Mae West: Free Space Grabber

MAE WEST is back onscreen. This assessment of her Blu-ray line-up is by Stephen Schaefer. This is Part 6 of 12 segments.
• • Mighty, Mighty Mae • •
• • Celebrate Mae West! • •  
• • Mae West: This film was peak Mae West • •
• • Stephen Schaefer wrote: ‘I’m No Angel,’ also 1933, rates as peak Mae West.  The restoration’s visual detail is astounding and here is Cary Grant again in a carnival setting with West, not surprisingly, a lion tamer.  
• • Stephen Schaefer wrote: Written by Mae West, directed by Wesley Ruggles, ‘I’m No Angel’ launched West as the nation’s cultural question. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera – they all spoke about, commented on and drew West. 

• • Note: Frida Kahlo [6 July 1907 — 13 July 1954] was a Mexican painter, who has achieved great international popularity.
• • Stephen Schaefer wrote: Variety, the showbiz trade Bible, announced, ‘Mae West’s films have made her the biggest conversation-provoker, free-space grabber, and all-around box office bet in the country. She’s as hot an issue as Hitler.’
• • Mae West: Would Hollywood clean up their “filth”? • • ...  
• • To be continued on the next post.
• • Source: Boston Herald; published on Tuesday, 11 May 2021.
• • On Saturday, 12 August 1961 • •
• • "Come On Up" was having a revival in 1961. The copyrighted version bears the credit line "based on a story idea by Charlotte Francis" but Mae had tinkered with the text and brought in a handsome old friend Jack LaRue to play the heroine's former gangster husband. "A Wagnerian heroine," the Chicago Daily News called her in their review on 12 August 1961, "emerging out of a mountain of marshmallow."
• • After touring the Midwest, "Come On Up" was staged in the month of August in Florida at Miami's Cocoanut Grove Playhouse (air-conditioned, we hope).  "The entrance alone called forth sustained applause for at least two minutes," wrote an astonished critic for the Miami News on 12 August 1961.
• • Overheard in Hollywood • •
• • Bosomy actress Mae West and fan dancer Sally Rand have been invited to play Lady Godiva in Dubbo's Jubilee Week procession in October.
• • In Her Own Words • •
• • Mae West said:  "I don't mind telling you that I am as fed up on this pseudo-frigidity in women as a lot of men are.  It all started a few hundred years ago with some religious fanatics who decided because the religious leaders had been supernaturally conceived, it naturally followed that any expression of sex through the human body must be sinful.  Bosh!"
• • Quote, Unquote • •
• • An article about a crime wave in Hollywood mentioned Mae West.
• • Hollywood's Gangsters Did This:
• • Held up Zeppo Marx for thirty-eight thousand dollars.
• • Forced Mae West to part with about $16,000 worth of jewelry.
• • Robbed Helene Costello's home of about $30,000. ...
• • Source: Modern Screen; dated for April 1933
• • The evolution of 2 Mae West plays that keep her memory alive • •
• • A discussion with Mae West playwright LindaAnn LoSchiavo — —
• • http://lideamagazine.com/renaissance-woman-new-york-city-interview-lindaann-loschiavo/
• • The Mae West Blog celebrates its 17th anniversary • • 
• • Thank you for reading, sending questions, and posting comments during these past seventeen years. Not long ago, we entertained 3,497 visitors. And we reached a milestone recently when we completed 4,700 blog posts. Wow! 
• • By the Numbers • •
• • The Mae West Blog was started fifteen years ago in July 2004. You are reading the 4,798th blog post. Unlike many blogs, which draw upon reprinted content from a newspaper or a magazine and/ or summaries, links, or photos, the mainstay of this blog is its fresh material focused on the life and career of Mae West, herself an American original.

• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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• • Photo: • • Mae West • • Frida Kahlo's artwork • •
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Mae West: Mexicana

Most people have not seen MAE WEST featured in a Frida Kahlo painting.
• • Reportedly Diego Rivera’s favorite American actress, the Brooklyn bombshell appears in a cameo on the left side of the work titled "My Dress Hangs There." Created with oil and collage on masonite [460 x 500 mm], it is owned by a private collector and, therefore, it rarely tours.
• • Frida Kahlo — — who was born and died during the month of July — — [6 July 1907 — 13 July 1954] was a Mexican painter, who has achieved great international popularity.
• • The painter Diego Rivera [8 December 1886 — 24 November 1957] was her husband.
• • Critic Janice Helland wrote an essay about Frida Kahlo's paintings that were inspired by her American sojourn. According to Janice Helland, in "My Dress Hangs There" [1933], Kahlo scourges the United States with representations of the accoutrements of a bourgeois life-style (a toilet, a telephone, and a sports trophy) and indicts its hypocrisy by wrapping a dollar sign around the cross of a church. Her appropriated photographs of Depression-era unemployment, which constitute the lower part of the picture, juxtapose "reality" with the "made-up" painting and thereby highlight the vulgar display of American wealth and well-being as opposed to the poverty and suffering of the lower classes. In the midst of this Kahlo places a pristine image: the Tehuana dress. . . .
• • Let's accept the fact that Helland is well informed about art interpretation and Kahlo iconography. However, she and the others who insist on dating this artwork to 1933 are quite obviously not Mae-mavens.
• • One look at the millinery indicates that Mae West wore that costume in "Klondike Annie," a motion picture not released in the United States until 21 February 1936.
• • So tell us again: in what year did Frida Kahlo channel "Klondike Annie" for her collage filled with her sarcastic humor? It was NOT in 1933.
• • Come up and see Mae every day online: http://MaeWest.blogspot.com/
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Mae West
• • Photo: • • Mae West • • Frida Kahlo painting • •
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Mae West.