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| From https://hollywoodrevue.files.wordpress.com/ 2015/07/sextette-poster-1.jpg |
Director: Ken Hughes
Screenplay: Herbert Baker
Based on the stage play by Mae
West
Cast: Mae West as Marlo Manners; Timothy
Dalton as Sir Michael Barrington; Dom DeLuise as Dan Turner; Tony Curtis as
Alexei Andreyev Karansky; Ringo Starr as Laslo Karolny; George Hamilton as
Vance Norton; Walter Pidgeon as Mr. Chambers
Synopsis: The legendary actress Marlo Manners (Mae West), the greatest living Hollywood star, is celebrating her
honeymoon with her newest husband Sir Michael Barrington (Timothy Dalton) in London. Her agent Dan Turner (Don DeLuise) has other plans, involving
convincing her to woo a former flame and Soviet politician Alexei Andreyev (Tony Curtis), in the midst of an
international peace conference at the same hotel she is at. Barrington's own
miscommunications with the press, a pink audio tape of Marlo's scintillating
memoirs, and various former husbands entering back into her life will make it
impossible for the new couple to enjoy their honeymoon.
This, I confess, was the worse
way to be introduced to Mae West,
having never seen any of her films beforehand. The legendary actress of bawdy
one liners, enraging the Hays Code and being proudly her own person in films
like She Done Him Wrong (1933) is an
iconic individual. Sextette, for my
first West film, is a tragedy in
terms of this image. An attempt by its producers to give her a last hurrah, but
encumbered by the sad truth, alongside the general quality of the production,
of her being fed her lines, robotic in delivery of them even if heavily made-up
and, as a woman of eighty five, moving not as an elder stateswoman still
proudly stomping around the sets, but lost in a production so off in style its
perversely watchable for all the wrong reasons. The kind of production that, if
I was one of the individuals who'd funded the film, would turn his head around
in the midst the projection screening and tell the producers of Sextette that it was completely
unsellable.
Sextette is part of the hidden underbelly of seventies cinema,
where for all our love of the New American Wave it was always as much the era
of films like this and disaster movies, both actual disaster films and film
disasters. All decades of motion images feed on the popular trends of their
eras, and feed on trends they've made up as being popular to the target
audience's bafflement. The seventies however is strange as, straddled between
nostalgia for the Hollywood studio system and after the studio system collapsed
in the sixties, they could still have the (aged) stars of yesteryear return
onscreen (or on the television tube) to evoke the old era. Yet this is a film
trying to be popular with the young, particularly as this was already when Mae West was a gay icon and disco was
popular, leading to intentionally camping up the production and reinterpretation
old song standards into disco funk. Your cast can resurrect Walter Pigeon back onscreen, but have
cameos as random as Alice Cooper to Ringo Star, in the midst of his solo
career, as a European art film director and one of Marlo's husbands.
The casting itself is an anomaly
worth a paragraph. West's appearance
is sad, more so as in a world where her Marlo Manners is the most beloved
figure, the ultimate sex icon who can bring about world peace in the end of the
plot, everything feels like it is in an alien world or a perverse Twilight Zone episode without the punch
line, characters laughing at her mechanically spoken one liners in ways that
linger too long in the air, constant and awkward. DeLuise does better as her scuzzy, panicked agent. The rest of the
cast, barring one who will get his own paragraph after this one, is a sorry lot
of varying performances. Alice Cooper
is a mere cameo near the end. Ringo Star,
a year after a disastrous attempt at a disco album, tries an accent but
eventually just sounds like Ringo Star
in a cameo role. Tony Curtis being
the stereotypical Russian, Walter Pigeon
a nice sight, as a recent convert to Mrs.
Miniver (1942) and his performance, but too slight a role. And then there's
Keith Moon of The Who, of all
people, playing a dress designer as camp as possible. Whilst the following will
come off as a tasteless remark, the exaggeration he puts into the performance
causes one to wonder if he was either/both game to be as ridiculous as can be
onscreen or drunk during the performance considering how flamboyant he tries to
be.
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| From https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/it/2/2d/Sextette.JPG |
Timothy Dalton, God bless him, manages to leave the film unscathed and with dignity. Even if it originally rests on dated gay humour, even the cringe worthy gag panic gags show Dalton has an incredibly good comic timing especially when it comes to being dead pan and playing a character utterly naive to what the press is misquoting him about. How the character becomes more serious as the film goes on, and the only one you care for, is entirely dependent on a charisma that shines even when he's thrown against the disaster around him. The film's reference to James Bond even comes off as an unexpected premonition, as whilst his Bond stint was only two films and divisive, the same virtues he shows here were to be found in those films (even Licence to Kill (1989)) fully. Also, as this is a musical where he does sing a duet with Mae West, he's a significantly better singer than another Bond actor Pierce Brosnan, as anyone who has watched Mama Mia! (2008) is aware of.
The film as an entity is within
its own time lapse. Everything is truly that of a seventies film, in aesthetic
and even the decor of its central hotel setting. There is a deliberate attempt
at camp irony which yet hollow, as it's a construct of kitsch not properly
formed and sincere. Considering the material here would've greatly suited this
tone, West at one point surrounded by
half naked beefcake, it's a neutered form of what it is attempt to sell. Aside
from West's stiltedness the film,
directed by the same man who helmed Chitty
Chitty Bang Bang (1968), is completely flat in structure and appearance, perfunctory
to an extreme especially as it also attempts to have dance sequences alongside
musical numbers, none of which standing out in the slightest. The dialogue is
rudimentary, the one line innuendo flat, and moments of bland un-PC humour
cropping up which are merely pitiful rather than offensive (like a hotel
kitchen full of multi-cultural chefs arguing, allowing for jokes about
non-English or American food being inedible, and a solitary Chinese chef,
dressed like a old man from fictional Chinatown with chopsticks, scored to
stereotypical "oriental" music to emphasise his existence).
And the music's strange. Some is
hummable, some especially when it tries to go disco awful. Some songs lyrically
are peculiar in context, especially when West sings to the youngest member of
that group of beefcake, Olympic athletes, a song about growing up, reminding
you that many of these songs are "golden oldies", being forcibly
crowbarred to be more sexually explicit when usually their innocence and casual
tweeness suit more for other forms of subversion. The result in general, like Sextette as a whole, is a tug-of-war
between the old films that made West's
name and the new cinema, like many of these infamous seventies films, which are
bastardisations of such tropes that cannot be even called antiquated. They are "Golden
Turkeys", to reference the Medved
brothers who ripped into them at this period of time and helped create the
"so bad its good" phenomena of now, beasts not of anytime but created
in pockets of their own hubris. Films like Sextette
which are, in honestly, tragically naive, follies which wanted to commit to
something but fail miserably. That Sextette
took a while to even be distributed back in its era says a lot of the film;
even if it's still with us and talked of, it was always a complete failure on
paper as much in result that no sane producer would've bankrolled.
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| From http://www.mondo-digital.com/sextette4big.jpg |
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