Edward F Cline (1940)

An indolent spoof Western – it really needs more plot complication and activity for W C Fields and Mae West to confuse or subvert.   He is Cuthbert J Twillie, a snake oil salesman who becomes the sheriff (the sixth in as many months) of the small town of Greasewood.  She is the imposingly shady Miss Flower Belle Lee, who becomes, briefly, his wife.  Because the story, for which Fields and West shared the screenplay credit, is so underpowered, it was sometimes hard to stay awake.  Besides, the pair’s respective speech patterns may be unique but, heard together, their voices can sound almost genetically related – the combined effect is hypnotic, even lulling.  Scene after little scene fizzles out, although sometimes this makes it more strikingly weird in retrospect – like the sequence in which West opens the door of her boudoir to a goat and asks it to deputise for her in bed.  The goat obligingly falls asleep there and West leaves the room.  Fields comes into the bedroom from his bath and lies down next to the goat.  Its identity is revealed nearly immediately and the goat then just trots out.

Her weariness is part of what makes Mae West so funny.  When she rolls her eyes, she can hardly summon the energy to complete the movement.  As Flower Belle is shooting a line to her various male admirers, she sometimes looks as if she can’t believe what she’s saying but that if they’re daft enough to, what the hell …  Fields and West both wrote their own dialogue (according to the BFI note).  Of course the lines need to be heard in context but some of the standouts are, from him, ‘My, what symmetrical digits!’ and ‘You’re the epitome of erudition’ and her arithmetical definitions, when she finds herself teaching a class of (mature-looking) schoolboys:  ‘When a man’s got a hundred dollars and you leave him with two – that’s subtraction’.  I may be wrong but my sense was that Fields was more likely than West to feed a reasonably good line to a minor member of the cast:

Twillie [bartending]:  Do you remember the first time you kicked a woman?

Customer:  No, I don’t think I do recall the incident …

She, on the other hand, gives herself some prime punchlines:

Judge:  Are you trying to show contempt for this court?

Flower Belle:  No, I’m tryin’ to hide it.

Or:

Suitor [coming on to Flower Belle]:  Spring is the time of year for love!

Flower Belle:  What’s wrong with the rest of the year?

Joseph Calleia is the masked bandit who is West’s main man interest for as long as the plot requires.   Dick Foran is a local newspaper editor who also becomes a suitor later in the proceedings.   Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West from the previous year’s The Wizard of Oz) has plenty of shrill zest as the morally censorious Mrs Gideon.  The one number in the film, Flower Belle’s song ‘Willie of the Valley’, is remarkably hopeless.  Its prologue includes a gather-round-and-hear-about invitation and there turns out to be nothing to hear about.   But Mae West’s jadedness makes even this pretty funny.

26 January 2010