#7 She Done Him Wrong

January 7, 2021
She Done Him Wrong (1933) ***
The Criterion Channel
Free
Wildcard

So, remember yesterday when I said that it was going to be all TCM from now on? I clearly lied.

I didn’t feel like watching another Thin Man movie just yet, and there are some other things that were just too long, so I thought I’d glance around elsewhere. The Criterion Channel had these Mae West movies, so I thought, why not? So, not much of a change from TCM.

This movie is an hour and five minutes long, and someday I won’t be choosing movies quite so much because of the short length, but that day is not today.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a Mae West film all the way through, and I’ll bet there are many people who know exactly who she is and have seen her and can pick her out of a lineup and yet have not seen one of her actual films. She was very unusual for the time in that she was her own screenwriter, and was the complete creator of the Mae West character from 20 years in the theatre before she got anywhere near movies. Of course, she had to wait for the movies to not only be invented, but be talkies, she would not have fared well in the silent cinema. 

She Done Him Wrong is pre-Code, and, I believe, was one of the films that actually made the Code come to fruition, because it is pretty dirty. Mae West is definitely living with a man without benefit of clergy, and the movie makes it clear that it’s not the first time. All men are obsessed with her on first meeting, and if you are going to write that movie for yourself, you had better be sure that your mouth isn’t writing checks that your ass can’t cash, but Mae West’s ass is perfectly capable of all the check-cashing you like. She doesn’t appear for the first ten minutes of the film, but everyone spends all that time talking about her, and it’s quite the star entrance.

Baby Cary Grant is in this, one of his first films, as a missionary, and is visibly Cary Grant the movie star even then.

Even at 65 minutes, it has a meandering quality, and is not overburdened with plot, until the last fifteen minutes, which is suddenly super-plotty, but manages not to wrap it all up anyway. But none of that matters, because it’s all about Mae, sparkling like a diamond. What an icon.