Goin' to Town

"Goin' to Town" is a very good comedy and sort of Western that stars Mae West. It's also labeled as a musical, and Mae's Cleo Borden sings a couple of tunes and then some. The plot unfolds in three separate locales. The opening scenes have Cleo in a Western setting where she is a popular saloon singer. After she promises to marry a rancher who does some rustling on the side, he gets killed on her wedding day, but she inherits his land which has just been dotted with oil wells.

Cleo takes a fancy to the chief engineer of the oil project, Edward Carrington (played by Paul Cavanagh). But he doesn't seem to take a hankering to her. So, when he heads off for a social outing at the races in Argentina, Cleo enters her own high-spirited horse in the races in Bueno Aires. After the glamorous setting there, she heads for the high class New England area - still pursuing Carrington and trying to break into high society where she has been snubbed by a couple of flighty wealthy matrons.

The story has some extravagant and very funny developments there. The movie has some shenanigans with others trying to foil Cleo's quest for social standing. There's some more rough stuff and she tries some very unusual ways to establish herself. She's on the up and up but some of the high society patrons are not. They will "get theirs" in the end, and the film has a nice surprise ending for all - Cleo and the audience. This is a somewhat crazy and frenzied story with a sizable cast and light comedy. But it's Mae West at her best - whether singing in a saloon, a high class casino, or an opera in her own mansion.

This is the third of the Mae West movies on the 5-film, 2-disc collection I just watched and I just found out, the first made after the Production Code became a bit more strict. It's a bit of a mess, to tell the truth what with the change in locales from the Wild West to South America to Southampton. And some of the plot points confused me. But as long as Ms. West manages to keep her zingers at the ready and get some good songs in, to boot, this is still a pretty enjoyable outing for her. And it's always fun to see her give it to the snobbish society ladies, that's for sure! The men, for the most part, are pretty interchangeable but really, there's still plenty to enjoy in Going' to Town.

In Going' To Town Mae West enacts her own version of the Horatio Alger story. She rises from dance hall queen, to millionaire, to high society, and finally to a title. Mae starts this rise by being a 'good woman to a bad man'.

The bad man is Fred Kohler who mixed cattle rustling with a lot of legitimate money and pays the ultimate price. He leaves everything to his fiancé Mae West. It's the beginning of her rise.

All the time she's got her eye fixed on Englishman Paul Cavanaugh who she knows as the engineer drilling for oil on Kohler's and now her property. She doesn't know at first he's an heir to a title, but she finds out soon enough.

Mae really comes into her own in this film. In previous films she had George Raft and Cary Grant twice as leading men. Going' To Town is a film she carries all by herself.

Cavanaugh is the film's weakness. Not a strong enough personality to be a lead, one can't figure out why Mae's so set on him. Someone like Leslie Howard would have really given that part some character. And what a team that would have been.

Still this film is all Mae West. And that's all you need.

This was the first Mae West movie to appear after the introduction of the Production Code the year before and, given the generally held belief that this factor harmed her successive films, I was expecting to be let down by this one; indeed, while rarely scaling the heights of her best work, I found it to be a very engaging and entertaining vehicle with a fair amount of good lines.

Amusingly, this film – with the word “town” in its title – starts out way out West while West’s GO WEST YOUNG MAN (1936) starts out in a rural setting and goes rustic gradually! Interestingly enough, it features a vivid horse-racing sequence and another hilarious vignette in which West dabbles in opera singing: playing Delilah (“the only woman barber who made good”), she is prone to call out to her Samson, “Come ‘ere, Sammy!”; it’s worth mentioning here that The Marx Brothers also lampooned just these very diverse subjects for their first two big-budget MGM extravaganzas!

The plot is quite busy, especially for a 70 minute movie, with a handful of besotted males vying for the hand of wealthy oil tycoon West (who marries – and is subsequently widowed – twice during the course of the film, even if she is clearly chasing after her no-nonsense British employee Paul Cavanagh who is really an aristocrat!). Initially, I thought that Cavanagh was a curious choice for her leading man but, ultimately, he acquits himself rather well under the circumstances, and Gilbert Emery is a welcome familiar face as West’s Pygmalion (once she decides to take on the upper crust of society in her bid to win Cavanagh’s affections); incidentally, this portion of the film bears more than a passing resemblance to George Raft’s predicament in Mae West’s debut feature, NIGHT AFTER NIGHT (1932)!

Going' TO TOWN (Paramount, 1935), directed by Alexander Hall, from the story by Marion Morgan and George B. Dowell, with screenplay and dialog by MAE WEST, in her only theatrical release of 1935, repeats the formula of sorts from her hit comedy, I'M NO ANGEL (1933), but not as successfully. Once more, she plays a woman who wants to crash into and be accepted amongst the swells of high society, only to get snubbed by the grand dames but admired by the millionaire gents.

