Sextette

[photo: you do the math] Fans of Mae West tend to be fans of her work in the 30s--work done at the height of her career as a vaudevillian. She was a bold female figure, funny, commanding, and fully in possession of a palpable personality and sexuality. I've never quite known if I feel West is talented, but I always *feel* West, for watching her is somehow consuming. Sextette comes not from the stage-lit glamor of West's early career, but from the fog that is the very end of her career--an age of color, when the feather boas must compete for screen time with the emerging mullet, and when the nation was already struggling to digest Alice Cooper. Sextette doesn't attempt to hide from a subset of film culture that was, if not advancing, at least rapidly changing. Sextette is a bizarre hodge podge. It integrates many of the tropes of 30s musical (mixed identities in romantic farce, the delayed consummation of a favored marriage, the starlet--playing a character that is overtly a swift adaptation of her public persona to the screen) with the culture of the late seventies. The contrast can be jarring. West plays herself, the vaudevillian charmer, but about forty years too late. What was sex appeal at 35 is, around 85, how I imagine W.C. Fields would look hefting around in a wedding dress, commenting coyly on his eagerness to reach the honeymoon suite. To those who believe I'm overstating the matter, I submit this clip of West in her eighties singing "Babyface" to a table of foreign dignitaries, all of whom are younger than her by at least one decade, but more often by three.

Don't misunderstand -- it is really fun, and not solely in that fascinating train wreck kind of way. I loved Sextette as only Sextette can be loved. It's funny, West is hysterical (usually deliberately), it's full of great people, it's a watchable ego piece (the script was adapted from a play West wrote for herself to star in), and in the end it confirms everything I believe about what happens when people try to act really sexy. At any age.