GWas there once a time when women put on a hat to go out on the balcony? A hat the size of a wagon wheel, preferably with fringes or an ostrich feather on the side? Definitely in the cinema. Mae West, for example, would never step out onto a balcony without a hat, even if there was no one below staring at her. Except for those quiet moments on the balcony, everyone stared at Mae West. That’s what it was about. That everyone was amazed when she appeared, staring open-mouthed, shifting in their chairs and clapping enthusiastically. Most of all, they looked at this woman who might just have disguised herself as a woman, infatuated, seduced, and fainting in her presence. Mae West was a force of nature, a force of nature of sex.
That’s how cinema went in the early 1930s through the 1940s, World War II and just beyond. And so it stayed in a way. Because Mae West became a role model not only for drag queens all over the world, but also for pop stars like Madonna. Her mark on popular culture runs deep. It’s all the nicer to be able to marvel at her in the original again, like now in the Berlinale Retrospective, which doesn’t include the whole time and therefore not the years of her ending career, but only those of the wedding.
Rainer Rother and his team placed Mae West alongside two other actresses of the time (with nine films each made between 1932 and 1943), Rosalind Russell and Carole Lombard, under the motto: “No Angels”. There is also a catalog in the Edition Text + Kritik in which it is stated right at the beginning what is obvious: that the three have nothing in common apart from their gender, other than that they worked in the Hollywood studio system, and that shortly before and in the Years after the introduction of the Hays Code, industrial self-censorship, in 1934. That means: A comparison of technology, roles, partners is not the aim of the compilation. Rather perhaps a broadening of the view of the possibilities of such different roles and comedic formats at a time when there was only one really important point of reference for the woman in the stories that are told here, namely the man. In Mae West’s case: the men. A typical Mae West dialogue goes like this: “Have you never met a man who made you happy?” Often.”
Famous for speaking about sex
Mae West plopped onto the screen as a finished persona. In the silent era, she drove theaters and audiences crazy and producers happy, even when she was arrested for indecent behavior, which has happened repeatedly. Actresses have always sold sex on stage and in film. But Mae West, who didn’t conform to any standard of beauty, became famous for speaking out about sex. For her “Hmhm, I see what you mean”, her “Come up and see me some time”, sentences and murmurs that became a kind of jingle for her over time. There was nothing for the censors to do, but everyone knew what she meant. The same goes for her gait, that swaying and swaying of her hips that she wouldn’t stop when she stopped, which was particularly evident in the tight, floor-length skirts with barely showing seams. She moved from the neck down in a never-ending serpentine motion, folded her arms at her sides, rolled her eyes up and said, “I lost my reputation and never missed it.”
Because she had that voice that could coo and lure and flatter, and with which she could perform everything from intricate jazz to blues to operatic arias across the musical vegetable patch, Mae West needed talkie. She had to wait until she was almost forty. But when he came, she was there. Who their directors were didn’t matter much. What remained the same (almost always) was that she at least wrote her own dialogues. Sometimes the story and the script too, like in “I’m No Angel”. In doing so, she saved the Paramount studio, which was on the verge of bankruptcy in the early 1930s.
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