but I watched on.There are many black actors in the film and the Mills Brothers perform the best musical acts, although, the songs they sing have racist lyrics. During Jungle Fever, the black actors, who portray the black folks in the town, look saucer-eyed, tranced and spooked, as they dance and jive to the music—it will make you queasy. And like many movies of that time, the black characters are happy and content (what could be wrong?), laughing and smiling, whether they are singing, dancing, cooking, serving, doing laundry, or helping a bride with her wedding dress. Don't they know there's a war on? The North won the Civil War and Hollywood made movies like Operator 13, which makes you wonder about what kinds of movies they'd have made if the South had won.
Man99204
This movie is guaranteed to offend people of Color, Southerners, Women, and people with a conscience.It has what has to be one of the most preposterous plots ever inflicted on the American Movie Audiences. Marion Davies, was a woman noted for her ultra light colored gray blue eyes. In this plot she is a Civil War era spy who put on a dark wig, darkens her skin slightly and passed for a black laundry maid. As the maid, she giver her alter ego all of the very worst stereotypes of a 1930s "Black Servant". It is shamefully bad. White Southerners are treated only marginally better. And don't get me started on the liberties it takes with American History.There is really only one reason to see this movie -- Gary Cooper. This is one of his early movies and he is amazingly handsome here. Fast forward through the Marion Davies bits and linger on the scenes with Gary Cooper.
Michael_Elliott
Operator 13 (1934)** (out of 4) Extremely bizarre and rather choppy Civil War drama about actress Gail Loveless (Marion Davies) who goes to work as a spy for the Union. Once undercover, as a black maid, she begins to have feelings for a Confederate soldier (Gary Cooper). Once again Davies lover William Randolph Hearst put the money up for this production and half way through the making he had director Raoul Walsh fired even though he had made GOING Hollywood with Davies a year earlier. A new script was written and the rest is history but in the end this turned out to be one of the strangest dramas from this era. I might go even further and call the film a complete and utter embarrassment and a horrid excuse for entertainment but the thing is just so strange that you can't help but be entertained by it. The first thirty-minutes has Davies in some very bad blackface make up as she's undercover as a maid. Davies wasn't a newbie to blackface but the make up job here is so light skinned that you can't help but laugh at the thought that this make up job would be able to fool anyone in discussion with her and that includes Cooper's character. This is a drama yet Davies plays this maid role as some sort of comedy with the bad accent, which again doesn't sit well with what the film was going for. Not to mention that whoever was doing the make up forgot to paint her palms so they're constantly white. The second half of the film really doesn't get any better even though we do get a few battle scenes but none of them are all that interesting. Even worse are various musical sequences which come out of no where and will have you wondering if the Civil War was an actual war or just one big concert. Add in the bad direction and rather bland performances and you've got a movie that really needs to be rediscovered and held up as a cult classic. Even Cooper can't save this mess but he does add some charm to an otherwise crazy movie.
blighty-3
I came across this movie by accident and found a strong drama about people involved in espionage on different sides of a civil wardated of course, with assumption no thinking person would accept today, over dramatic? but very much in the style and mood of its ageone well worth watching if you are able to watch movies outside of modern style and ethics
AD
