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It's doubtful that MAE WEST would have had much to discuss with Ethel Barrymore. But she kept tabs on her career.
• • When Mae brought "Diamond Lil" to California, she was interviewed by Edgar Waite of the San Francisco Examiner. She spoke of the box-office uplift that followed her out West during the cash-crunched winter of 1929.
• • Mae West assured Waite: "Last Monday at the Curran, we took in $300 more than Ethel Barrymore on her opening night last summer. . . ."
• • The year before, critic Robert Garland compared the Brooklyn bombshell and the stately dramatic actress.
• • "You'd have thought that a favorite bootlegger had come back from Atlanta," wrote drama critic Robert Garland in the New York Evening Telegram [5 April 1928]. "Mae West makes Miss Ethel Barrymore look like the late lamented Bert Savoy."
• • Born on 15 August 1879, Ethel Barrymore died during the month of June — — on 18 June 1959. Praised for her work on the stage, Ethel was an Academy Award-winning screen actress and a member of the famous Barrymore family.• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
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Only one of MAE WEST's motion pictures received an Academy Award nod. Alas, a wink is not a win. The Brooklyn bombshell's big box-office for "She Done Him Wrong" left no impression on the gold-plated statuette's baby-sitters. And so, anticipating the season of Oscar, New York Times writer Dave Kehr offers his analysis about the tug-of-war between wowing the audience versus winning the laurels.
• • According to Dave Kehr: One of the enduring traditions of the Academy Awards is that the Oscar for best picture almost invariably goes to a film that isn’t. This will not be news to anyone who has sat through some genuine groaners from Oscars past: pictures like Frank Lloyd’s 1933 “Cavalcade,” Robert Z. Leonard’s 1936 “Great Ziegfeld” and Cecil B. DeMille’s 1952 “Greatest Show on Earth.”
• • But even when good movies win, the other nominees are usually of equal or even greater interest. Most famously there was the banner year of 1941, for which John Ford’s magnificent “How Green Was My Valley” was named what the academy then termed “outstanding motion picture” (a more modest, defensible claim and perhaps one the academy should revive) while Orson Welles’s game-changing “Citizen Kane” went home with only the original screenplay award.
• • If the Oscars aren’t a reliable guide to artistic accomplishment, they provide an infallible index to how the leaders of the motion picture industry want their business to be seen in any given year. In 1933, for example, pressure was mounting from civic and religious groups for Hollywood to clean up its act — — pressure that would result in the renewed enforcement of the Production Code in 1934.
• • By selecting “Cavalcade” — — a numbing historical pageant, derived from a Noël Coward play, about a wealthy couple (Diana Wynyard and Clive Brook) stiff-upper-lipping their way through 40 years of English history — — the members of the academy distanced themselves from the racy entertainments that then dominated the box office.
• • Hollywood's 1932 — 1933 Season of O
• • Among the other nominees of the 1932 — 1933 season: the flesh-baring, garter-snapping backstage musical “42nd Street”; Mae West’s “She Done Him Wrong” — — the film in which she sings the innuendo-laden ballad “Where Has My Easy Rider Gone?” [sic]; and Frank Borzage’s adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s “Farewell to Arms,” a film so forthright in its depiction of premarital sex that 12 minutes had to be cut when it was reissued into the more prudish, post-Code world of 1938. . . .
• • For most of the ’30s the academy whipsawed between popular entertainments (“It Happened One Night,” 1934) and prestigious literary adaptations (“Mutiny on the Bounty,” 1935) meant to assure would-be censors that Hollywood was a dignified, pipe-smoking kind of place, tirelessly working for the moral improvement of American audiences. . . .
— — Excerpt: — —
• • Article: "Big, Important Picture? Sure. But Is It Best?"
• • Byline: DAVE KEHR
• • Published in: The New York Times
• • Published on: 31 December 2008• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Media analyst and college instructor Lawrence Jeziak has been focused on MAE WEST as he explores the feminine influence in films.
• • Professor Jeziak, who tours The Great Lakes State facilitating film-related conversations, teaches cinema studies at Oakland Community College in Michigan. His hour-long presentation for general audiences showcases iconic actresses like Mae West and Barbara Stanwyck, whose pre-Production Code work is still considered scandalous, he claims.
• • According to Jeziak, his goal is to help screen scene-sters have more fun at the movie house. Said Jeziak, “For those who are serious about film, maybe my presentations will remind them of other films they’ve seen and enjoyed — — and for others, it might make them think a little deeper about the movies they watch.”
• • Lawrence Jeziak said the role of women in film has changed over the years along with the way culture has viewed the fair sex, from the earliest depictions of housewives, to the screen sirens and femme fatales of film noirs, to present depictions of strong businesswomen and female political leaders. When Hollywood was in its infancy, he noted, there were basically two roles for women in film: the housewife or the whore. [It seems he forgot about the paid housemaid.] “Now you have directors like Sofia Coppola, who is one of only three female directors to be nominated for an Academy Award.”
• • Maybe his discussion will touch on sex symbol Jayne Mansfield, born on 19 April 1933.
• • Mae West, whose vacuum-packed perceptions about her sultry hold on the bodybuilders who comprised "The Mae West Revue" were shattered when a blonde vixen slithered into the nightclub, never forgot the evening when Jayne Mansfield [1933 —1967] surprised her. Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay met when the actress noticed his impressive physique in Mae West's touring nightclub revue. When Mansfield's dinner partner asked her what she wanted, she replied, "I'll have a steak and the man on the left."
• • Presumably Jayne Mansfield got her steak along with her stake in Hargitay's happiness — — and perhaps she, too, rates a mention in Professor Jeziak's oral history of women in soft focus.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
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