Sextette

 

    If you don't enjoy Mae West, you might as well leave this website, because she was the ultimate Queen of Camp, at least in her later years.  This was a woman who basically saved Paramount Studios from complete bankruptcy and single-handedly brought feminism to its height of appreciation.  She didn't need a man, but constantly talked about them anyway.  "Men are like linoleum floors, lay 'em right and you can walk all over them for years'.  Her quotes are as funny as they are timeless, and she had a million of them, all of which she wrote herself!  "Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?"  Miss West definitely had her time in the spotlight, making hit after hit while in her heyday, but after a while, she'd basically had enough and lived quietly in the apartment building (that she purchased simply because the manager didn't care for her type of friends) called The Ravenwood.  She even bought the building across the street because she didn't like the color and after buying it, she had it repainted.  

     Anyway, after years of being in retirement, Mae West was drawn back out into the spotlight to star in the camp classic Myra Breckinridge.  A movie that even though it had Mae West, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett, and a young Tom Selleck starring in it, tanked worse than most of the movies ever made at that point (1970).  And even though it really isn't that great of a movie, it's still enjoyed for its trashy campiness and unbelievable storyline, not to mention the bad acting.  But most of all, we got to see what became of the powerhouse we all knew as the incomparable Mae West, who was the real star of the film even though she probably had the least screen time of all the actors in the entire movie.  

     Even after the disastrous Myra Breckinridge had completely tanked at the box office, it still reminded Mae West that she was a star and had reignited her desire to be seen in films again, even though she was over 80 years old at that point.  So she dug out an old play that she had written almost 20 years prior, that people had told her could never be filmed due to its sexual overtones, but it was now the late 1970s, and scripts like the ones Mae wrote were no longer seen as jailable offenses.  Mae was always ahead of her time.  I mean, this was a woman who wrote a play all about gay men, simply titled "Sex"...back in the 1920s!

       So Mae West dug out an old script, revamped it, and hired literally EVERYBODY to star in it, and I do mean EVERYBODY.  Timothy Dalton, Dom Deluise, Tony Curtis, Ringo Starr, Regis Philbin, George Hamilton, and Alice Cooper, just to name a few!  And these were just the people who accepted a role in the film, dozens of other actors were offered roles and (wisely) turned them down.  And even though it still had (almost) every star that was somewhat popular at the time, it STILL tanked at the box office, shockingly worse than Myra Breckinridge did, which people didn't think was cinematically possible.  Proving that no matter how many wonderful actors you insert into a film it can still be a piece of crap.

      Even though the plot is paper thin, and the acting is horrendous, I still loved it.  Just to see how good Mae West still looked at 84 years old.  Speaking of the plot, it was obviously geared to function as a showcase of stars instead of an actual movie.  The entire story revolves around a woman named Marlo Manners (Mae West) who has recently married Sir Michael Barrington (Timothy Dalton) and no one even bats an eyelash despite the 60-year age difference between them.  It just so happens that there is an international conference happening at the very hotel where Marlo and her new husband (#6) are now spending their honeymoon.  Husbands 1-5 are all there and one of them, a Russian delegate I think, decides that he wants one last fling with his old flame Marlo.  Meanwhile, her current husband spends the entire movie in an interview trying desperately to prove he's not gay ("Where's my husband?  He's downstairs trying to save his reputation.  Oh, well he should be up here with me trying to ruin it")

     Madness erupts when it's discovered that Marlo has made a cassette recording of all her scandalous affairs, that her manager is trying to destroy but it keeps slipping through his fingers and makes its way all around the hotel in various sorts of mishaps.  This little pink tape ends up everywhere from being stuck in a muscleman's pecs to one of the building's gargoyles.  Not such a long story made even shorter, he gets it back, and the world (and Marlo's reputation) is saved.  Not that she really cares.  She's too busy trying on new outfits in her hotel room the entire time.

     Most assuredly a movie that has more trivia than it does storyline.  Mae West was basically blind, deaf, and senile when the movie was made and apparently needed an earpiece hidden in her wig to help her remember her lines.  Sandbags were placed on the floor so that she would know when she'd hit her mark since she couldn't see two inches in front of her due to having severe cataracts.  Such a terrible movie, but it does fall into that wonderful category of "so bad that it's good".  And even though it got awful reviews, hardly made a dime, and was a temporary demise for many up-and-coming actors, there isn't one person who says that they had less than a marvelous time making it, proving that even when she was already half dead, Mae West could still be the life of the party.