Criterion has a collection of Mae West films that are leaving at the end of the month, so I figured, why not give this one a shot. It's based on a play of hers called "Diamond Lil" and she, naturally, plays the titular Lil. It also features a very young Cary Grant, and I understand she's effectively responsible for launching his career, so that was another reason to watch it.
Well... it's 65 minutes long and it still managed to drag. There is no way in hell you wouldn't know this was originally a play, because it's incredibly stage-y. And a lot of the acting (Cary excepted) is at best amateurish. There are some good lines from West (I know she never actually said "Come up and see me sometime" but she says some variant of it many times in this) but the best one by far is uttered by her piano accompanist early on in this. She says "this tune haunts me" and he zings her with "it should, considering you just murdered it". I'd be proud forever if I came up with that one. The actual play is a bunch of shenanigans: Lil is with a bar-owning district "boss" (i.e., political influencer) who showers her with diamonds that he pays for with some decidedly shady side-business (effectively trafficking of vulnerable women from the mission next door, done with an oleaginous Russian couple), but she was with a violent criminal ("Chick") who is currently behind bars. There's another unsavory customer who has his eye on Lil and who informs her that a copper called "The Hawk" has gone undercover investigating her current beau's business and will bring him down. Meanwhile Grant plays the person who runs the mission which is struggling financially (kind-hearted Lil arranges to buy the building off the outrageous Jewish caricature landlord to ensure that the mission is not shut down) but who is secretly [SPOILER FOR THE VERY GULLIBLE}... THE HAWK! Chick (who quite rightly doesn't trust Lil to be faithful) breaks out of prison to check up on her, she gets into a tussle with the distaff side of the Russian couple
(because the young man falls for her) and accidentally stabs her to death (!), the Hawk closes in... It's exhausting. Throw in a couple of song numbers from Lil (one of which is Frankie and Johnnie, hence the film title) and you've got a picture. I've never seen West before, and I have to say... she's not my type. It's almost comical how every man in the movie acts like a Tex Avery cartoon wolf every time she sashays (well, "lumbers" might be more apt - she moves rather like John Wayne, perhaps because she was very tiny (Cary Grant TOWERS over her) and wore giant heels) into view, even though she reminds me rather of a plump middle-aged Coronation Street character. Literally every man finds her irresistible, which is what can happen, I guess, if you write your own material. Her delivery is familiar, mostly because it's been parodied so often, but her lines are hit and miss. There are some that are genuinely funny (when she visits Chick in prison,
every old lag knows her, and one of them says "will you consider going out with me when I get out? and she says "how long are you in for?" "15 years" "It's a date!") but others haven't aged well. There's a lot of fairly tame double entendres (we managed to miss the notorious "is that a gun in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me"), but you wonder how salacious she really was, since she set this in the 1890s, and you never even see a hint of ankle (or giant shoes, which might be the point). Perhaps more progressive was the idea that she was an unrepentant user of men, who was cheerfully upfront about looking out for #1 and collecting as much bling as possible. It also has decidedly melodramatic elements, which differentiate it from the screwball comedies that were breathing hard on its heels. The contrast between this and, say, The Good Fairy, which came only 2 years later, is instructive. Still, now we can say we've seen a Mae West film.
No comments:
Post a Comment