I just rewatched Myrna Loy in The Barbarian (1933). On my first watch back in 2017, I wrote ‘"Stockholm Syndrome" wouldn't be named for another forty years, but it could have been called "Barbarian Syndrome." Myrna Loy is beautiful, but this is not her best work.’ I stand by that opinion.

This time, to see if others saw it the same way I did, I sought out online reviews of the film. Most of them are not complementary. One sample featured review at IMDB sums it up "Loy should not have been in this movie, regardless of the prevailing attitudes of the times...how things have changed." That echoes my sentiments, but it also made me curious. Have times really changed in the past hundred years?

Fortunately, IMDB has an external link to the Internet Archive where curious minds can find contemporary reviews of the movie in the May 2, 1933 issue of Variety.

In her "Going Places" column on page 11, Ceclila Ager writes

When Races Clash: Myrna Loy's metamorphosis from impulsive exotic to restrained Nordic encounters a stone wall in "The Barbarian," a set-back which, it is hoped, is only temporary. In order to make her ultimate surrender to the Egyptian respectable, she explains now and then, although nobody's asked her, that her mother was an Egyptian herself.

Now comes a battle between her Caucasian and Egyptian heredities, which makes Miss Loy proud and haughty one moment, swooning with elemental emotions the next. Her blood calls to Egypt and the particular sheik assigned her, but the Anglo-Saxon environment in which she was brought up won't let her be. She's in a pretty pickle, all the tougher for her to illustrate because it's such a phony pickle.

On page 17, male reviewer Joe Bigelow expands

It's all well and good as Novarro remains a fresh but agreeable young dragoman (Egyptian guide) who seeks to win the tourist lady from her white man fiance. That's because Novarro plays it so well, and Miss Loy helps him so much. Then the boy reveals his true station—he's a prince—and a lot of desert pash stuff, including beatings, draggings, and kidnappings, arrives. That the girl finally succumbs is a slap at the character rather than a vindication for the script. Novarro has always had a flare for light comedy. But Metro has generally succeeded in keeping it a secret.

And anonymous's "The Woman's Angle" column adds

Ramon Navarro changes, to suit the rambling, indecisive yarn, from charming rogue to routine caveman sheik. Not the type for the latter phase, so the ladies will remain quite calm.

Spread throughout the issue are theater revenue estimates from across the country indicating that in addition to critical scorn, The Barbarian also generally underperformed at the box office.

Disappointing, notices bad, and Novarro fans not liking it.

Novarro is another who is not up to previous draws....

Novarro's "The Barbarian" was coldly received and except for loyal Novarro following won't attract much attention....

Stage goes Egyptian this week in sympathy with the feature, Ramon Novarro's "The Barbarian" (Metro). Both are not so good, and from Friday night's business it looked like the populace guessed it ahead of time.

Feature picture was weak, and not exactly what the natives were looking for after the swell build-up for Novarro by the house.

Barbarian $7,800 (New Low)

All together that sounds like both critics and audiences of 1933 rejected a film in which the rape victim abruptly decides she loves her rapist. So although some things are certainly culturally different in 2026 (for example, the most recent episode of CBS Sunday Morning showcased a band called Mannequin Pussy), rather than criticize the mores of Great Depression-era Americans, we should probably be condemning the misogynistic kinks of producers at Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Bad producers. Bad!

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Henry is starting to get suspicious that I secretly film him with my phone camera.

Please don't show him this.

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Today, while sitting in stopped traffic waiting for a school bus to unload, I thought about how younger me would have been terribly inconvenienced by such an experience. I know in the past I would have argued that school buses should make fewer stops, as they did "back in my day," rather than divest each passenger to their own driveway. But just because I had to walk a greater distance than kids today doesn't mean society should expose those kids to a greater risk of traffic fatalities by making them walk along today's much busier roads. How many dead children is my convenience worth?

That made me think about how certain activities modify your chance of dying from moment to moment. ESPN charts play-by-play win probabilities in football games based on the statistical chance of either team wining given the current score, down-and-distance, and time remaining; imagine doing the same thing for a person, charting the second-by-second probability of your death based on your current activity and location. I have a non-zero chance of dying even as I sit here typing, but my graph probably has a much steeper slope when I drive a car or hold a toaster over a full bathtub. One day, my death probability will reach 100%. Once it gets there, you can stop graphing. The line's not coming back down from that. Game over.

That made me think about what the graph would look like for people living in war zones. Everyone's current death probability baseline is non-zero, but citizens in Ukraine have to be somewhat higher. Looking at some quickly Googled numbers, approximately 8.5k people, or 0.002% of the total population, die per day in the United States in 2026. The daily mortality attrition rate in Ukraine appears to be roughly 0.015% of the population. Generically speaking, just being in Ukraine, you're 7 times more likely to die each day than in the US. If you were graphing that moment to moment, I'm sure the line would swing wildly depending on whether or not a wave of drones was overhead.

That made me think about what the graph would look like if you were one of the conscripted Russian "soldiers" sent to the front lines. I've been reading that the average life expectancy of Russia's current Latin American mercenaries is about five days. From the moment they set foot on the Eurasian continent, their death probability graph has to look a lot like the win probability graph for Georgia when they played Division II Tennessee State back on September 5. It wasn't pretty. (Georgia's lowest win probability was 85.9% after TN State completed a 6-yard pass to set up a short second down at 9:11 remaining in the first quarter. For most of the rest of the game, it was 99.9%.) I sure hope someone is getting what they want from that meat-grinder.

I'm not a fan of this current era of unjust wars and corporate-driven AI intrusion into daily life, but I might come around if the AI could start calculating my real-time death risk quantification to help me know when I was doing something really foolish. I doubt it would help much. Humans are famously stupid, and I am human. If A and B, then C, so logically, I can already predict what number I might see while staring at my smartphone as I blithely cross the street in front of an oncoming school bus. In hindsight, I guess it's a good thing we didn't have AI or smartphones back in my day.

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109/2679. Caught Stealing (2025)
I enjoyed this so much more than I thought I would. It's essentially a neo noir disguised as an action thriller. There's plenty of comedy and style. Honesty, it's worth a watch for the closing credits alone.

110/2680. Hoppers (2026)
I also really enjoyed this. The critical reviews I'd read seemed to have a problem with the second half, when, yes, the tone rather abruptly changes from sentimental environmental message movie to body horror. But its heart is always in the right place, and it's always a lot of fun.

111/2681. Stop the World: I Want to Get Off (1966)
This is a filmed British play with overt 60s counter-culture leanings. The songs are pretty good, but I struggled with the weak and generally unlikable characters slow to learn any lessons. (That's the point, yes, but I lack patience for nitwits.)

112/2682. Non-Stop New York (1937)
Mistaken identity leads to suspense on an utterly ridiculous flying boat over the Atlantic in this British production akin to the RKO B-picture murder mysteries of the era. The highlight is the attempted murder on the plane's external observation deck!

113/2683. Charles Grodin: Rebel with a Cause (2025)
TCM kicked off its new Friday night concept of movies themed around a film-related documentary with this, which wants you to believe that Grodin wasn't the curmudgeon he played convincingly for so many years on the set of late night talk shows. He must have been a pretty good actor.

More to come.

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UPDATE: 9:03PM. FYI: My power is out again.

This time it's my fault. After voting, Mom and I went to Culver's to celebrate democracy in action. I decided to buy four pints of custard to take home and put in the freezer for later. Mom said, "Now I know the power is going to go out again." And it did! Mothers always know.

For the record, Georgia Power's estimated time until restoration to clear this latest downed pine tree is... about three hours.

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