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| 1933: She Done Him Wrong | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Jul 7 2010, 09:14 AM (452 Views) | |
| Laughing Gravy | Jul 7 2010, 09:14 AM Post #1 |
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As the silent era was buried by the talkies, the various great pantomime clowns of the 1920s adapted with various degrees of success, but the early 1930s really belonged to a new generation of screen comics, funny men and women who settled directly in Hollywood from the stages of vaudeville and Broadway, with the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, and Mae West leading the pack. Mae West was born in New York City in 1893, just as the Victorian Era was about to end, and a few years later she probably helped put the nails in its coffin with such Broadway shows as Sometime, in which Mae introduced the dance “The Shimmy”, and Sex, which was raided by NYC police and resulted in Mae spending eight days in prison on a morals charge – which helped ticket sales immeasurably. Mae usually wrote her own plays, including her biggest hit, the 1928 Broadway show Diamond Lil. In 1932, Paramount Pictures gave her a supporting role in a George Raft picture, Night After Night; Raft later said of Mae’s appearance in the film, “She stole everything but the cameras.” For her next picture, and first starring screen role, Paramount decided to produce Diamond Lil, but the play was so notorious that it was extensively rewritten and released as She Done Him Wrong. It was a huge hit, helped save the studio from bankruptcy, and even garnered an Academy Award nomination as Best Picture. In 1890s New York, Mae is a saloon singer in a bowery beer joint, where she’s romanced by… well, by every man in the film’s cast, most of whom are gangsters of one sort or another. She encourages them all, particularly the ones who come bearing diamonds. Her interest DOES, however, extend to Cary Grant, who runs the reform mission next door. He has no diamonds, but… well, he’s Cary Grant, and so she invites him to come up 'n' see her sometime. That’s pretty much the plot, such as it is. On this sparse branch is hung a nest full of juicy entendres; Mae describes herself as “the finest woman that ever walked the streets” and sings a song bemoaning her boyfriend, a jockey, jilting her, leaving her without a rider in her saddle. (She also sings a song about how much she enjoys “a man who takes his time.”) Cary: “Haven’t you ever met a man that could make you happy?” Mae: “Sure. Lots of times.” One of the big laughs is when she’s asked if she minds that the saloon owner has hung up a nude portrait of her. No, she’s flattered, although she adds that she wishes he hadn’t hung it up over the “free lunch” sign. Alas, the censors beefed up the Production Code enforcement, and very quickly, Mae’s films were tamed to the point of innocuousness. By 1936 she was pretty much washed up in films, although she was memorably teamed with W.C. Fields in My Little Chickadee (1940). She remained the quintessential sex symbol and maintained a cult following until her death in 1980 – and beyond. Today, her early films are as sexy, funny, and refreshing as ever. The early Paramount films are owned by Universal now; there's a five-film set that contains most of her early work, but She Done Him Wrong was issued separately as part of the "Cinema Classics" DVD series, and it includes a surrealistic 1934 Walter Lantz cartoon, "She Done Him Right", with Mae as a dog. Hmmm. |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| panzer the great & terrible | Jul 7 2010, 06:53 PM Post #2 |
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Mouth Breather
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Jazz fans, "I Wonder Where My Easy Rider's Gone," which West sings in this picture, is not the W. C. Handy number Louis Armstrong so memorably covered. It's a good song though. |
| Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious... | |
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| outerlimit | Jul 8 2010, 06:54 AM Post #3 |
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Balcony Gang, Foist Class
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Universal have a 6 disc set in PAL called The Mae West Collection containing this film and also the Columbia pic called "The Heat's On".Sadly, no extras. I watched "I'm No Angel"(also with Cary Grant) from the set last week and enjoyed it very much.No sign of the George Raft movie though....Incidentally,Mae West more or less discovered Cary Grant. |
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| Laughing Gravy | Jul 8 2010, 07:53 AM Post #4 |
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Mae always claimed to have discovered Cary Grant, and undeniably his two films with her furthered his career... but he had a major role opposite Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, released several months before his first film with Miss West. |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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| panzer the great & terrible | Jul 8 2010, 08:05 AM Post #5 |
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Mouth Breather
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Good point. Blonde Venus is the red headed stepchild of Sternberg's early talkies. It's often overlooked, but how can anybody with a sense of humor pass it up? It's often dismissed as all form and no substance, but it has plenty of substance, all silly. Mae liked to take credit for Grant, but Grant's movie personality wasn't fully formed in her pictures. I think Cukor deserves the credit for Grant. That what Grant used to say, anyhow. |
| Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious... | |
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| Laughing Gravy | Nov 15 2014, 02:51 PM Post #6 |
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The film proved very popular with the gang (five guys, three women) and Mae got lots 'n' lots of laughs. The Merrie Melodies cartoon Honeymoon Hotel (1934, their first in Cinecolor) reminded me a LOT of Mr. Bug Goes to Town; it was fun. The other cartoon, She Done Him Right (1933, Walter Lanz) had Mae as a singing poodle, and it was fun, too. Bob Ripley went to North Africa (my date for the evening had lived in Morocco, you see) and showed us some stuff, some of which we believed and some of which we did not; our Vitaphone offering was three well-dressed lads on guitar, called the Gotham Rhythm Boys; and then Ming the Merciless masqueraded as Abe Lincoln in a cowboy hat in "The Phony Doctor", the seventh episode of Batman '43. |
| "I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley | |
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