POP FILTER

VS.

SHE DONE HIM WRONG

Right as I am about to press play, my phone rings, it’s my ma. We chit chat and she asks me what my plans are for the evening, and I tell her I’m watching a Mae West movie. “Oh, god, why would do a thing like that? Do something else.” I tell her I have to watch it because I’m reviewing it, and what exactly is it that she doesn’t like about Mae West? “Oh well if you have to do it, that makes more sense. She’s just awful, I mean, where’s the talent?” My mom also hates Marilyn Monroe, but I always thought that it was because she more of the Jackie O type. This, coming from my mother, could not have been a bigger endorsement for the movie. Mae West is certified film royalty. I had never seen any of her movies, and only knew about her from old Looney Tunes cartoons, parodies, many top movies lists and the Mae West room in the Dali Museum in Barcelona.

Mae was superstar in Hollywood in her day, a true, fearless, bitchy, badass. She was an actress, singer, writer, vaudevillian, Broadway star and national sex-symbol. If she didn’t like the part the studio sent her, she rewrote it. She got her start with a play she wrote and starred in aptly titled, “Sex.” She Done Him wrong came out in 1933, the same year as King Kong, and saved Paramount studios from bankruptcy made West into a household name. And here she still is, nearly 80 years later, still offending the delicate sensibilities of middle-aged conservators of morality like my mother. So does this stand the test of time? I have a long history of loving strong female characters, ever since I was nine and had total normal heterosexual feeling about

Xena, Warrior Princess (Caption: They told me I could go up to be whatever I wanted. They lied.) Every Halloween as a kid I either wanted to be Red Sonja or the Pink Power Ranger. There is something so appealing to me about a woman who is independent, strong, and surviving in a man’s world. All these women owe a debt of gratitude to trail blazers like Mae West. She was a Hollywood powerhouse in a time where women had just won the right to vote. She oozed sexuality and confidence and made filthy jokes in a time when women were infantilized and long before the women’s movement of the 60s. She Done Him Wrong is from Hollywood’s first golden age, because it has something we think we have, but don’t actually: movie stars. Glamorous, sophisticated larger than life movie stars. What we have today are famous people. You would never in a million years see Clark Gable so undignified as to appear in his workout clothes in a tabloid.

When you watch this movie, you are watching Mae West own the room and all the men in it, and be balls to the wall, drop-dead fabulous while covered in diamonds. She says things that were absolutely scandalous, “Listen, when women go wrong, men go right after them.” And the possible the most famous line from a movie of all time where she propositions Carry Grant, “Why don’t you come up some time and see me?” It has all kinds of really great lines like “Well, surely you don’t mind my holding your hand?” says Carry Grant to which she replies, “It ain’t heavy – I can hold it myself.” I loved his movie. I’m going to have to give it 4 stars, it’s absolutely fantastic.

-Stephanie Rose