BELLE OF THE NINETIES (34)

Directed by: Leo McCarey (1934)

Starring: Mae West, Roger Pryor, Johnny Mack Brown

The Pitch: A famous chanteuse is loved by two men, a boxing champ and a crooked promoter.

Theo Sez: Some evocative detail for nostalgic types - a line of overweight chorus girls, a Mississippi paddle-steamer coasting into port - but this post-Production Code vehicle finds La West drastically reduced in everything except her prodigious ego : to see her strike vacuous poses onstage, or go through a fairly indifferent song-and-dance, while dozens of (male) extras are made to applaud wildly and say things like "She's so divine" and "I've never seen anything like her", is to realise how far Barbra Streisand still has to go in the diva stakes. The film keeps the saucy double entendres to a minimum, apparently trying to shoehorn its star into the standard vaudeville humour of palooka prizefighters and atrocious puns ("So you were born in St. Louis? What part?" "Why, all of me"). Nonetheless the occasional classic Mae-ism ("It's better to be looked over than overlooked") does manage to creep through - in the same way that the horribly un-PC "darkie" scenes nonetheless include one magnificent, visually arresting shot, of a frenzied prayer meeting reflected in a river, that I'll probably remember long after many much better movies have been forgotten.