Annie du Klondike

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.

The inimitable Mae West struts her stuff yet again in this breezy, passable, but lesser Paramount Studio vehicle. Based on her play ("Frisco Kate") and co-credited for the writing here, she is the whole show naturally.

The story, if you care, has Mae playing Rose ("the Frisco Doll") Carlton, an 1890s entertainer who has to take it on the lam after bringing down one of her paramours - not with sly one-liners, but with a knife in the back. She's forced to slum it on a ship headed for the Klondike. With the police breathing down her bodice, she winds up impersonating a Salvation Army missionary (Helen Jerome Eddy), who conveniently dies of a `bad heart attack' while on board. In a change of heart, the sultry Mae, now dressed down in drab, basic black, vows to fulfill the woman's mission and ventures on to reform an Alaskan town full of drunks, prosties and other sinner types with her own revamped style of Bible-thumping. Somehow you feel these unfortunates will never be ENTIRELY saved, but that's never the point anyway. Interspersed throughout are a few typical West songs, notably `I'm an Occidental Woman in an Oriental Mood for Love' decked out in full Oriental regalia, including headgear, which really has to be seen to be believed.

It's always grand entertainment to see the most virile of men falling all over themselves over La West -- reduced to simpering, whimpering fools once they zero in on our gal. This time one of filmdom's most rugged and respected character stars, Victor McLaglan, becomes her prime, buffoonish play toy. McLaglan (who had won an Oscar a year or two before) plays Bull Brackett, a brusque, salty ol' sea captain here, who barks out orders in his best Wallace Beery imitation and roughs up nearly every guy within throwing distance. But watch the big brute turn to pure mush at the first sight of Mae -- sulking, grousing, bumbling, even running into poles, for God's sake. And McLaglan's not the only one. Dashing, doe-eyed Philip Terry's Mountie, McLaglan's chief rival, risks all respect, not to mention his career, in his play for her, while obsessive-compulsive `Oriental' Harold Huber loses much more than that over his fascination with " the pearl of lotus flower.' Ah, yes, in a distinct case of reverse gender discrimination, every man is weak, inept, servile, and just plain putty around dear ol' Mae. Improbable fun...but fun.

And speaking of support roles, nobody has ever been given the chance to steal a Mae West movie, so to mention anyone else in the cast would be a waste of time. By the way, you won't see any pretty dames supporting West either. She wouldn't stand for it. So every other female -- bar girls, suffragettes, society ladies, you name it - are at least 50-70 in age here, and either much heavier than the quite zaftig West or downright ugly. Smart girl that Mae!

Suffice it to say there's never much action in a Mae West movie because the old girl (she was 44 at the time this movie was released) simply can't move in those tight, breath-taking (literally!) outfits she wears. She simply sashays from place to place, plants herself, and lets out a few double entendres. The dramatic action is usually compromised by a series of set poses - lighting a cigarette, filing her nails, primping her platinum-blonde locks, laying carefully on a settee, or shoving some pawing, lovesick puppy away from her camera light. Actually, what you're waiting for anyway are Mae's delicious quips, but, sadly, there are way too few of them in "Klondike Annie", none of those classic lines we all enjoy and remember so well. Methinks those dastardly censors cut out her best lines this time, because there's not a lot of zing in the ones she delivers here. Rumor has it William Randolph Hearst and his newspaper establishment took offense at Mae portraying any kind of religious figure and insisted on immediate congressional action. Whatever.

Raoul Walsh directed this but there is really little directing going on. The narcissistic Mae could never have been considered a director's star. And as for her acting? Well, if Mae were alive today, I'd love to ask her, "What the hell DO you see looking up at the ceiling all the time?" Whatever it is, I'm sure it's better than some of the silliness we're seeing down here.

But Mae is Mae, so what you see is what you get.

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."

Despite I wasn't from those golden era, in fact my background starts on the seventies, as a die hard cinephile when I'd hear about the fabulous Mae West I have to confess that l've stayed really impressed when l realize such greatness, what a woman!!! Then I began to study his career, she was the first Goddess on the thirties, bolded and sexy impregnating on collective imaginary of the men, in this movie she around 44 years, she running away from Frisco in a cargo ship of the rough Captain Bull Brackett (Victor Maclaglen), along the way she meets with a Christian Sister Annie Alden who intent to help a church at Nome, sadly she dies before, Rose (West) having wanted by the police changes places with Annie, at the ground she has to play an opposite character henceforth, well-craft plot, a perfect vehicle to Mae West, after her came up, several Goddess, nevertheless Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe stay closest as sexy symbols, my wife always wonder why l love all them so much, I guess she is jealous!!!

Resume:

First watch: 2011 / How many: 2 / Source: DVD / Rating: 7.25

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.