Last night I had the chance to rewatch Mae West’s She Done Him Wrong, her second movie and her first star vehicle after 1932’s Night After Night, where she was fourth-billed below George Raft, Constance Cummings, and Wynne Gibson, for those keeping score at home. I’m hardly the first to compare Mae West to Groucho Marx, of course, two of the best-known vaudeville-to-film success stories, but it struck me how much their comedy styles resemble one another – the constant wiggling (Groucho always looks as if he’s got an outboard motor powering his eyebrows and shoulders), the audible smirks, the rapid-fire double entendres delivered while the upper half of the torso whirls around the stationary bottom half like a jack-in-the-box, the absolute verbal and visual domination of every scene either was in. Substitute diamonds for cigars, or vice versa, and you could use them almost interchangeably in one another’s movies, like Lego pieces. That might be a shade too strong a claim — I’m not so familiar with vaudevillians that I’m prepared to argue that Marx and West were more alike than any other two actors who came up on the comedy-hall circuit — but I’m interested in the shared aspects of their respective relationships to magnetism. (Not for nothing did both West and Marx become magnets for misattributed quotes in later life!)
Mae West and Poochie
Mae West and Poochie
Mae West and Poochie
Last night I had the chance to rewatch Mae West’s She Done Him Wrong, her second movie and her first star vehicle after 1932’s Night After Night, where she was fourth-billed below George Raft, Constance Cummings, and Wynne Gibson, for those keeping score at home. I’m hardly the first to compare Mae West to Groucho Marx, of course, two of the best-known vaudeville-to-film success stories, but it struck me how much their comedy styles resemble one another – the constant wiggling (Groucho always looks as if he’s got an outboard motor powering his eyebrows and shoulders), the audible smirks, the rapid-fire double entendres delivered while the upper half of the torso whirls around the stationary bottom half like a jack-in-the-box, the absolute verbal and visual domination of every scene either was in. Substitute diamonds for cigars, or vice versa, and you could use them almost interchangeably in one another’s movies, like Lego pieces. That might be a shade too strong a claim — I’m not so familiar with vaudevillians that I’m prepared to argue that Marx and West were more alike than any other two actors who came up on the comedy-hall circuit — but I’m interested in the shared aspects of their respective relationships to magnetism. (Not for nothing did both West and Marx become magnets for misattributed quotes in later life!)