Wesley Ruggles (1933)
The opening sequence has a barker for a circus doing a big introduction for a singer-dancer called Tira. The NFT3 audience isn’t going crazy for the star of I’m No Angel to make her entrance in quite the same way as the hordes of men yelling for Tira (they include all social classes and some great mugs) but the excited anticipation is basically the same. And Mae West, from the moment she appears, puts on a wonderful show. A show is what I’m No Angel is – as a comedy story it has its longueurs – but Mae West makes such a criticism irrelevant not just through her power as an entertainer but because of her amazing ability to look and sound avid and tired at the same time. Even at the start, when Tira is singing and dancing to the circus crowd (she then becomes the show’s main attraction by putting her head in a lion’s mouth), her shimmying and come-ons are perfunctory. You yawn during the dull bits – Tira, the lion-tamer who drives men wild, gets involved with New York socialites and sues one of them for breach of promise – but it feels all right to be intermittently bored because ennui, in eternal combination with lust, is a necessary part of Mae West. She has more opportunities in I’m No Angel than in My Little Chickadee to express fatigued desire (she gets the sole story and screenplay credit here – although Lowell Brentano is credited with ‘suggestions’). You hear this quality especially in the throaty little moan she gives before saying ‘You fascinate me’ to one of her suitors.
To object that Mae West’s performing style is samey would also be to miss the point. She’s very intentionally samey: you see her getting herself into position to walk the bawdy walk that can call to mind an indolent tank. West was forty when she made this film and she looks it – her seen-it-all overripeness is of course essential to her persona, as are the unvarying tone and tempo of her readings. It may be the fact that she delivers all her lines in the same way that throws the words into relief and makes you appreciate them more. The technique works especially well here in Tira’s repeated instructions to her black maid, culminating in the famous ‘Beulah … peel me a grape’. Mae West always seems to hold back the punchline – her slow delivery, and the way she conveys quick-wittedness by drawling, are part of the magic. (Talking about the film afterwards, you quote the lines and try to do it in her voice – and you always feel the line has come out of your mouth too quickly.)
Mae West seems to be having more fun here than in My Little Chickadee. As Sally said, you sensed a running competition there between West and W C Fields, which the star has no need to worry about in I’m No Angel. She looks to be enjoying herself particularly – occasionally just about corpsing – in the banter with Beulah (Gertrude Howard) and her other attendants (Libby Taylor and an uncredited Hattie McDaniel as a manicurist). She also revels in her scenes with a young Cary Grant, as Jack Clayton, the fiancé whom Tira sues. On the evidence of this film Grant, even at this early stage of his screen career, had a charming lack of vanity, combining the matinee idol looks with a willingness to appear foolish (and terrific wit). In the comic climax to the film – the breach of promise court hearing, where Tira ends up cross-examining a succession of ex-lovers called as witnesses for the defence – Clayton can’t stop smiling at her singular forensic technique. You can tell it’s the actor as much as the character who’s having a good time.
All the supporting cast – Edward Arnold, William B Davidson, Nigel De Brulier, Ralph Harolde, Russell Hopton, Gertrude Michael, Gregory Ratoff, Kent Taylor, Walter Walker – are good. The songs are considerably better than in My Little Chickadee – particularly ‘No One Loves Me Like a Dallas Man’. (We notice, as she puts the record on, that Tira’s collection also includes ‘No One Loves Me Like a Frisco Man’ and so on.) The director Wesley Ruggles sometimes seems as much a spectator as the rest of us but he just about keeps things going and I enjoyed the camera movement down a series of shelves on which Tira keeps miniature framed photographs of the many men in her life next to ornaments of the animals they remind her of, including a skunk.
5 March 2010
