User Reviews

We all pretty much know that Marion Davies will always be known as the "kept" girl of William Randolph Hearst but for a fleeting time she had a basic acting career...and not even Hearst's oodles of money could have made her big.

To be fair, Davies was actually a fairly good comedienne. Try Cain and Mabel and see. In this she gets to show off both sides...Comedy and Drama...but in the end this film is just pretty ordinary.

The plot itself is a pretty interesting premise. The northern Spy network during the Civil War decides to try out a young actress as a spy in a Southern area. She decides to dress in black face and play a light skinned black slave girl. Her partner in this caper is a seasoned actress who has done a few jobs for the network and they both are sent to the South to steal enemy troop placements. They succeed but Davies falls in love with a Southern Spy master played by Gary Cooper.

Your not gonna be real surprised by anything in this old and dated film but the real treat is seeing the Mills Brothers sing. They have a couple of amazing numbers in this. Seeing Marion Davies playing black-face isn't too huge a deal but she does her best. Gary Cooper is as wooden as he always was.

Watching this you'll see why Ms. Davies decided to skip acting altogether and let her sugar daddy take care of her. Knowing what we all know now, it was a wise move.

SPOILERS -- Annoying. Some annoying things in this film... I'm sure some of that is the black-face, the white person imitating a black person in such a racial, stereo-typed manner. But it's a little insulting that just everyone buys into the silly make-up and silly accent on Marion Davies, as she plays Lucille, the black maid, who is really a spy. As someone else pointed out, they break into song every couple of minutes. ( "Sleepy Head" by the Mills Brothers is actually quite well done.) The plot here is secondary... every now and then they stop singing to pretend the the Civil War is going on around them. Dramatic scene where "the maid" has to give evidence against a fellow spy, her friend, in the name of duty. Gary Cooper is in here, ostensibly co-starring. Some other fun cameos in here -- Sidney Toler, Hattie McDaniel, Sterling Holloway, Curly Howard. There's a skeleton of a plot in here, but I wish they had used more plot and less music. Davies, singing "Once in a LifeTime" as she swings, is just ridiculous. She did successfully jump from silents to talkies, but only made a couple more films after Operator 13. Much debate over whether the Hearst connection actually helped or hindered Davies' career. This one is okay. I was pretty surprised at the high rating, but it is only the result of 1000 votes so far. Gets better as it goes along. Directed by Richard Boleslawski, who died young a couple years after making this.

I can't believe this movie was only 85 minutes long. It felt much longer.

My dislike of this film is not due to the racist stereotypes or Marion Davies in black-face. I disliked this film because it's just not a good movie.

While the story is an interesting concept, the movie did not pull it off at all. The whole film feels very disjointed and poorly put together.

I usually like Davies, but I could see her acting (and over acting) in Operator 13. She is not convincing as a northern spy.

Gary Cooper did a good job with the material that he was given. He was completely underutilized in this film but that is understandable: this movie was a Marion Davies movie. If Cooper had been given a better part he would have easily overshadowed her.

Operator 13 really tried to be a good movie. It cast good actors as the leads, the costumes were fabulous and the battle scenes were well done. Nothing though, could save the movie from a horrible script.

. . . Marge Mitchell was still learning to type, so she asked my great aunt Hester (who'd just completed secretarial school, and lived next door to Marge) to take some dictation. The resulting collaboration, a letter addressed to the Many Greedy Mobsters studio releasing OPERATOR 13, contained the germ of Marge's idea to take the key characters from this farce and make them even more outrageous for a book. The House of the Groaning Fat Cat One Per Centers gave Marge a small "literary" advance, resulting in a hernia-inducing doorstop tome known as GASHED WITH THE WHIP. To drag out this story, Marge split OPERATOR's Gail into the Butterfly and Scarlett caricatures for her long-winded epic. Captain Jack became Rhett, Pauline morphed into Melanie, sad-sack John Pelham was transformed into sad-sack Ashley Wilkes and Hattie McDaniel remained herself, albeit ten times as much of her.

With Leo already plotting to create an army of brainwashed core supporters, demonically possessed ivory trash types willing to form a satanic "Base" and work against their own self-interest to advance the cause of Heartless Money Misers, the perfidious Pachyderm Political Party Propaganda Platform brazenly uses OPERATOR 13 to rewrite History, portraying U. S. Grant as a Copperhead Southern Sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth as a Freedom Fighter and People of Color as obsequious buffoons suitable only for mockery and enslavement. No doubt these were the story elements that "inspired" my Aunt Hester's middle-aged neighbor Marge to churn out that mendacious marathon of malarkey, GASHED WITH THE WHIP.

My review title sums up the unlikely plot in a nutshell. It gets worse! Blond, blue -grey eyed Marion Davis becomes Operator(spy) 13, dons a brunet wig, and supposedly masquerades as a very light-skinned octoroon southern negress maid for another female Union spy! (A octoroon has 1/8 African American inheritance)! Her 'disguise' includes her amusing impression of how such should talk. Clearly, she was enjoying this charade! Of course, Marian's face otherwise looked nothing like a typical negress's face, and it's a good thing the film was shot in B&W, as she couldn't easily disguise her eye color!. Usually with a flower in her hair, in truth, she looked more like a Nordic's attempt to pass as a brown- skinned South Seas maiden! .........OK, I've just described the worst implausibilities of the film. Yet, I gave the film a fairly good overall rating. Why? As I see it, the film should be thought of as part musical comedy(mainly the first half), and part a serious Civil War drama and romance(mainly the second half). Then, it doesn't come off as half so bad...........There's certainly enough music, both traditional Civil War fare, and newly minted songs by the team of Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn, to qualify it as a musical, even if that wasn't the intent. Marion sings 2 songs: the novelty "The, Colonel, Major, and the Captain, in which she keeps changing hats of the various officers, piling them all on her head, along with her hat, at the end! Later, she serenades Gary Cooper: her new-found Rebel spy boyfriend, with the romantic "Once in a Lifetime, Love Comes Your Way", as he gently pushes her in a swing. I also enjoyed 3 numbers sung by the famous Mills Brothers: "Roll, Jordan Roll", "Sleepy Head" and "Jungle Fever". Various ad hoc groups sang other songs...........As I previously described, Marion supplies most of the presumably unintentional humor, with her spy disguise.......... The rather wooden Rebel Major, played by Gary Cooper, somehow meets the disguised Marion at a party, and finds her attractive. Later, he meets her again, without her disguise, dressed like a southern belle, although admittedly fresh from Yankeeland, visiting relative, and he is even more attracted to her(What man wouldn't be!), and she to him. Thus, they begin a romantic relationship...........Near the end, they meet again, but this time Cooper is nasty to her, scolding her for being a female spy(which he apparently considers unfairly sneaky), and claiming that she just pretends to love him. She counters that she truly loves him, which he is willing to consider. Just then, Union and Rebel patrols approach, and begin fighting. For some reason, they decide to split up and reunite at the finish of the war, which, unbeknownsed to them, is yet several years hence. Finally, we encounter Grant and Lee at Appomattox, shaking hands, to essentially end the war. Then, there is a cameo of Marion and Cooper embracing, symbolically acknowledging the end of the war at their personal level...........Thus, ended Marion's career at MGM, although she would be in a number of films for Warner, before retiring, to spend more time with her possessive sugar daddy: William Randolph Hearst.......... You can see this for free at You Tube, or you can also purchase the film fairly cheaply.