A Film Canon

 

 

This is basically a showcase for Mae West's extraordinary persona, which more than compensates for the sketchy secondary characterisation and narrative, and lack of any real directorial flair. Swaggering and wisecracking her way through every scene, she greets the world with a cynical, exploitative promiscuity capable of transforming the very state of being 'kept' into something empowering, a supreme cuckoldry whose summative image is her promenade down the corridor of a prison populated entirely by her ex-lovers. For the most part, however, the action is restricted to a rough, 1890s Western-styled bar, as if to conflate the semi-mythological abandon of that decade with the more historically distant saloon - a space in which women always ultimately reign supreme, if only by virtue of their scarcity. Here, that scarcity is deflected into a white slavery operation, whose various entanglements (including murder, manslaughter and mistaken identity) require Mae to defend her lifestyle at point of death, as well as providing the perfect foil for her outrageous assertiveness: a young Cary Grant, cast as a distant, taciturn mission worker.