GOIN' TO TOWN (1935)

In an Old West town in the present day (that is, the 1930s), Cleo is a popular singer at a saloon (labeled a dance pavilion). When rich but feared Buck Gonzales, a notorious cattle rustler, rides into town, he wants to know when Cleo will finally give in and marry him. She loses to him in dice and agrees to marry him if he agrees to sign over his money and property to her. He does, but before they can marry, he's killed during a rustling expedition, so she gets his considerable property including a ranch and oil wells. As she takes over the daily operation of his various businesses, she falls for British engineer Edward Carrington, getting his attention by shooting his hat off his head. He's interested, but when he finds out that she has a bet on whether or not she can snare him, he rejects her and leaves for business in Buenos Aires. Cleo follows him with her horse Cactus, determined to win a horse racing prize, become a high society dame, and win Carrington over. It's a bumpy road, but she eventually gets everything she wants.

Most Mae West movies are very mannered affairs, star vehicles built on rickety stories and featuring weak characterization. Most W.C. Fields and Marx Brothers movies are like this as well—supporting players in these movies never really had a chance of making an impact because the spotlight was always on the star (Cary Grant in SHE DONE HIM WRONG being the exception). Before the creation of the Production Code in 1934, West was popular for her (somewhat exaggerated) sexiness and her naughty double-entendres, but by the time of this movie, she had to tone everything down to get her movies released. Fields and the Marxes managed to sustain their popularity—their narratives were just as weak as West's but their humor wasn't tied so much to sex as to anarchic wackiness—but West didn't. However, she can still elicit laughter with her dry readings. When an admirer says, "I didn't get your name," West replies, "It's not your fault; you tried hard enough." When a man tells her he is the "backbone of his family," she responds, "Your family ought to see a chiropractor." (My favorite line, to a Russian man, "Cigarette me, Cossack!") What she can't do is write a strong plot (like Fields, she wrote most of her movies) or play a three-dimensional character. The other characters are equally weak. Stodgy Paul Cavanagh can do nothing to make Carrington come to life, and he and West have no chemistry—she certainly never acts like she's really in love with him—and no one else gets much screen time. There are two Native American characters and one is fairly important to the plot, but neither has much dialogue. It's fairly short and not hard to watch, and the finale, which involves West singing an aria, which she does well, is OK, but overall disappointing. [Criterion Channel]