She Done Him Wrong (Paramount, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, after The Seven Year Itch Turner Classic Movies showed a movie featuring a legendary female star who was the total opposite of Marilyn Monroe: a woman who controlled her own movies and carefully crafted them to showcase a truly liberated personality. Her name was Mae West, and after a career in vaudeville she came into her own in 1926 with a play she had written and in which she starred. West later said the play was inspired by a woman prostitute she’d seen wearing a hat with two ultra-expensive bird-of-paradise feathers (which became such a prestige item in the 1920’s the bird they came from was literally hunted to extinction). West got a production contract for the play and hired Elwood Elsner, who’d previously worked with John Barrymore, to direct it even though she hadn’t yet decided on a title when rehearsals began. Midway through the rehearsals Elsner said, “This play reeks of sex, sex, sex!” West heard that and then and there decided to call the play Sex, even though in 1926 newspapers would not print that word: the New York Times ads read, “Mae West in that certain play.” When Sex opened the New York city government busted West for obscenity; she was sentenced to 10 days in the city jail and mused on the irony that she was in jail for playing a prostitute and every other woman in the jail was there for being one. West followed it up with a play called The Drag, which was not only about Gay men but was cast with Gay actors playing all the Gay roles. In 1928 West opened a play she had written called Diamond Lil, setting it in New York in the 1890’s. She said that was because she wanted a play that would attract women as well as men, and the lavish 1890’s costumes would give female audiences something they’d enjoy seeing on stage, though I’ve long suspected the real reason Mae West gravitated to the 1890’s was because it was the era in which women who looked like her – zaftig, with whalebone corsets creating artificial waistlines – were considered the epitome of female sexiness.

In 1932 Paramount offered West a movie contract and put her in a film called Night After Night, which starred George Raft as a gangster who opens a speakeasy and Constance Cummings as the “society” woman he falls for, but West’s supporting role stole the film. She walks into Raft’s speakeasy and a hat-check girl looks at her jewelry and says, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds.” West fires back, “Goodness had nothing to do with it, honey” – a line she’d not only written herself (in fact, West demanded permission to rewrite her entire role) but which became so identified with her she used it as the title of her autobiography. Paramount wanted West under contract, and she was able to make an unheard-of series of demands on the studio: not only did she demand that they make Diamond Lil as her next film, she insisted that she write the scripts for her films and her credit as writer be in type 75 percent the size of her credit as star. Paramount retitled Diamond Lil as She Done Him Wrong and gave her the young, drop-dead gorgeous Cary Grant as her leading man. There’s a legend that West had Paramount’s executives line up all the young males they had under contract, whereupon she walked up and down the line looking them over, until she finally put her hand on Grant’s shoulder and said, “Him.” That’s almost certainly not true: Paramount had actually been carefully building up Grant’s career for about a year since he’d played the second lead in a Lubitsch-esque romantic comedy called This Is the Night, and when he made She Done Him Wrong he’d already starred with Sylvia Sidney in a non-musical film of Madame Butterfly and with Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus. Be that as it may, She Done Him Wrong holds up beautifully.

The plot casts Mae West as “Lady Lou,” singer in a nightclub and saloon owned by Gus Jordan (Noah Beery) next door to a mission run by stuck-up Captain Cummings (Cary Grant). The club is a wide-open joint and a hang-out for lowlifes of various types, including “Russian Rita” (Rafaela Ottiano) and her boyfriend and partner in crime, Serge Stanieff (Gilbert Roland). One of Lady Lou’s former boy-toys, Chick Clark (Owen Moore, Mary Pickford’s first husband), is in prison for crimes he committed to buy Lou diamonds. In one of the film’s most audacious scenes, Lou goes to visit him in prison and we find that every prisoner there had an interest in Lou and committed their crimes to lavish diamonds and other gifts on her. There’s a great scene in which Lou is confronted by Sally (Rochelle Hudson), who attempts suicide on the floor of Jordan’s bar. It turns out she’s been having an affair with a married man, and the implication is he got her pregnant. Lou talks her out of killing herself with yet another one of the great Mae West lines: “When girls go wrong, men go right after ‘em!” Unfortunately, Lou makes the mistake of turning Sally over to Rita and Serge, who unbeknownst to her are what were then called “white slavers” and are now called “human traffickers.” They want to sell her to a whorehouse on the Barbary Coast (which was in San Francisco, at the other end of the country from New York!), only Lou is luckily able to rescue her in time. Rita and Serge are also counterfeiters, and they’re walking around with bundles of phony money. Meanwhile, Chick Clark escapes from prison and is determined to kill Lou if she’s been seeing other men while he’s been in stir – which of course, being a Mae West character, she has. True to form, however, she overpowers him and easily disarms him.

There’s also talk of a mysterious undercover cop called “The Hawk,” who to no surprise turns out to be Captain Cummings, and in the final scene he announces to Lou that he’s a federal agent (presumably with the Secret Service, since the FBI didn’t exist in the 1890’s and the Secret Service was originally formed to enforce the laws against counterfeiters; the business of protecting the President and other officials came later, after the 1901 assassination of William McKinley) and he’s going to take her into custody – only instead of handcuffs, he puts an engagement ring on her finger and announces that she’s now under a life sentence to be married to him. Along the way West sings three songs: two of them by Ralph Rainger, “I Wonder Where My Easy Rider’s Gone” (a rewrite of W. C. Handy’s “Yellow Dog Blues”) and “A Guy What Takes His Time,” which West recorded for Brunswick Records even more audaciously than she performs it in the film (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjSslko71yw). She begins the record with a series of orgasmic moans that almost certainly no white singer had put on records before. West’s third song is “Frankie and Johnny,” a song which the movie censors who came later – largely as a result of a pressure campaign by the Roman Catholic Church, who in 1934 formed an organization called the Legion of Decency to force the film industry to enforce its own Production Code – forbade later filmmakers from even mentioning in films, much less performing. (Lena Horne worked out a marvelous arrangement of “Frankie and Johnny” for her appearance in the 1946 film Ziegfeld Follies, and she recorded it for the independent Black & White label, but the Production Code Administration wouldn’t let MGM film it.) West would get to make one more movie after She Done Him Wrong, I’m No Angel (also with Cary Grant as her leading man), under the period of loose Production Code enforcement commonly, though inaccurately, called “pre-Code” by movie historians and film buffs, before the censors came down on her and put a premature end to her film career.