Too Much of a Good Thing: Nine Mae West Films on KL Studio Classics Blu-ray

Mae West’s fervent belief in the healing powers of sex was only equaled by her epic and rather unlikely confidence in herself.

Mae West
Photo: Everett

Mae West’s fervent belief in the healing powers of sex was only equaled by her epic and rather unlikely confidence in herself. The idea of erotic indulgence filled her big, swaying body with euphoric anticipation, and she was as romantic about money as fellow vaudevillian Jack Benny; in lieu of cash, she preferred to hold glittering diamonds with her unusually tiny hands. When her first film was released in 1932, she was a coarse woman of 40, a Broadway headliner who had done time in the hoosegow for indecency.

West was so hard-bitten that she could sometimes alarm the camera with her impenetrable sangfroid. Many thought she was a man in drag, given her undisguisedly rotund frame and exaggerated, often vicious hauteur. She had an inexhaustibly playful interest in language, a rare, sometimes perplexing, and even lofty wit, spiced by low-down slang. She wrote almost all her films, insisted on total control of her work, and was wildly popular for a short time, right before the Production Code lowered the boom on adult attitudes. West made 12 films in total, and only three are really first-rate, but that was enough to seal her legend.

On stage, and in her later films, West perfected a kind of slow-motion languor, her eyes rolling around like avid, drugged marbles as she contemplated her amatory prospects and stewed in the juices of her sated, shady past. But when she was on the set of her first film, Archie Mayo’s Night After Night, she saw that the actors were playing their scenes at a snail’s pace. Seizing her Hollywood opportunity by the short hairs, West jolted the supine film awake by playing her own dialogue in a raucous, fast style. “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!” exclaims Patricia Farley’s hatcheck girl. “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie,” quips West’s Maudie Triplett, putting the audience right in her pocket. When Miss Jellyman (Alison Skipworth) asks Maudie if she believes in love at first sight, West offers the first of many philosophical bon mots: “I don’t know, but it saves an awful lot of time,” she ruminates. George Raft later marveled in his autobiography, “[She] stole everything but the cameras.”

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That canny rescue job gave West the power to adapt her biggest stage hit, 1928’s Diamond Lil, four years later as She Done Him Wrong. Lowell Sherman’s still-fresh crime comedy, set in the Gay Nineties, won her stardom, and it led to her best film the subsequent year, Wesley Ruggles’s I’m No Angel. West’s showgirl character, Tira, is first seen doing a shimmy, driving gross men to distraction with her extremely lazy gyrations. As she undulates off stage, West memorably sneers under her breath, “Suckers!” It was a woman’s sharpest gibe at the opposite sex on scene until Jane Fonda looked at her wristwatch mid-coitus in Alan J. Pakula’s Klute.

Tira finds fame doing a lion act, and as she gets richer, she employs a trio of black maids (played by Hattie McDaniel, Gertrude Howard, and Libby Taylor). They’re at once servants and confidantes, blissfully dancing with West as she starts to shout jazzy nonsense and shuffle across a room. (Two of her lesser films, Leo McCarey’s Belle of the Nineties, from 1934, and A. Edward Sutherland’s Every Day’s a Holiday, from 1937, are bolstered by the august presence of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong backing her bizarre musical numbers.) West classes herself with the outsiders of the time: Blacks, gays, and fallen women are her people, and they’re always her friends on screen, whereas the ones with power, rich white men, are generally seen as repulsive. Her leading man here, Cary Grant, seems amused by West, and not always in a kind way, as he projects a mocking aggression that she doesn’t seem to notice.

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Alexander Hall’s Goin’ to Town, from 1935, and Henry Hathaway’s Go West Young Man, from 1936, were watered down due to censorship, but they both have their moments. The former has West, as former dance hall queen Cleo Borden, singing an aria from Samson and Delilah and pining for a dull Englishman (Paul Cavanaugh). She garners most of her laughs with her nasal delivery, since the edge of her double meanings were filed down by the Code to single-meaning one-liners. In Go West Young Man, West plays a movie star hiding out in the country, feeling up Randolph Scott’s sexy gas station attendant in several lengthy scenes. She seems most like a gay man in this film, brazenly checking out Scott’s ass when he isn’t looking, even beating out a rhythm on it as they dance. And the film is the rare West production that offers interesting roles to other women: Elizabeth Patterson’s quietly salty Aunt Kate is sensitively limned by West, and Isabel Jewell is likable as a star-struck young maid. The endings of both Goin’ to Town and Go West Young Man are jarringly abrupt, but West’s plots are so hectically lurid and tied up so neatly and quickly that they suggest a satire on the movies of the time.

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Among West’s triumphs is Edward F. Cline’s 1940 film My Little Chickadee, where she met her match in W.C. Fields, another resolutely egocentric vaudevillian. They shared a love for mysterious, black-humored non sequiturs, and they both refused to make contact with others. “Is it possible for us to be lonesome together?” asks Field’s Cuthbert J. Twillie, and West, as the gold-digging Flower Belle Lee, smiles with appreciation at his wintry, cynical solitude.

This is the only time she really paid attention to a co-star on screen, and it makes this at times flat-footed production an endlessly watchable source of delight—a slice of pre-WWII theater of the absurd. (All it really needed were the Marx Brothers, West’s lifelong friends, to show up and the whole world to break down into sex, drink, and self-defeating puns, maybe even conclude in the end of life as we know it: the sexual congress of, say, Mae and Harpo as Groucho watches and Fields passes out.) This is a film you dream of but can’t imagine actually happening, which is why it’s a little prosaic and disappointing. Fields gets the lion’s share of the laughs, but West gets in her innings during a schoolroom scene where she counsels some unruly boys: “Two and two are four, and five’ll get ya 10 if ya know how to woik it.”

West made one more disastrous film after My Little Chickadee, Gregory Ratoff’s The Heat’s On, in 1943, before returning to the stage and later to nightclubs. At age 77, she made a comeback in Michael Sarne’s outrageous adaptation of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, co-starring Raquel Welch in the eponymous role, then proved her implacable (or is it omnipotent?) will by getting a young Timothy Dalton to croon “Love Will Keep Us Together” to her in Ken Hughes’s Sextette, when she was closing in on 90. Toward the end of her life, when a reporter asked West what she thought of love, she replied, “Love is what you make it, and who you make it with.” If her figure wasn’t especially shapely, her epigrams surely were.

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Night After Night, She Done Him Wrong, I’m No Angel, Belle of the Nineties, Goin’ to Town, Klondike Annie, Go West Young Man, Every Day’s a Holiday, and My Little Chickadee are all available on Blu-ray on June 29 from Kino Lorber.

Dan Callahan

Dan Callahan’s books include The Camera Lies: Acting for Hitchcock , Barbara Stanwyck: The Miracle Woman, and Vanessa: The Life of Vanessa Redgrave. He has written about film for Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Nylon, The Village Voice, and more.

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