Tag: Mae West

This movie is bad…I mean turn your head away, bad. I’m not sure if it passes for so bad it’s good… Once you see this movie… You want to un-see it. I cannot believe the powers to be thought it would be a good idea to portray an 85-year-old Mae West as the sex symbol Marlo Manners. I’m not knocking Mae West because she made some good films in her career…this was not one of them. I’m in no way knocking Mae West…but this movie should not have been filmed.

Mae looked fine for being 85…but acting like she was in her twenties or thirties… was not a good idea. It was like someone doing a bad Mae West impersonation. Playing her soon-to-be husband in the movie was the pre-Bond Timothy Dalton.

Some films are great. Some are terrible. And some like Sextette are so completely unhinged, so gloriously out-of-step with time, taste, and logic, that they transcend quality altogether and enter that rarefied zone of sublime WTF.

The plot, such as it is, involves Marlo (West) arriving at a London hotel after marrying her sixth husband (Dalton, somehow keeping a straight face). But she’s got five ex-husbands still circling, plus world leaders, Cold War politics, and various intercontinental shenanigans all trying to get a piece of her… attention. West floats through the whole thing like a rhinestone-covered battleship, delivering every line as if time stopped in 1933.

To pour on some more badness…it was a musical! I won’t go there, but you can imagine. The movie did have star power. I will give it that. The cast included

Timothy Dalton, Alice Cooper, Tony Curtis, Dom Deluise, Ringo Starr, Keith Moon, George Hamilton, Rona Barrett, and Regis Philbin.

For me, the only bright spot is two small appearances by Keith Moon who plays a dress designer. He is refreshing and goes wonderfully over the top in his small scenes. He could have been a decent character actor.

I would hate to see the movies that were passed over for this one to be made. I usually like bad 70s movies, but you just feel embarrassed for Mae West in this one.

If you want to see a good Mae West film watch “My Little Chickadee.”

I found this line from a review… “Bad comedies are painful, bad musicals are worse, and combining the two, then adding in liberal sexual innuendo involving a woman who is eighty-four or eighty-five years old is agony. “

Keith Moon in Sextette