The Hays Code did a lot of things for the films in the late 30s through the 50s, cleaning up anything remotely offensive in Hollywood films and appeasing a certain group of people who found the existing crop of motion pictures to be bawdy and glorified in sin. Perhaps they were thinking about Mae West when pointing their collective fingers at Hollywood because when it came to sex and innuendo, Mae West was at the heart of it, reveling in everything tawdry.
My first experience with Mae West was in the Gore Vidal film from 1970, Myra Breckinridge. That film shows us a Mae West who was well past her prime, yet still oozing the sexuality and charm she had in her youth. While I was not familiar with her work at the time I saw that, I recognized the character she was playing from countless parodies and homages I had seen over the years. Her on-stage persona had thoroughly entered the cultural zeitgeist long before I was born, and the image of a blonde with a sultry, cibtralto voice goes back to her earliest works on vaudeville, where she was one of the pioneers of double entendre comedy.
This act caused controversy, especially after her 1926 Broadway play Sex hit the stage. This play, written, produced, and directed by West, so offended some that complaints went out, and the police raided the show, arresting Mae on moral charges. She would spend eight days in jail, preferring that to paying a fine, and credited it to boosting her career. Not long afterwards, she was contracted to star in films in Hollywood, where she would eventually become the highest-paid actress in the city.
One of her earliest films, She Done Him Wrong, was designed around her stage persona, benefited heavily from her rewriting her own dialogue, and was so popular that it saved the struggling Paramount Pictures studio from bankruptcy. For a time, Mae West was on top of the world. But the production code was coming rapidly, and with it came censorship. Censorship was the death knell for performers who traded on sexual innuendo, and Mae West was not spared.
But that wasn’t really in play in 1933, and so what we see on the screen in She Done Him Wrong is Mae West, even if it was not as overt as what was happening on the stage. Watching it, we get a sense of what she was like, tossing out lines like “When women go wrong, men go right after them,” and “I’m a fast-moving girl, that likes them slow.” It’s difficult to describe her in writing, but when you see her on screen, you recognize her from her reputation and distinct delivery.
She Done Him Wrong isn’t the greatest written film in the world. It’s primarily on the Academy Awards Best Picture list because of the waves it made in Hollywood upon release. This film was a huge financial hit at the time, and Paramount was ingratiated to Mae West and the production for saving them from financial ruin. When you boil the film down, though, it’s pretty bare-bones. The story is about a bawdy singer, Lady Lou (Mae West), who works in the Bowery ballroom saloon of her boss, Gus Jordan (Noah Beery Sr.), who is always showering her with diamonds. She accepts these gifts but is a woman with an unquenchable appetite for men, including for Captain Cummings (Cary Grant), a young man running a mission located next door to the saloon. Cummings is in reality an undercover federal agent investigating Gus for counterfeiting and prostitution.
Also in the mix is Chick Clark (Owen Moore), a convicted criminal serving time in prison. Chick is still in love with Lou and vows to escape and take her with him. Lou visits him in prison to placate him but has no intention of living her life on the lam with him should he escape. She is warned that Chick believes she has betrayed him, which is the main reason she takes the time to pay him that visit in prison in the first place. There are some double-crossings, a woman is accidentally killed, and a lot of people end up getting arrested before it is all over.
All of this takes place over the course of a film that barely clocks in at an hour. As I mentioned above, this is pretty bare-bones. What we are mostly here for is Mae West, who at this time would have been infamous for her Broadway play and subsequent arrest. This was a time before such things would have been readily available for the world to see either from official means or via a shaky cell phone recording uploaded to the internet. Most people in the world would have known of her on-stage antics strictly from the news outlets and word-of-mouth and would have been dying to get a glimpse of what all the fuss was about. Mae knew that there was no such thing as bad publicity when it came to entertainment, and she was right. The general public flooded theaters to get a glimpse at her, and she delivered as expected.
Watching it today, it’s more of a curiosity than a legitimately entertaining production. We see more suggestive dialogue on YouTube than this film ever could. It’s charming and funny seeing it in the context of 1930s cinema, but that has its limits. The story isn’t particularly engaging, so we have to rely on the presence of West, which is enough to sustain the short runtime. Mercifully, the film doesn’t run much longer as it would overstay its welcome. This is a product of its time and is best enjoyed on that level.
I am not opposed to seeing more Mae West productions. She is a delight when turned loose and allowed to shock her audience. However, once the Production Code was in full sway, she was effectively neutered, and by the 1940s, she was abandoning Hollywood for the stage again, where she could be as risqué as she wanted to be. This uncensored version of Mae West is what I would really like to see, able to push boundaries well beyond what she could get away with even in pre-code Hollywood and unencumbered by a paint-by-numbers script that is really only there to give us an excuse to see her when the logistics of 1930s America couldn’t otherwise make that possible.
Academy Award Nomination:
Outstanding Production: William LeBaron
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Release Date: January 27, 1933
Running Time: 66 minutes
Not Rated
Starring: Mae West, Cary Grant, Owen Moore, Gilbert Roland, Noah Beery Sr., and Neşet Berküren
Directed By: Lowell Sherman
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