SEXTETTE

US, 1978, 91 minutes, Colour.
Mae West, Walter Pidgeon, Timothy Dalton, Tony Curtis, Dom de Luise, George Raft, Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, George Hamilton, Alice Cooper, Regis Philbin.
Directed by Ken Hughes.

A very odd film. It has to be seen to be believed. Mae West made a great impact in the thirties and forties for her humour, sexual innuendo. She also made an impact on male audiences in the thirties and forties with her sex appeal and her emphasis on sexuality - and the life-saver jacket of World War II!

She made an unwise comeback in the film version of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckenridge. She played the agent Letitia van Allen who was meant to be 45; Mae West was 80. She was heavily made up and had glamorous clothes and blonde wig. Instead of looking made up, she looked rather embalmed. She went through her bumps and grinds and innuendo in the way she did forty years earlier. Seeing her acting in this way at her age was in many ways embarrassing.

It is a surprise, therefore, to watch her in her mid-eighties, trying to do the same kind of thing in Sextette. The screenplay is based on one of her early plays - a corny plot of a famous actress marrying an English lord and becoming involved in international affairs, her being able to have a hold over the diplomats because of her sexual relationships (with the connivance of the American government)! Her husband, who seems a fool, is in fact an English agent. The director. Ken Hughes, who has made such films an Of Human Bondage and Arrivederci Baby and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, does his beet, with tongue in cheek, with the material and the cast.

Mae West is her old self with the same gestures but at times she seems hardly able to walk and shuffles along. While she is often very funny, she also seems in many ways pathetic. She apes her past and this is regrettable.

Some brave men appear with Mae West and allow themselves to be somewhat overshadowed - although they actually play their roles rather well. Timothy Dalton is all seriousness as Lord Barrington seemingly innocent, very British, the butt of a lot of jokes about homosexuality and trying his best to sing and be romantic with West. As her previous husbands, Tony Curtis has a chance to do a skit on a Russian diplomat, Ringo Starr be a European film director, George Hamilton pretends to be a godfather type (with themes from the Godfather).

The film, however, is very much carried by Dom de Luise as Mae West's agent. He has some funny lines, even stops to do a satiric song, and keeps the pace moving. Various people like Keith Moon and Alice Cooper have turns and in the supporting cast we find George Raft doing a walk on scene and Walter Pidgeon, looking at Mae West in laughing disbelief at times, as the chairman of the international meeting. Media personalities like Rona Barrett also appear in the film. Mae West's one-liners, even with their broad unsubtlety, are often very funny. However, the cast sometimes breaks into song, there are dancing scenes so artificial that they are vivid reminders of the styles of the thirties and the whole enterprise looks 30s creaky. The tongue-in-check attitude means that the film gets away with a lot of its creakiness. Certainly a curiosity item.