She Done Him Wrong

Set mostly in a bawdy saloon/dance hall in NYC during the 1890s, this film is a showcase for the talents of Mae West. She plays Lady Lou, a self-confident, sassy singer with a quick wit, who entertains customers with songs that have a Blues theme and were popular in vaudeville.

In this role, buxom Mae West is at her best. She struts her stuff, she wears tons of diamonds, she smiles in a slightly mischievous way, she rolls her eyes, and she speaks in a voice that is more than a little nasal. Her costumes are glamorous and flamboyant. In short, she presents an on-screen image that is wonderfully ... unique.

The film's story is thin and largely irrelevant. It involves the people around Lady Lou, some of whom are schemers and cheats. Implicit sexual references in the dialogue, and the character of Lady Lou, led the "National Legion of Decency" to push down our throats the Production Code, a wretched policy device that censored cinematic content for some thirty years thereafter.

If I have a complaint with this film it is that the story is too serious. Mae West is placed in scenes that allow her merely to recite dialogue. She is less an actress than a singer and on-stage performer. I would have preferred a more lighthearted musical theme, to play up her musical talents.

And so for me, the best parts of this film are the musical numbers few though they may be. Mae West sings "Frankie And Johnny" and a couple of other songs. One of my favorite sequences occurs about midway through the film. In what appears to be an authentically designed music hall set, an Irish tenor with a big mustache sings "Silver Threads Among The Gold", a musical tearjerker popular with barbershop quartets of that era. The song's sad theme prompts a man in the audience literally to "cry in his beer". Gas lights point upward to the stage. And behind the singing tenor, a curtain sways back and forth, with product signs that read "Old Whiskey", "Dijon Burgundy", among others. It's a sequence that is straight out of vaudeville. Marvelous!

"She Done Him Wrong" is a film whose story almost gets in the way of the main character, played by a legendary talent. The film is worth watching more than once, but only to see marvelous Mae West, and to listen to those wonderful songs from the bygone days of vaudeville.

Mae West had a Broadway smash when she penned the bawdy tale of DIAMOND LIL for herself--and with a few tweaks here and there the story came to the screen as SHE DONE HIM WRONG. The film was an immediate hit and the role of Lady Lou remains one of West's best remembered performances. The script is jam-packed with some of West's most famous lines, including the memorable "Come up'n see me sometime. I'm home every evenin'" and "You can be had." West throws her lines with style, aplomb, enough innuendo to make a censor cringe, and considerable humor--but, somewhat surprisingly, the movie is not really a comedy.

SHE DONE HIM WRONG is a hard-knocks tale of Bowery bruisers who dance attendance upon the 'Lady Lou' and often resort to crime to keep her dripping in the diamonds she prizes above all else. But although she has one lover already locked up in jail, another one mixed up in the white slavery rackets, and still a third waiting to step into the gap, the Lady Lou is more interested in seducing missionary Cary Grant... only to find him less interested in her body than her soul, a circumstance that prompts West to utter one of the most how-did-that-get-past-the-censors lines in 1930s cinema: "Maybe I ain't got no soul." This is a surprisingly tough little movie, and in addition to West's zinging lines and occasional musical numbers SHE DONE HIM WRONG also offers a glimpse at a very young (and still slightly wooden) Cary Grant; it also has an ensemble cast that plays in a very enjoyable grand manner, truly first rate production values all the way, and A surprisingly brisk running time. West did funnier films than this, but the mix of her sharp wit and the rough story is particularly memorable. This is where the fire started really started, and I recommend it very strongly.

Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Mae West is another one of those actresses that played the same role time after time. She played Mae West. What distinguishes the movies are the lines and she was a masterful created of double entendre with a big load of sex. She would surround herself with the actors of the day, like Gilbert Roland and Wallace Beery. The one that benefited the most here was Cary Grant. It's hard to realize that he goes back so far. I have to admit that for mot of my life I found West's thing to be off handed and tiresome. But now I know that she had great timing and and interesting stage presence. She could deliver a "dirty" line like no other. This gave us the famous like, "Come up and see me sometime."

Mae West is certainly entertaining with her wisecracks and sexual innuendo. Unfortunately, she's the only entertaining thing about this whole film. The other actors, even a young Cary Grant, aren't given terribly interesting characters to inhabit. The whole thing is set-bound and the story is nonsense.

Okay, maybe not nonsense, but it is cluttered with too many subplots and one-note characters which fail to hold interest. The first ten minutes are a pain to sit through, mainly because West isn't there to enliven the proceedings. That should not be.

She Done Him Wrong (1933) is an interesting curio and a showcase for Mae West, but as entertainment, it is lacking.

It's really a privilege to be able to see an icon like Mae West on film. This early talkie is Mae at her best - precode, dripping in diamonds and one-liners. It's a shame that later in life, she became a parody of herself. She was an important figure not only in theater but in early film.

Mae was not only a talented performer, she was a gifted writer and knew how to showcase herself. Though "She Done Him Wrong" is light on plot, it's heavy on Mae, and frankly, who cares about anything else? She's Lady Lou, a bawdy singer, with her hourglass figure shown to great advantage in a variety of gowns. All men want her - and let's face it, many men have had her! When she visits her ex-boyfriend in jail, she knows ever other con in the place.

This is a fascinating movie on so many levels. Besides Mae and her precode innuendos, it has Cary Grant's star-making performance (though Grant always disliked West's claim that she discovered him). It's the film that saved Paramount from bankruptcy. It's one of the films that brought on the code. Most interesting to me is, the audiences loved it! These audiences would very soon (like the next year) be deprived of the sexual double entendre and morality found in this film. Rather than the early audiences being naive and unsophisticated, it was the banning of certain language and situations in film that gave rise to the idea of a false world: that once, there were no shades of gray, all unmarried women were virgins, the bad guy always lost, and no bad deed goes unpunished.

"She Done Him Wrong" is a great chance to see a very young and handsome Gilbert Roland and Noah Berry Sr. (whose son really resembled him) in early film roles.

An amazing artifact, some hilarious lines, and most of all - Mae.