Some Pre-Code Paramounts

Mae West was still plenty hot stuff in the sixties, riding the crest of new-found popularity among the "protest" youth crowd that would also embrace W.C.Fields, Humphrey Bogart, and The Marx Brothers. She was fashionably anti-establishment because she made saucy movies back in the thirties and still wielded a nasty tongue in her dotage, a thing borne out by her embarrassing turns in 1969’s Myra Breckingridge and the later, even more execrable, Sextette. I used to see her as a kid on Channel 8 in Belle Of The Nineties, the one Mae West title they owned, and alas, the first of her vehicles to be hollowed out by Code enforcement. Mae’s comeback during the Age Of Acquarious seems to have shared its emergence with that of the Motion Picture Ratings System, which finally and for all time wiped out the Code. Up until then, her early pictures still packed a wallop in terms of raunchy content, though it would be only a few years before "Now Generation" fans would move on to the next fad. Thirty-five years later, we’re left with a rather odd feminine screen presence that seems not of this earth --- or at least not the earth we occupy today. Were there ever women like Mae West? I mean, even in the Gay Nineties, which was the inevitable setting for virtually all her movies? Maybe the real-life Jenny Lind or Maud Adams were like this --- Sarah Bernhardt in her youth perhaps? Even in the early thirties, she must have seemed peculiar, though wildly popular (but that’s cause her pictures were so saucy). That generous, if not corpulent, figure seemed to adhere to the conventions of an earlier day (the gay nineties again), not to mention studied theatrical posing in costumes that must have weighed sixty pounds in the box. We were reminded of this as we unspooled Universal's DVD of Night After Night, Mae’s 1932 motion picture debut. This isn't much of a movie, but it may well be the best thing she ever did, and for all that, it’s worth a closer look.



Night After Night was intended to launch George Raft as a leading man. He’d played in support of Paul Muni in Scarface, doing a coin-flip routine that would become grist for every impression and caricature of him thereafter (WB would even resurrect it ten years later when they spoofed Raft in Tex Avery’s cartoon, Hollywood Steps Out). Truth to tell, George didn’t have a lot to give beyond the coin gag, but somehow he managed to flip the gals in the audience, as they went for his swarthy appeal in a big way. In Night After Night, he’s one of those half-hearted denizens of the underworld that studios were forced to soften up in response to public outcry over the hard-edged gangster stuff of Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, and George’s own Scarface. Cagney, Robinson, and now Raft were obliged to play it for either comedy or sentiment. Thus we have The Little Giant, Hard To Handle, and Night After Night, among many others. The latter seems slow at just 70 minutes, and you could run a Studebaker on all the oil in this man's hair. Just at halfway point, when it looks like time to bail out, comes Mae West, and she’s just dynamite. I’d not seen this show since it was on a Tennessee channel back in 1970, so it came as a shock to realize just how good West could be when she let her hair down, something that wouldn't happen again once she got near-total control of her Paramount vehicles. In this one, Mae’s relaxed and seems to actually enjoy her interplay with other actors. You don’t get that aloof quality she displays in the later pictures. There are really only two big scenes for her, and word is the actress took over her own dialogue after expressing disapproval of the script. For the whole second half of Night After Night, you just keep waiting for her to come back. It was the same way for folks in 1932. Based on the fantastic response of patrons, Mae’s graduation to leads was swift and sure.


I’d have been happier with the Carole Lombard set if they’d stayed with her pre-code stuff. A combo of White Woman, Sinners In The Sun, Supernatural, and No Man Of Her Own would have been sweet, but in this DVD business, we have to settle for what we can get, which in this case is Man Of The World, the lone pre-code amongst a brace of mid-thirties Lombard comedies. The titular figure is our old friend Bill Powell, and he is magnificent. The two of them got married the year they made this --- she used to call him "Philo," after the sleuth character he’d played --- but they split soon afterward as Bill really wasn’t into the night-life scene (when you’re the coolest sport in town, you don’t have to go out of the house to prove it). Man Of The World starts out like gangbusters. Bill’s got such a smooth line in blackmail, you’d almost pay the guy off just to get to hear his spiel. That scene with Guy Kibbee in the first reel is just too priceless. In fact, there’s lots of fun to be had … until the payoff … and that’s a real letdown. So as to avoid a spoiler, I’ll merely recite the cardinal rule for all Bill Powell movies, and that is this --- Bill must triumph. He must walk away with the woman, the money, his rival’s dignity --- everything. Defeat for Bill is just unacceptable, and that’s the reason I just couldn’t embrace Man Of The World. Give me Lawyer Man, Private Detective 62, and especially The Road To Singapore (what a delicious ending that had!). It seems all of Bill’s Paramount vehicles had bummer finishes. That’s probably because they still thought of him as a heavy, as he’d been in the silent days. Bill certainly rolled up a gallery of sleazy characterizations while at that studio. The difference, and it’s a crucial one, between a Paramount Powell and a Warners Powell, is that he could be sleazy at WB and get away with it; in fact come out smelling like a rose … and that’s only as it should be!