A Movie So Bad, It's Actually Good! I've seen Sextette a couple of times. The first time I saw it, my jaw dropped at the absurdity of pairing Mae West with love interest Timothy Dalton. Then there were the assorted cameos of everyone from George Raft to Alice Cooper. Mae West was probably the only star out there who had the moxie to assemble such a diverse group of characters into the same picture. The second time I watched it, I took the movie for what it was -- a fun, campy pic that doesn't take itself seriously in the least. Kudos to Ms. Mae!
Mae West at her Best! Great Musical so bad its perfect great companion piece to The First Nudie Musical. Love the songs sung by the West! Every Gay Man's Dream of the Musical so Bad its good!
Sextette is all in good fun, nothing more I first bought this movie on VHS many years ago. I have every Mae West film, including the hard to find "The Heats On", which I don't think has ever been out on DVD. So believe me when I tell you, I am a huge fan of Mae West. I have her albums, a doll of her, books on her and a few other rare collectibles.
Sextette is by no means "oscar material", but it makes no sense to me at all why so many people insist on bashing Sextette so badly. I must agree with the previous reviewer who said this movie only has a bad storyline if you compare it to Citizen Kane. In other words, taken for what it is, a fun, campy movie, Sextette is great.
First off, I read in one of my Mae West books that making Sextette was NOT Mae's idea. She was approached by those who wanted it made and she agreed. They said she had good days when she was "on" and other days where they couldn't get her to remember anything. Other days she thought she was back in the 1930's. However, overall, her performance is wonderful and everyone in the cast was so good, they helped sell her. I don't know how much of that is true about her condition, but assuming it is, she did a great job. The Mae West we all know comes through in many scenes.
To truly enjoy Sextette, first off you must suspend reality. Mae does not look like she's in her 80's here. She looks like she's around her late 50's or early 60's. I know a lot of women now in their 50's who don't look half as good as Mae did in this movie. In any case, we are encouraged to believe she is still the Mae West we knew in 1933. Once you forget the details about her age, and once you realize this is a campy 70's movie, you can appreciate that there really is a plot and there is a lot of funny stuff in this film which is well delivered. The performances of Ringo Starr, Dom Deluise, George Hamilton and others are excellent.
Why did all these stars want to do this movie? Probably for the same reason true Mae West fans wanted to see it. A tribute to a legend. A woman who never let the system beat her down. A woman who took on Hollywood back when it was truely a man's world. A woman who saved Paramount studios from going bankrupt during the Great Depression. A woman who wrote her own screenplays and Broadway plays when those areas were also male dominated. Mae West was not just a great performer and entertainer, she was a great business woman and a great writer. She was truely ahead of her time.
As for the criticisms about her age, I also agree with the previous reviewer who pointed out that Mae was almost 40 when she first came to Hollywood. When she did "I'm No Angel" in 1933 she was 40 and I think she looked great for 40, especially in a day long before anti-oxidants and botox. And as for her shape in Sextette, she sure doesn't look like a young woman, but her body isn't bad at all for her age. She's still got an hourglass shape. They shouldn't have given her a big, fluffy wedding gown in the opening scene, though. She'd have been better off with a tapered gown, but most of her gowns were gorgeous in this film and her dress maker in the movie is hilarious. Compare her shape here to her shape in the 1940 film "My Little Chickadee" with WC Feilds and she doesn't look all that different except for maybe a little more hunch to the shoulders.
All in all this movie is a movie for Mae's fans. It gives us one last chance to see her do her thing and give us those fun one-liners that made her so famous. If I had to make any real criticism of this film, it would be that some of the musical numbers were not so fabulous. "Love Will Keep Us Together" was my least favorite, but even the cheesey musical numbers are fun enough to sit through. The creators of this movie did NOT intend this to be a serious musical like "The Sound of Music" or anything of that caliber.
The bottom line is to suspend reality and enjoy it for what they intended it to be. A campy, fun tribute to a fabuous Hollywood legend. Nothing more or less than that.
a lot of "tette" and no "sex" ONLY for Mae West 'FANS' -- mostly unfunnnnny - even supporting players - buy if you just want "all" the great lady's movies. I love her even at her worsttes.
SEXTETTE separates true worshipers of heinous cinema from the fainthearted!! The good news is that this is one of the most frightening horror movies ever made. The bad news is that it was supposed to be a musical comedy. (Bad comedies are painful, bad musicals are worse, and combining the two, then adding in liberal sexual innuendo involving an eighty-five year old former sexpot is agony.) But Sextette is never boring. It can't be...there's virtually a new TERROR around every corner!
This unbelievably misguided project from director Ken Hughes and screenwriter Herbert Baker takes Mae West's 1926 play SEX and reimagines it as a romance between the 85-year old West and 32-year old Timothy Dalton. And while Mae and her latest hubbie (future James Bond star, Dalton) lounge around their palatial honeymoon suite, Mae reminisces about her past conquests while a roster of escapees from the Hollywood Squares stumble through.
There's the always-confused Ringo Starr as a Stroheim-like director; leather-skinned George Hamilton as a pinstriped gangster; Alice Cooper in a permed `Barry Manilow-style' wig and tuxedo; Keith Moon as a foppy fashion designer; plus Dom DeLuise, George Raft, Regis Philbin, Rona Barrett -- the list of has-beens and never-will-be's goes on and on ...and on! Meanwhile, the viewer gets to grind their teeth at the loose excuse for a plot, in which the U.S. government begs Mae to spend a night with one of her ex's, a Russian bigwig (Tony Curtis), in order to save diplomatic relations.
But the show really belongs to its octogenarian leading lady, (who at this point in her life must have been giving her corset-maker hazard pay), in her final and most astounding screen role. The most bizarre thing about Sextette is that it pretends that its star is still in her twenties! and has her firing off racy double-entendres that will make every viewer nauseous with their quasi-necrophilic implications. The star is filmed in such soft-focus that one can barely make out her face. She shambles across the sets like she's about to fall over, and when she recites trademark zingers like, "I'm the girl who works at Paramount all day and Fox all night," (Say it out loud), she seems to have forgotten what they mean. The most horrifying exchange comes when she caresses her breasts provocatively, causing Dalton to embrace her and break into an ear-melting rendition of "Love Will Keep Us Together."
YES! Just when you think it's as cheesy as it could ever possibly get, the entire cast breaks into song and dance, and you remember it's also a freaking musical! You haven't lived until you've heard Dom DeLuise creaking out a cover of the Beatles' "Honey Pie"? Other low lights have West crooning "Happy Birthday" while pawing a 21-year-old youth in a gym full of Olympic bodybuilders and lip-synching another standard to which she appears to have forgotten the words. And we'll bet you thought AT LONG LAST LOVE was interminable!...
The whole mess ends with West singing "Babyface" (astonishingly, she's referring to herself) and sneaking onto Dalton's yacht for a really sick-making seduction scene. We'd like to tell you that the movie has a happy ending, (if having sex with an eighty-five year-old woman qualifies as "happy") but the viewer's side of the experience is something far less pleasant.
Sextette is a jaw-droppingly Bad Move We Love that separates true worshipers of heinous cinema from the fainthearted. It is defiantly one for the record books, and most certainly not recommended for viewing on an empty stomach.
Anything Goes Trivia
Megaton Man
Tailipoe
Trevor
