Night After Night (Archie Mayo, 1932), Goin' to Town (Alexander Hall, 1935), and Go West Young Man (Henry Hathaway, 1936). Mae West had the body of a linebacker and the voice of a bulldozer. I applaud her trailblazing sexual agency but I think I'd rather have Robin Williams stick his tongue down my throat than listen to her infamously lascivious machine-gun quips. Archie Mayo's Night After Night is a pretty grim affair—it's a snoozefest for 37 minutes, then West appears for all of two minutes and you feel like throwing up. For sure, she was the kind of performer you have to back into slowly. "Goodness had nothing to do with it," she says—which probably means a hand job or oral sex was involved. Charming. She ain't all bad: Sometimes her crassness is the story's crux, pitched at people like me who can't stand her. In Goin' to Town, she plays a woman with the last name of an ax murderer who heads to South America thanks to the fortune of a man with my surname. It's impossible to watch her kiss a man, but it's great seeing her throw wrenches at the stodgy culture that would rather not have her. West was a very talented screenwriter and Go West Young Man benefits not only from Henry Hathaway's visual eye (the car trip to the country is beautifully shot and edited) but also from the great dialogue West feeds her co-stars. Lots of great lines ("Get her a block of cement so she can put her feet in 'em," says one of the film's country gals) and moments (West's assistant handles her suitors alphabetically) reveal West's interest in sending up celebrity and Hollywood fandom. Look for the maid's very funny Marlene Dietrich impersonation in Go West Young Man.

Golden Earrings (Mitchell Leisen, 1947) and The Flame of New Orleans (René Clair, 1941). Golden Earrings is all wrong, and I'm not just thinking about Dietrich's embarrassing brownface. The whole thing suggests a really whacked Looney Tunes cartoon: When Ray Milland first spots Dietrich, it's like Elmer Fudd stumbling upon Bugs Bunny's rabbit hole, except Milland is hunting Nazis and Dietrich isn't cooking anything as delicious as carrot stew. Their chemistry is off-kilter, as is the filmmaking, which is filled with lots of lazy visual "filler" to move the story along, like all those ridiculous shots of Bruce Lester riding on his bicycle. The Flame of New Orleans, on the other hand, is really sweet. It's as light as whipped cream—somewhat unappetizing but completely unpretentious, with Dietrich's character torn between a banker and sea captain in New Orleans. She pretends to have a look-alike cousin so she can quell the banker's suspicions about her intentions, only to learn that the captain is in love with her. Dietrich often looks as if she's acting into a mirror offscreen but René Clair deftly handles all the power-playing and upper-handing like a mime juggling invisible bowling pins.

We're Not Dressing (Norman Taurog, 1934), Man of the World (Edward Goodman and Richard Wallace, 1931), Hands Across the Table (Mitchell Leisen, 1935), Love Before Breakfast (Walter Lang, 1936), The Princess Comes Across (William K. Howard, 1936), and True Confession (Wesley Ruggles, 1937). Universal's upcoming Carole Lombard collection may not be the most important DVD release of the year, but it's a great way to catch up on some little-seen gems. I can't figure out what the purpose is of the wheelchair-bound dude in Hands Across the Table, but if you pretend he doesn't exist, what remains is a pretty charming, old-fashioned romantic comedy with Lombard and Fred MacMurray's characters growing closer together because of their shared delight in making fools of themselves. It's their chemistry and Lombard's performances that also enliven the cruise ship murder comedy The Princess Comes Across and the Alka Seltzer courtroom screwball True Confession. A little more serious is the superior Man of the World, a proper but sad little film about lies—what they do to us and what they do to others. What's remarkable about the film is its sharp modern sensibility and storytelling clarity. It's a Lost Generation novel come to life in which none of the details that help establish the mise-en-scène—the Paris newsreel footage, that hulking printing press, the extras, all the talk about onion soup and foo young—feel arbitrary or tossed-off. It's a film that cares about environment and how people fit into it, as does We're Not Dressing, which divides its action between a cruise ship and a not-so-deserted island. Bing Crosby is a bore here but everyone else, including a Skating Bear (!), is great. The film is very limber, like a series of epic-long non sequiturs connected by the cartilage of funny little asides (the shipwrecked people's landing on the island inhabited only by the very funny George Burns and Gracie Allen is a highlight) and really cool musical numbers, most of which are responses to something ludicrous that happens in the story, like Ethel Merman launching into song after a very strong drink. I think I fell in love with Lombard after her great slapping-kissing scene with Crosby. I don't know what's with her and ships and getting knocked in the face, but she makes a black eye look glamorous in Love Before Breakfast, a bouncy comedy with lots of fake toy boats standing in for the real ones and attractive men for the actress to choose from. Throughout these films, the actress reveals a singular talent for selling glamour without pretense.