I'm No Angel

Among the movie monsters of the early thirties, Mae West ranks with Frankenstein and Dracula.  The character that the actress portrays is imperious, stoic, and grotesque:  she stylizes her sexuality until it is almost abstract, a kind of Kabuki theater.  Not exactly erotic, Mae West represents the allure of the ambiguous:  she seems to be a woman impersonating a man impersonating a woman who is, perhaps, man in drag; she is a white woman who acts as if she is Black -- Mae West ambles self-confidently up to the color line and, then, struts right across it:  her creamy flesh is so blindingly white that it becomes ebony.  In I'm No Angel (1933, Wesley Ruggles), West sashays across her alabaster boudoir leading a coterie of chuckling and cooingAfrican-American maids, singing like a fat Blues chanteuse in a whorehouse on the dark side of town.  Her gender is uncertain; her race a mystery:  biology and history has nothing to do with this -- she is an invented monstrosity, every bit as puzzling and alarming as Frankenstein' s creature.  I'm No Angel is designed and written by West -- she engineered its dialogue which is entirely double entendre, erotic aphorisms, and mewling innuendo.  The film's plot is meaningless -- West is a circus performer who is persuaded to work as a lion tamer.  (This gives her an opportunity to prance around in jodhpurs with a whip.)  She becomes famous, entertains a succession of men, each of them more presentable and solvent than the preceding boyfriend, and ends up, ridiculously mismatched, with a boyish and baffled-looking Cary Grant.  There is a trial scene in which West's character cross-examines ex-boyfriends, humiliating each of them with a well-placed zinger, to amble back to counsel table and shake hands after each such exercise with her ethnically stereotyped Polish-Jewish lawyer.  She purrs at the Judge and he purrs back at her.  The film might be characterized as amoral, but that suggests that morality and ethics has something to do with this spectacle.  (In an early scene, West and her jealous low-life paramour try to shake-down a john and end up, apparently, killing him -- West tells her thug boyfriend to deposit the corpse in the hall:  her nonchalance is breathtaking, too breathtaking for the censors, it seems, because  the chump comes back to life in the next scene.  The matter-of-fact presentation of what seems to be a murder is alarmingly nihilistic, suggesting disturbing depths to the story that, of course, don't exist at all -- it's just a plot contrivance and the last thing West wants is for the audience to engage in any thing like conscious thought.)  West was over 40 when the picture was made and her figure is best characterized as a bit flabby and matronly.  She is presented as a hootchie-cootch dancer at the outset but her efforts are limited to toying with a see-through veil that she vaguely lifts and, then, drops a couple times.  Her face is impassive, mask-like, the carved and mostly immobile countenance of a figure in ancient Japanese theater, Kabuki, as I have said, or a demon in a Noh play.  The film's editors can't match eye-lines because with only few exceptions the viewer can't tell where West is looking:  in her love scenes, she appraises the man with a downcast, side-long glance, bats her long eyelashes, and, then, opening her eyes, rolls them skyward as if expecting her orgasm to originate somewhere near the zenith above -- the upward roll of the eyes, which simulates some sort of masturbatory swooning, occurs without West moving her heavy head with its marmoreal mass of sculpted curls.  It's evident to me that John Wayne learned his famous swaggering, rolling walk from close observation of Mae West.  The actress moves slowly, deliberately, every step a theatrical gesture, rotating her shoulders broadly in one direction while she turns her hips in the opposite way -- she chugs her little plump arms up and down with her fists aggressively clenched.  The film is short and entertaining -- it was West's best picture or, at least, her best box-office and is a repository of classic nuggets:  "Beualah -- peel me a grape!"; someone says:  "Ain't love grand?" to which West pedantically replies:  "I've heard it highly praised"; "Are you mixed up in this?" an interlocutor inquires and West says "Like an olive in a martini"; "I just ain't no honky tonk sister no more," she says and "It's not the men in your life but the life in your men" and, of course, "when I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better."