Annie du Klondike

Whenever a Mae West film was coming up for scrutiny with the Hays Office's Production Code Administration, the censors could be heard blocks away sharpening their pencils and scissors. Her February 1936 "Klondike Annie" was especially confounding when the PCA cut an early crucial scene of a murder which would explain the subsequent actions of West's character. In those early days of unmitigating censorship, however, nothing was more paramount in the eyes of the censors than protecting young viewers witnessing an unjustifiable killing.

Mae West and the censors have had an ongoing battle for years, beginning from her early days on the New York City stage in the 1920s. After her helicon early successes with a much relaxed film production code, the actress was testing the limits in "Klondike Annie" under head censor Joseph Breen. West's character is a kept woman who murders her boyfriend, Chan Lo, in a scene that hit the cutting room floor. Eight minutes in total were chunked out of West's latest effort, and the viewer remained in the dark as to why she's on a steamer headed for Nome, Alaska. Loosely adapted from her 1921 play, 'Frisco Kate,' "Klondike Annie" has been both praised as one of her best films, her magnum opus as film reviewers labeled it, while others saw the movie as an excuse to mix religion, hypocrisy and West's double entendres all into one motion picture. Newspaper publisher William Hearst, upset at Mae's off-handed unflattering remarks about his mistress, actress Marion Davies, was especially critical of the film, directing his editors, "That Mae West picture Klondike Annie is a filthy picture. We should have editorials roasting that picture, Mae West, and Paramount. DO NOT ACCEPT ANY ADVERTISING OF THIS PICTURE." In public Hearst lambasted the film, asking "Isn't it time Congress did something about the Mae West menace?"

Another source of outrage came from religious groups, who insisted censors ban the movie entirely. On the steamer, captained by Bull Brackett (Victor McLaglen), the boat takes on Sister Annie of The Salvation Army, who died en route to her mission in Nome. To get away from the law, West as The Frisco Doll applies make-up to the deceased Sister Annie to make her look like a hooker so she could take her place. Individual states, such as Georgia, as well as several communities, outright prohibited "Klondike Annie." Where the film was permitted to play, West was able to say lines such as "When caught between two evils, I generally like to take the one I never tried" that the Hays' censors allowed in the film.

West made a habit of reporting to the studio late every morning during the shoot, causing the director, Raoul Walsh, to tear his hair out. Ernst Lubitsch, Paramount Pictures' head of production, took West aside to inform her she must arrive on time. The order triggered Mae so much she took a nearby mirror and smacked Lubitsch with it. And she continued to come in late, holding the film crew and the other actors waiting.

Despite the cuts and drama behind the scenes, "Klondike Annie" remains one of Mae West's more popular films. Reviewer Karl Dahlke writes that even though the slices impair the movie, "What remains, however, is still a compelling story, with enough of West's trademark licentiousness, bravado, and coyly lacerating humor to please fans."

In the earlier days of Mae West's career, she made a huge name for herself on Broadway. Her shows were very popular...and were perhaps made MORE popular after she was arrested for lewdness for this act! Hollywood during the early 1930s jumped at the opportunity to bring West out west....because in this Pre-Code era, pretty much anything went in films...and West's bawdy humor was perfect. However, bowing to public pressure in mid-1934, a much tougher Production Code was put into effect--and banned all sorts of illicit content. In other words, the new Code pretty much eliminated most of West's appeal! And in her films from 1934 and later, her humor was essentially neutered...and this explains why she really never made that many films. The double entendres and risque plots simply were unfilmable in this Code era...and the few films she did make after this time were pretty dull by comparison.

In the case of "Klondike Annie", Mae cannot be the old Mae at all. She is still seen by men, inexplicably, as a sex symbol...but she's now a sex symbol without that sharp tongue that made her so funny. And, in the case of "Klondike Annie", the film was so neutered that it had little edge at all. Imagine....Mae playing a missionary, of sorts, in rough, tough gold rush era Alaska!

When the story begins, Rose (West) is a performer who is essentially being held prisoner by her evil boss. In desperation, she kills him and runs--hitching a ride on a ship heading to Alaska. But, because it was a Code film, you never see the killing (it was removed from the finished print) and this made the story a bit confusing.

After a missionary on the cargo boat dies on the way to her job in Alaska, Rose poses as Annie in order to avoid the police....and the captain helps her. After all, like most men in these films, he's smitten with her and the plan is for her to disappear from the mission sooner or later...though it ends up being much later than she anticipated.

