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If there is a compendium about motion picture comedy, then it must include the great comedienne MAE WEST — — and this new title discusses her unique contribution with well-shaped language.
• • A critique of ANOTHER FINE MESS: A History of American Film Comedy by Saul Austerlitz [Chicago Review, 512 pages] was spotted in The Boston Globe. A portion appears below.
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• • Reviewer James Sullivan writes: Film comedy, Woody Allen once claimed, is harder to produce than drama. Still, the perpetually unsatisfied director was convinced that comedy is “less valuable than serious stuff.’’
• • In “Another Fine Mess,’’ a survey of the most significant artists — — yes, artists — — to make us laugh at the movies, from Charlie Chaplin to Will Ferrell, writer and critic Saul Austerlitz takes rigorous exception to Allen’s line of thinking. Addressing sexual, racial, economic, or political tensions, comedy has always helped its audience sort through the vagaries of the way we live now. Slapstick, screwball or spoof, comedy serves a function.
• • “We turn to drama to experience a heightened version of the world as we know it — — life, puffed up,’’ writes the author. “Comedy releases all that hot air; our laughter is a bemused acknowledgment of our own collective foibles and inadequacies.’’
• • Perilously, Austerlitz set for himself the task of identifying the 30 most representative comic figures in Hollywood history. Many are obvious — — Mae West, Charlie Chaplin, Woody Allen, the Marx Brothers, Peter Sellers. Others, such as Dustin Hoffman, a dramatic actor who has done lots of comedies, or Judd Apatow, the director of a recent spate of ribald, dude-centric cash cows, might need a little splainin’.
• • But the writer, who contributes occasionally to the Boston Globe, and whose first book was a history of the music video, makes his case as deftly as Groucho lanced metaphorical balloons. W.C. Fields, the master of the withering aside, was in his early silent-film appearances “a juggler performing with one hand tied behind his back,’’ the critic observes. And if Preston Sturges, director of the classic comic testimonial “Sullivan’s Travels,’’ gave frequent leading man Joel McCrea the power to bend “the world to his will,’’ McCrea’s successor, the “pint-sized neurotic’’ Eddie Bracken, “could hardly convince his own extremities to comply.’’
• • Austerlitz notes that his biographical chapters are intended to create a conversation among comedy’s most influential practitioners. Arranged in rough chronological order, the effect is cumulative. Mae West’s brazen sexuality primps the pillow for Marilyn Monroe’s bombshell self-awareness; unlikely bedfellows Jerry Lewis and Richard Pryor somehow manage to conceive Eddie Murphy. ...
• • ... The author would not be the first to linger over the genius of Chaplin’s beloved Tramp, or the directors Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, or Cary Grant’s canny subversion of his own good looks. “If Mount Rushmore were dedicated to comedians instead of statesmen,’’ he suggests, “Grant would have found himself climbing across his own face in ‘North By Northwest.’ ’’ ...
— — Excerpt: — —
• • Book Review: "Great film comics help us live with ourselves"
• • By: James Sullivan
• • Published in: The Boston Globe — — boston.com
• • Published on: 14 September 2010
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• • Tell the bookseller you heard about it on the MAE WEST BLOG.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
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Mae West.
MAE WEST, Colette noted in a 1938 publication, had the confidence to create an unapologetic majority-of-one presence on the silver screen — — as self-sufficient and durable as a diamond solitaire. "She alone, out of an enormous and dull catalogue of heroines, does not get married at the end of the film, does not die, does not take the road to exile, does not gaze sadly at her declining youth in a silver-framed mirror …. She alone has no parents, no children, no husband," wrote Colette. "This impudent woman is, in her style, as solitary as Chaplin used to be."
• • Can you imagine the buxom Brooklynite translated into the character of one of the 1890s Parisian prostitutes who people "Gigi," an arch novella written in 1944 by Colette [28 January 1873 — 3 August 1954]? Ooooh-la-la!
• • Defanged by the American musical comedy team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who laundered and starched all the sex and naughtiness out of the original, "Gigi" became a romantic tale of mismatched parts and was chastely adapted for the screen in 1958, starring a very ladylike French native Leslie Caron [born 1 July 1931] as the ingenue tutored by the scarlet women in her family. The motion picture version premiered at the Royale Theatre — — the Broadway house where "Diamond Lil" debuted in 1928 — — in Manhattan on 15 May 1958.
• • Still active and sought after, the 78-year-old Academy-Award-nominee will soon portray Madame Armfeldt in a Paris revival of Stephen Sondheim’s "A Little Night Music," a musical about shady ladies that leaves the sex and sass intact. Moreover, Leslie Caron's memoir "Thank Heaven" will be published by Viking around Christmas.
• • Mae West and Leslie Caron • •
• • In The Examiner, Alan Petrucelli has put together a most intriguing profile that includes this morsel about Leslie Caron and Mae West.
• • Pittsburgh Stage and Screen Examiner Alan Petrucelli writes: And this story, which we’ll call The Women, Part Deux, is a hoot! One day director George Cukor “begged” Caron to make up a lunch quartet with — — are you ready? — — Mae West, Greta Garbo, and Barbra Streisand. Caron coos: “An absolutely historical luncheon, I know, but I would have felt very uncomfortable in front of these great dames. You know what happened? Streisand says, ‘Gee, Miss West, I do so admire your work,’ and West replies, ‘Sure honey, I can tell by the way you been stealin’ it…’” [from "Leslie Caron? Oui! Make no reservations about it, just thank heaven for this little/ big girl" printed on 7 September 2009; by Pittsburgh Stage and Screen Examiner Alan Petrucelli; published in: The Examiner — — www.examiner.com].
• • Hmmmm. Though that nostalgic nugget goes together like misfitted pipes amid nougat, and the imagined comeback by Mae West to Brooklyn's Barbra twangs like a nail mis-struck, it is nice to see the Empress of Sex fondly recalled by an awestruck foreign thespian who did not have lunch with her after all (and who did not do her own singing on screen either). We do hope her memoir is a real page-turner quite unlike the clutch of mud most of these celeb tell-alls have been.• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
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Mae West.
In June 1914 Willie Hammerstein died — — and, oh, what an angel he had been to MAE WEST. 
In 1912 and 1913, Hammerstein booked the teenager for eleven week-long engagements at his vaudeville attraction situated in Longacre [later Times] Square. The location was popularly known by New Yorkers as "the corner."
• • In 1899, Oscar Hammerstein built his fifth showplace — the Victoria Theatre — at the corner of West 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue. Stars like MAE WEST, Will Rogers, W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Buster Keaton, Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit, and Eva Tanguay were among the thousands of performers who made Hammerstein's Victoria the vaudeville "nut house" of Times Square.
• • Mainly, it was Oscar's son Willie Hammerstein who deserves credit for the playhouse's 17-year successful run. Willie had the knack for booking crowd-pleasing stagebills along with a peacock's genius for public relations.
• • In 1900, Oscar Hammerstein built his sixth theatre — the Republic Theatre — next door to his Victoria Theatre on West 42nd Street and leased it to the immensely successful producer, David Belasco. Retaining roof rights of both buildings, Oscar opened Hammerstein's Roof Garden above both theatres. Mae West often played at "the Roof" as well.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West venue • • Hammerstein's Victoria • •
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Mae West.
