Remembered For One Reason ...

Night After Night (1932) Boosts George Raft and Welcomes Mae West

Ran this down after reading Mae West’s recount in her Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It book. Night After Night was the screen debut for West, as well as being, less importantly now, George Raft’s first starring part. Night After Night is in every sense a vehicle for Raft, Paramount in-house agreeing he could be another Valentino, but what did anyone by 1932 need with another Valentino? Raft wrote later that Mae West “stole everything but the camera,” though in fact, her part is limited, with but a couple segments to register fully. Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It was published in 1959, so her recall to Night After Night extends twenty-seven years, that plus impulse to come out a winner in all disputes, the woman who tamed Hollywood right from a start. Make of her account what you will, but know that in 1959, West was addressing a general readership and not chroniclers to whom she owed truth in facts. To read books like this is to know accuracy is down, way down, a list of priorities, and yet Mae West tells a life as she understood it, in a voice recognizably hers, that is, if you know West as an entertainer who left no detail of image-building to chance. She had help on the book, crediting author Stephen Longstreet (novels, scripts, teleplays) and Criswell (!) for “hours and days he spent in research … concerning my life not easily obtainable elsewhere.” Here was a Criswell talent new to me. Guess we can immortalize him for something other than Plan 9 From Outer Space. Query: Did Mae buy into Cris’s hocus-pocus re future reads? She was known to take such matters seriously.

The left coast was 3000 miles from a show world West knew best, though brass at Paramount were familiar to her from years of trouping and travel. There were few strangers among those raised by the biz. William Le Baron would line produce Night After Night. He understood talent like West’s, having met her in 1911 at beginnings for both. Le Baron would also be a champion for W.C. Fields. We can thank him for film legacies these stars left. West had dealt also with George Raft. He came nightly to the boxoffice during her Broadway run of Sex to rake off a cash share for investor Owney Madden, who also owned the Cotton Club and was a leading face of NY gangland. It’s been written that Mae West had an affair with George Raft, but as with most of her liaisons, it was casual, at least on her end. She had wanted him for the male lead in Sex, but Raft didn’t think he could measure up, and so demurred. A lot of wires, then, connected these people. 

Mae had to ride a hot and dingy train to California. It reminded her of miserable trips from vaude. Those who had snatched brass rings kept their aversion to choo-choos. Bad association dies hard. Gloria Swanson hated crimson hues because they reminded her of smelly upholstered seating aboard. The Marx Brothers each had horror stories, and shared them in elder age. Trains were hot as hell because they had to keep windows closed to keep the soot out. Mae West made her trip in June and so got brunt of the heat, four days “holding an ice bag to my head as the electric fans merely swirled the tired torrid air around.” She stayed in her drawing room until arrival in Pasadena. All this for $5000 a week, a transaction most could embrace even today. Imagine five grand in 1932, science-fiction to anybody back then. I believe the essentials of what West wrote in Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It. She says Paramount dawdled with the script for Night After Night, paying her to wait and be idle. Dialogue was bad enough for West to turn down flat. She tried to give the studio its money back so she could go home. They said no and that if she didn’t like her lines, to feel free rewriting. This doesn’t sound like a concession you would give a fourth-billed player, but again, there is ring of truth because Adolph Zukor confirmed as much in the book he’d write (or have written) twenty years after the 1932 movie was made.

Mae West was thirty-nine when she began in films, less an outright sex symbol than source for smart comedy. She’d stay that way to satisfaction of all, then and for those of us who enjoy her now. West doesn’t try to be funny in her book. I think she wanted by 1959 to put the record right and tell what effort staying on top entailed. The West formula really was one only Mae could manage. She had no choice but to stand fast against those who tried to rewrite her. It’s told that she parsed endlessly over Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It before allowing the book to be published. I get the sense that she was stubborn on Night After Night, though reasonable enough to let her material be tested against what was pre-written and leave outcome to the audience (“My part was very unimportant and banal. The dialogue did nothing for me”). Paramount must have realized right away that West would be a major asset, a starring one, and so accommodated her. Director Archie Mayo is dragged through briars by West, same as Groucho would do for him when recalling A Night In Casablanca (I believe he referred to Mayo as a “fat idiot”). Players from a background of stage success did not like studio men telling them how to perform. West found Mayo “fat and friendly,” says they maintained “an armed truce.” (were people generally less tolerant of corpulence in those days?)

It is understood that studios cinched belts when a grip of Depression saw theatre receipts fall. Many put an absolute ceiling on dollars spent. Odd then to read West’s account of waste on Night After Night, as in “ … the actors didn’t know their lines, the director did not seem to know what he was doing. They would shoot a scene over and over, one expensive take after another.” West noticed too how slow a tempo the others used, perhaps ongoing precaution against early recording’s failure to pick up their words, not a concern for someone having come from the stage, where, according to West, she played it slow as contrast to co-players’ speedier delivery. That would have to be reversed now, and indeed, Mae West comes into Night After Night at much higher energy than Raft, and especially Alison Skipworth, another reason her performance stands out and works better for modern watchers. Once she took greater control of vehicles however, West would slow down and let others do the running. Night After Night might, for this reason, be her most energetic performance. To the film’s success, other than a personal one for West, I’m in doubt. The negative cost was $301K, with domestic rentals of $240K, low among other Paramounts for that year. Night After Night is available on DVD, and TCM ran it in HD a few years back.