While I was never a big fan of Mae West, I must admit that her post-Code pictures were mostly a sad lot. This one just seemed all wrong for her and her persona...especially when the stuff she's preaching as a missionary comes to actually change her into a good woman! It's just hard to imagine this sort of thing...and the film suffers from this and is simply too 'nice' for West.

By the way, late in the film, a Chinese man tosses an ax at Mae...and you can clearly see it's actually on a string!

The period of strict enforcement of the production code, beginning in 1934, was to Mae West what the end of prohibition was to bootleggers. West was a star whose self-penned stories made an art of promiscuity, and whose overt sex appeal made even the subtlest of innuendoes as see-through as a chiffon stocking. She is sometimes pinpointed as the main reason the code-enforcing Hayes Office was established, although it wasn't so much that her pictures were the most risqué out there (something like Baby Face is a far more flagrant flaunting of the code than I'm No Angel and She Done Him Wrong). It was the fact that she was also a box office sensation – and thus a much more potent influence – that made the Legion of Decency moralists take notice.

In this light, Klondike Annie seems to be not so much a watering down of pre-code Mae, but an apology and atonement for her past misdemeanours. While it begins with some of West's familiar man-hopping sass (albeit without so much of her sly wit), half-an-hour or so in the plot is suddenly hijacked by a Christian missionary, from whereon Mae is a reformed woman, as if in direct response to the proclamation of I'm No Angel. This was in a way self-censorship on her part, because as with her earlier pictures West wrote the screenplay, and despite her antics both on and off screen was truly a devout Christian. Luckily this means Ms West still appears in control and enough of her personality has survived intact, even when she's dressed in black and preaching a sermon. It's a testament to her credible acting skills that she manages to pull this off, making Rose Carlton's redemption and unconventional adoption of the moral crusader role a believable one, tweaking her ability to command attention and work a crowd into a slightly new direction.

West also has a very flattering and focused director in Raoul Walsh. Walsh makes his camera placement a slave to Mae, keeping her almost constantly foregrounded, staring hypnotically out at the audience. Take for example the scene where Victor McLaglen prepares breakfast for her, in which we see the table in a fairly standard sideways-on set-up. When Mae comes in Walsh switches to a sharply different angle, purely so that she can enter bearing down upon the camera. Walsh is also blunt in bringing out plot points, making for example Sister Annie's first address to Mae a close-up straight into the camera (a Walsh speciality), to let us know that this is a key moment in the story.

Another odd side-effect here is that without all the usual sexual politics and bed-hopping Klondike Annie actually has a far clearer and more substantial plot than the earliest Mae West pictures, even transitional ones like Belle of the Nineties, which took out the sex but left in the battle-of-the-sexes. But to what purpose this clarity? Klondike Annie may be technically one of the better Mae West pictures, but without her free-spiritedness and playful man-conquering exploits the very heart of the Mae West formula has gone. While the picture served to keep her in work for a few years, it has little of value for those of us in the audience. The production code had not only put a cramp West's style, it had wiped out her box-office appeal in the process.

Rose Carlton (Mae West) is known as the San Francisco Doll. She performs at Chan Lo's gambling house in San Francisco, but it's a gilded cage. She escapes to Alaska. Along the way, she befriends Sister Annie Alden. When Annie dies, Rose takes on Annie's identity to hide from her murder charge. Rose decides to continue Annie's goal of saving a failing mission.

Mae West continues to work around the code and maintain her persona. It is difficult. In this movie, she has a saintly streak. The stakes could be raised higher. The officer could start harder and heighten the intensity. There could be more assassination attempts. This has some Mae West humor, but it could have been a bigger thriller.

My only reason of watching this rather trifling Mae West vehicle is that the director is Raoul Walsh. I've never been a big Mae West fan, though I thoroughly liked "She Done Him Wrong" and "I'm No Angel." I had some hopes for "Klondike Annie," but it lamentably turned out one of her dullest efforts. Mae's suggestive one-liners are surprisingly exhausting; her characterization of "the Frisco Doll" is rather fake and unremarkable. Walsh's direction is curiously flat and there's very little of his trademark exuberance to wither the contrived silliness of Mae's script (adapted from her own play "The Frisco Kate").

I saw it back to back with another Mae West movie called "Every Day's a Holiday"(1937). Though Walsh is a vastly superior director than Edward Sutherland, I much prefer that one because it's breezier, funnier, and more enjoyable.

The only good or likable things in "Klondike Annie" are Mae's romantic liaison with the rugged Victor Mclaglen as the rough, grumbling captain of the ship, and the moment when Mae impersonates the Salvation Army missionary. The rest is forgettable