Critics trace Snow White's Evil Queen to this 1935 film

She was released in 1935 by RKO Radio Pictures and produced by Merian C. Cooper, the man behind King Kong, and it is a lost-world fantasy about an immortal queen. Critics and Disney historians have traced the look of the Evil Queen in Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to this film's villain, which makes it a possible source for one of the best-known villains in animation.

"Lost world" is a genre label for stories in which explorers reach a hidden place that history forgot: a valley, a plateau, a city under a mountain. The film is based on H. Rider Haggard's novel She: A History of Adventure, which appeared in book form in 1887. Haggard is credited with developing many of the genre's conventions, which later authors copied. The film's queen is known by the title "She Who Must Be Obeyed."

In the film, explorers at a remote Arctic outpost cross a glacier into a volcanic cave and find a queen who has lived for centuries. Cooper moved the story to the frozen north from the Africa of Haggard's novel. Helen Gahagan plays the queen. Gahagan was a Broadway star, and She was her only film role.

How the film connects to Snow White

Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered on December 21, 1937, and was the first cel animated feature film. Its villain is a vain queen who wants to be the fairest in the land. Several writers have pointed to Gahagan's costume and bearing as the queen in She as the model. Disney historian J.B. Kaufman supports the link. Art Babbitt, an animator on Snow White, and other Disney animation staff have denied it.

RKO released both films, which gives the link a plausible route. In the film, the queen is called She Who Must Be Obeyed, and the Evil Queen in Snow White is likewise a ruler defined by beauty and power. It remains a resemblance that writers have pointed to, not a documented fact, and the artists involved did not all agree.

The producer who followed King Kong

Cooper had produced and co-directed King Kong in 1933. When She arrived in 1935, the New York Times reviewer said it was not much more than a King Kong edition of lost kingdom melodramas, and noted that screenwriter Ruth Rose and Cooper had worked on both. TCM calls it the most well-known version of the story made before Hammer, the British studio, made its own She in 1965.

Earlier versions had been short and silent: a 1908 one-reeler directed by Edwin S. Porter for Edison, a 1917 Fox film and a 1925 English film. Dance director Benjamin Zemach was nominated for an Academy Award for the film's Hall of Kings number.

A flop, a star and a Senate race

The film lost about $180,000 on its first release. Gahagan never made another film. She went on to represent California in the U.S. House of Representatives and lost the 1950 U.S. Senate race to Richard Nixon, who won about 59 percent of the vote. Nixon later became president.

That gives the film an odd double life. It is a box-office failure that is also the only record of a Broadway star's screen acting, in the one role critics have linked to a cartoon queen.

Where it fits on Relay

Relay streams 569 films from the 1930s in the United States, and She sits among the more ambitious of them. Relay's listing describes this edition as in color. If you like old fantasy built from painted sets, a strange queen and a volcano, this is a good place to start, and a useful one to watch next to Snow White.

Action/Adventure