Mae West plays a saloon singer named Cleo Borden ("A woman of very few words and lots of action"). She is first seen kissing a young cowboy (Grant Withers) behind a semi- closed curtain, then serenades him on the dance floor with a song before Buck Gonzalez (Fred Kohler Sr.), a wealthy rancher by day and cattle rustler by night, enters the scene. So much in love with her, he proposes marriage. Instead of giving him an answer, Cleo decides to gamble on her decision through a crap game. Losing, she consents on becoming his wife, on the condition that he'd wait two weeks to prepare herself. During those two weeks, Buck is caught cattle rustling (a profession very few people had known), and shot and killed in the process by the sheriff (Francis Ford), who had his suspicions on him. On her wedding day, Cleo arrives at Buck's ranch to learn of her future husband's death. Because she was willing to keep her part of the bargain, she learns from Winslow (Gilbert Emery), Buck's financial accountant, that he had awarded Cleo his entire fortune, making her the wealthiest woman in the state. While inspecting an oil field, which has become part of her inheritance, Cleo takes notice on a geological engineer named Edward Carrington (Paul Cavanaugh). She tries to become the object of his affection, but the no-nonsense Englishman appears to have a strong will and ignores her. After Carrington transfers to Buenos Aires, South America, Cleo reads an article on Mrs. Crane Brittony (Marjorie Gateson), a wealthy matron, in a society magazine. Taking Winslow's advice by winning the heart of Carrington is to become refined and cultured, Cleo heads for Buenos Aires. While there, Cleo enters her horse, Cactus, in the big race, beating the horse owned by Mrs. Brittony, who takes an immediate dislike towards the "cattle baron's widow." Unable to nab Carrington, who defends her honor against malicious gossip, Cleo acquires the affections of Fletcher Colton (Monroe Owsley), Mrs. Brittony's nephew, whose main weakness is gambling. When Colton loses his entire fortune, Winslow talks him into a marriage of convenience with Cleo. Now husband and wife, the couple settle in Southampton, New York. Mrs. Brittony schemes on hiring Ivan Veladov (Ivan Lebedeff), a handsome gigolo, to discredit her and a private detective (Paul Harvey) to expose her low morals standpoints, later leading Cleo as a murder suspect.

Going' TO TOWN is the kind of movie in which the contributors to the screenplay couldn't make up their minds which direction the story is heading. Is it western, comedy or social drama? By the looks of it, all three combined. It starts off promisingly as a full- fledged modern-day western, consisting of shoot-em-up cowboys riding horses, gathering in a local saloon where they indulge themselves with either drinking beer or being around Cleo (West), where the story should have remained throughout. However, after twenty minutes or so, the locale shifts to Buenos Aires where horses continue to take part of the stock, this time at the races, and finally to Southampton, New York. According to the theatrical trailer that precedes the movie in the 1992-93 video release, Mae West has not ONE, but SEVEN male co-stars. With Cavanaugh as her British co-star, West might have selected better known debonairs as Herbert Marshall or Melvyn Douglas, for example, for stronger box-office appeal.

Unlike her previous screen efforts, Going' TO TOWN has its limitations when it comes to song numbers. West first sings "He's a Bad Man" while on the dance floor with Grant Withers, with his profile looking directly at her while the camera catches West's face is full view. Later on in the story while trying to be accepted to high society, she sings "My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice" in the SAMSON AND DELILAH opera. Interestingly, she doesn't spoof opera, as one might expect, but plays it straight. Before the fade-out, she sings, "I'm a Lady" (with part of her lyrics being her catch phrase of "Come up and see me sometime") as she walks downstairs with her new husband by her side. The camera this time ignores her male co-star and takes full focus on West while singing her closing number. There were a couple of times in the story where West did appear to be preparing herself for another moment of vocalization, one at a social function and another where she puts on the radio playing instrumental music. Expecting her to go into a song, this scene soon goes into a fade-out.

In spite of mixed reactions towards Going' TO TOWN, this fifth Mae West feature has become a rare find these days. Unseen in the television markets since the 1970s, it was distributed on video cassette in 1992 and cable television's Retroplex (Premiere: November 12, 2016). Credited at 74 minutes, video presentation runs at 70. West's one liners still makes the movie (WEST: "For a long time I was ashamed of the way I lived." GRANT WITHERS: "You mean you reformed?" WEST: "No, I got over being ashamed"; or her reference to Ivan Lebedeff: "We're intellectual opposites. I'm intellectual and you're opposite."). Mae West certainly has her moments on screen, but from the basis of the script, is passable entertainment. (***)