She Done Him Wrong
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She Done Him Wrong
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1996.
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She Done Him Wrong is a 1933 pre-Code American crime/comedy film starring Mae West and Cary Grant, directed by Lowell Sherman. The plot includes melodramatic and musical elements, with a supporting cast featuring Owen Moore, Gilbert Roland, Noah Beery Sr., Rochelle Hudson, and Louise Beavers. The film was adapted from the successful 1928 Broadway play Diamond Lil by Mae West. The film is famous for West's many double entendres and quips, including her best-known "Why don't you come up sometime and see me?". She Done Him Wrong was a box-office success and the film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Why It Didn't Do Him Wrong
- Mae West was a beloved, yet controversial controversial Broadway star as a lot of her plays contained questionable material for the time period. Not to mention her hip-swinging walk and her unique nasal delivery of double-entendre jokes, even if she did garner a lot of fans. Most of her Broadway shows were victims of censorship. One of West's shows in particular, "Diamond Lil", had achieved such infamy that Will H. Hays, enforcer of the Production Code Administration, had already insisted that a film of it could never be approved. In response, Paramount simply changed the title, turned Mae’s character into "Lady Lou" and added some new material by screenwriters Harvey F. Thew and John Bright, without referencing the source play.
- Some of the more blatant lines were replaced with new ones which got their effect through implication, insinuation and innuendo, which Mae actually found funnier. Examples: "When women go wrong, men go right after them." "I wasn’t always rich; there was a time I didn’t know where my next husband was coming from."
- The film's set in the 1890s; and while Miss West would have but a faint memory of the later years of that decade, a lot of the crew members, several audience members remembered it well. An introductory title describes it as "A lusty, brawling florid decade when there were handlebars on lip and wheel." While some scenes paint a rosy, nostalgic picture of the time (the singing waiters in the saloon, the free lunch and especially the nickel beer would have elicited a few sighs in an audience still stifled by Prohibition), others depict the '90s as a grim and gritty time, marked by political corruption, white slavery (forced prostitution), counterfeiting and other vices not nearly as enjoyable as those Mae promotes.
- The film's an excellent showcase for West, who preens, sashays, and wobbles serenely throughout the film. By setting the story in a previous generation, West was able to not only parody the melodramas of an earlier time, but get away with more innuendo than a contemporary story could. What's surprising is how affectionately West treats the plots and music she grew up with. Snippets of “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” “After the Ball,” and other turn-of-the-century chestnuts can be heard on the soundtrack, and the only real plot, as opposed to shtick, involves protecting a young woman's honor. When a saloon audience bursts into applause after a florid version of “Silver Threads Among the Gold,” it's unclear of West's target is the people enjoying the song within the film, or the audience watching the film for laughing at them?
- Once she arrives, about ten minutes into the film, West rarely relinquishes the screen. Her lines appear like clockwork: “When women go wrong, men go right after them.” “It takes two to get one in trouble.” West often implied that she discovered Cary Grant, although by the time he was cast in She Done Him Wrong, the British-born actor had already appeared in more than a half-dozen films. Still, this was a breakthrough performance for him, if only as the recipient of West’s most famous come-on: “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?” It's also heavily implied that this film played a role in a stronger Production Code, which was implemented in 1934.
- West saves her songs for the end, rolling her eyes for “A Guy What Takes His Time” (without even lip-synching it) and dragging “Frankie and Johnnie” --a well-known number that served as a sort of theme for Jimmie Rodgers-- out of her past.
Bad Qualities
- The film's clearly an artifact of the 1930s, being a ramshackle affair confined to a half-dozen sets, and featuring the same Paramount character actors who wound up in comedies with W.C. Fields and George Burns and Gracie Allen.