For years, Mae West had been giving me that silver-screen wink, inviting me to “come up sometime and see her.” I’m ashamed to say that as a die-hard classic film buff, I never went and saw her.
Until, that is, this past weekend, when I got my hands on She Done Him Wrong and popped it into the VCR for an hour of good, dirty fun, 1930s-style. While the movie was a disappointment, Mae West wasn’t.
Today, the wisecracking hubba-hubba vixen is the symbol of outrageous sex from an era when that three-letter word was just starting to come into its own (so to speak) in the movies and other pop culture. In fact, West wrote a play called SEX which landed her in jail for ten days on obscenity charges in 1926. As a child of vaudeville, West got her start on the stage when she was 5 years old; by the time she was 14, she was known as “The Baby Vamp” (sort of like today’s average prepubescent, belly-button-baring MTV wanna-be-a-singer).
In 1932, she had a bit part in a George Raft movie called Night After Night. She only had a few lines, but she stole the show. The next year, she got her first big-screen part playing, basically, herself in She Done Him Wrong. She only made twelve other movies, including the career-high of My Little Chickadee (1940) with W.C. Fields and the career-low of Sextette (1978) with Dom DeLuise. Along the way, she fired off enough one-liners to keep neckties loosened for generations:
“It’s not the man in your life that counts. It’s the life in your man.”
“A hard man is good to find.”
“When I’m good, I’m very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.”
Unfortunately, in her breakthrough role as Lady Lou, West was very good in a very bad film. She Done Him Wrong is, to put it frankly, a mess (though not, perhaps, as messy as Sextette). Lou works in the 1890s Bowery barroom saloon of her benefactor Gus Jordan (Noah Beery Sr.), who has draped her in so many diamonds she’s a walking glitter factory. The sparkle helps to offset her vulgar mouth.
The movie was written by West herself, adapted from her stage play Diamond Lil. The creaky theatricality certainly does the movie wrong. Characters pop in and out of the rat-a-tat-tat action, plots and subplots are muddled and the whole works come crashing to a halt at least twice when West takes the stage and belts out a couple of musical numbers. I’d like to be able to tell you what the story is about, but I’m afraid the vaudeville-style blizzard of entrances and exits had me baffled. There’s something to do with Gus’ backroom operation of a white slave trade, counterfeit money and the noble efforts of the Salvation Army missionary (Cary Grant) to stop it. At the same time West is plying her charms and—ahem—assets on the straitlaced Grant, she’s also paying visits to her former boyfriend who’s serving time in the state pen for stealing her diamonds. Frankly, I didn’t care about any of it.
The movie is directed in a hands-off manner by Lowell Sherman, though it’s pretty obvious that even if Cecil B. DeMille had been at the helm, he’d have been powerless as well—it’s West’s film through and through. By the way, that same year, Sherman would also direct another strong female, Katherine Hepburn, in her first Oscar-winning performance in Morning Glory.
The one thing putting fuel in the movie’s engine is, of course, Miss West herself. There are she-nanigans and he-nanigans and double-crosses and double-entendres and enough one-liners to make Henny Youngman jealous. Lou tells her maid, “I wasn’t always rich. No, there was a time when I didn’t know where my next husband was coming from.”
West was an unlikely sex symbol with her nasally snarl, homely features and mannish walk that looked like a cross between a wolf on the prowl and a linebacker storming down the field. But West was ferocious in her feminism and don’t-give-a-damn attitude. She was woman and we heard her roar (interestingly enough, there’s long been an urban legend floating around, speculating that West actually was a man in drag—not true, according to wardrobe mistresses who saw her in the buff).
Audiences loved She Done Him Wrong, lapping up West’s bawdy humor and suggestive winks. She shot to fame with this and subsequent movies; by 1936, she was the highest-paid woman in the U.S. To the Hays Office, however, she was the sassy, brassy Queen of the Obscene and provided an impetus for a stricter Production Code clamping down on sex, violence and profanity in movies. West shrugged and got around it by putting all of the sex in double-entendres and leering winks.
[By the way, She Done Him Wrong contains one of the most famous and most misquoted of West’s lines: “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?” (not “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?” Sure, sure, I know it’s a hair-thin difference—then again, we wouldn’t go around saying John F. Kennedy once said “Don’t ask what your country can do for you,” now would we?)]
There’s just enough sauciness in She Done Him Wrong to raise temperatures and eyebrows everywhere. There’s even a nude picture of Lou which Gus has hung in his bar—we get a two-second glimpse of her birthday suit. Later, Lou passes around some boudoir pictures of herself to a group of men and says, “For the bedroom. A little bit spicy, but not too raw—you know what I mean?” There’s a lot of throat-clearing and stammering from the men.
Sure, she’s spicy, but her movie is about as exciting as a bowl of lime Jell-O. My advice? Watch She Done Him Wrong for the bold sex of Miss West, but otherwise don’t go up and see the movie—at anytime.
In her best film, which she co-scripted, Mae West reprises her hilarious stage role as Diamond Lil in this gay 90s saloon spoof. She invites Cary Gran...More at Buy.com
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