Goin' to Town

Moviecut—Goin' to Town

source: Goin' to Town

This was my first time seeing a Mae West picture. I've always heard her name. Man, she can fling the sass! Mae marries a rancher who dies just before their wedding day, yet she still is gifted his large cattle ranch with acers of land and various animals in additional to oil wells. Thus, she becomes very wealthy and the talk of the town. Although, she does most of the talking. Being a sassy woman, she makes an amusing effort to be more lady-like as she sets her eyes on an English gentleman operating in her new high-class sphere. This is some genuinely funny '30s fun. Mae has oodles of good dialog zingers mixed with amusing physical comedy.

"Goin' to Town" is a very good comedy and sort of Western that stars Mae West. It's also labeled as a musical, and Mae's Cleo Borden sings a couple of tunes and then some. The plot unfolds in three separate locales. The opening scenes have Cleo in a Western setting where she is a popular saloon singer. After she promises to marry a rancher who does some rustling on the side, he gets killed on her wedding day, but she inherits his land which has just been dotted with oil wells. Cleo takes a fancy to the chief engineer of the oil project, Edward Carrington (played by Paul Cavanagh). But he doesn't seem to take a hankering to her. So, when he heads off for a social outing at the races in Argentina, Cleo enters her own high-spirited horse in the races in Bueno Aires. After the glamorous setting there, she heads for the high class New England area - still pursuing Carrington and trying to break into high society where she has been snubbed by a couple of flighty wealthy matrons. The story has some extravagant and very funny developments there. The movie has some shenanigans with others trying to foil Cleo's quest for social standing. There's some more rough stuff and she tries some very unusual ways to establish herself. She's on the up and up but some of the high society patrons are not. They will "get theirs" in the end, and the film has a nice surprise ending for all - Cleo and the audience. This is a somewhat crazy and frenzied story with a sizable cast and light comedy. But it's Mae West at her best - whether singing in a saloon, a high class casino, or an opera in her own mansion.

This was the first Mae West movie to appear after the introduction of the Production Code the year before and, given the generally held belief that this factor harmed her successive films, I was expecting to be let down by this one; indeed, while rarely scaling the heights of her best work, I found it to be a very engaging and entertaining vehicle with a fair amount of good lines. Amusingly, this film – with the word “town” in its title – starts out way out West while West’s GO WEST YOUNG MAN (1936) starts out in a rural setting and goes rustic gradually! Interestingly enough, it features a vivid horse-racing sequence and another hilarious vignette in which West dabbles in opera singing: playing Delilah (“the only woman barber who made good”), she is prone to call out to her Samson, “Come ‘ere, Sammy!”; it’s worth mentioning here that The Marx Brothers also lampooned just these very diverse subjects for their first two big-budget MGM extravaganzas! The plot is quite busy, especially for a 70 minute movie, with a handful of besotted males vying for the hand of wealthy oil tycoon West (who marries – and is subsequently widowed – twice during the course of the film, even if she is clearly chasing after her no-nonsense British employee Paul Cavanagh who is really an aristocrat!). Initially, I thought that Cavanagh was a curious choice for her leading man but, ultimately, he acquits himself rather well under the circumstances, and Gilbert Emery is a welcome familiar face as West’s Pygmalion (once she decides to take on the upper crust of society in her bid to win Cavanagh’s affections); incidentally, this portion of the film bears more than a passing resemblance to George Raft’s predicament in Mae West’s debut feature, NIGHT AFTER NIGHT (1932)!

This is the third of the Mae West movies on the 5-film, 2-disc collection I just watched and I just found out, the first made after the Production Code became a bit more strict. It's a bit of a mess, to tell the truth what with the change in locales from the Wild West to South America to Southampton. And some of the plot points confused me. But as long as Ms. West manages to keep her zingers at the ready and get some good songs in, to boot, this is still a pretty enjoyable outing for her. And it's always fun to see her give it to the snobbish society ladies, that's for sure! The men, for the most part, are pretty interchangeable but really, there's still plenty to enjoy in Going' to Town.

"Goin' to Town" begins with Mae West in the rootin', tootin' West. A local rich rancher asks her to marry him and she agrees. However, he's killed and she inherits his fortune. Now what would any girl do in a situation like this? Yep, run to Buenos Aires to hang with the rich set in order to hook an Englishman she met in the West(?). In the process, she naturally has trouble fitting in and it's thanks to a particularly snooty lady...and the fact that Mae is a tacky dame. Later, Mae marries the snooty lady's nephew--a very odd thing considering she's doing all this to win the English man's heart. When the new husband is murdered during a plot orchestrated by the snooty lady, Mae is accused of the crime. Can she extricate herself from all this and STILL win the man of her dream? Well, it's all very quickly and conveniently wrapped up in the last two minutes--that's for sure! This is an enjoyable film thanks to Mae's dialog. Otherwise, the plot often makes little sense. Not only do you wonder what man would be desperate enough to want her, but it's a confusing film. Why did she go to such elaborate lengths to get the English guy? Why did she marry another man in the process? Why would the audience care, as it's supposed to be a comedy--and a lot of this isn't super funny. Still, it's agreeable enough and a decent time-passer...but not a lot more. By the way, one of the things that REALLY made no sense was Mae's producing and starring in an opera for her new society friends! Huh?!

This film is really a Mae West vehicle and you can see how she inspired today's stars like Madonna and even Lady Gaga with her dazzling outfits and costumes. Mae West had a style like nobody else and was incredibly talented besides her looks. She was a screenwriter who developed her own projects in order to suit her. In this film, she plays a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who ends up from rags to riches. Along the way, she wants high society's acceptance even of her bawdy behavior and attitudes. Her character might be ill-bred, ill-mannered, and raunchy with jokes but she's entertaining and talented with her singing voice. I wonder if it was her real voice. She's going to climb high society even if it means doing it her way. Mae West is one of the great movie stars during the Great Depression and we can see why people flocked to see her films.

In Going' To Town Mae West enacts her own version of the Horatio Alger story. She rises from dance hall queen, to millionaire, to high society, and finally to a title. Mae starts this rise by being a 'good woman to a bad man'. The bad man is Fred Kohler who mixed cattle rustling with a lot of legitimate money and pays the ultimate price. He leaves everything to his fiancé Mae West. It's the beginning of her rise. All the time she's got her eye fixed on Englishman Paul Cavanaugh who she knows as the engineer drilling for oil on Kohler's and now her property. She doesn't know at first he's an heir to a title, but she finds out soon enough. Mae really comes into her own in this film. In previous films she had George Raft and Cary Grant twice as leading men. Going' To Town is a film she carries all by herself. Cavanaugh is the film's weakness. Not a strong enough personality to be a lead, one can't figure out why Mae's so set on him. Someone like Leslie Howard would have really given that part some character. And what a team that would have been. Still this film is all Mae West. And that's all you need.

Shortly after the release of Mae West's BELLE OF THE NINETIES, the Hollywood Production Code started to get tough, which put the Queen of double entendre in a tighter spot than her hardworking corsets. So why would Paramount dump her into this lusterless Grade 'B' item with its faceless supporting cast? West's script hardly helps as she pitches a veritable yard's sale of story lines at us: Mae takes over the ranch when her fiancé is murdered; Mae & her horse win the Derby; Mae the commoner crashes high society; Mae gets caught in a divorce/robbery/murder scam. Oh, she still gets off an occasional eyebrow raising quip and there's something irresistible in seeing her do a bit of Saint-Saens SAMSON & DELILAH (in the original keys, natch), but it's all a bit depressing to see her brought so low.