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In 1915 Cecil B. DeMille did a silent film for Paramount called The Cheat. In it, Fannie Ward contracts a Shylock like debt for sexual favors in payment for borrowed money. Trying to kill the oriental who lent the money was deemed justifiable in the end. In that same tradition, Paramount and Mae West did Klondike Annie where she actually kills Harold Huber, the oriental she's involved with and escapes from San Francisco to Nome.
Prejudice against orientals was rampant on our west coast during the Gay Nineties when this story takes place. Mae has two strokes of good luck, first in ship's captain Victor McLaglen who loves her any way and keeps her secret. Secondly she meets missionary Helen Jerome Eddy who is going to the wild north to head a mission in Nome. Eddy sickens and dies aboard ship, but she's the real deal as a missionary and it's the only time Mae West ever trod the straight and narrow. She escapes the police by taking the late Ms. Eddy's identity.
I'm not sure how this one escaped the Code. Not the racial prejudice, mind you, but the fact that Mae and Victor live happily ever after and Mountie Philip Reed who also falls for Mae let's her go. You were not supposed to go unpunished under Code rules.
Mae's as bold and brassy as ever. She's got the right buxom build for these parts as back then feminine ideal beauty was someone like Lillian Russell who had a bit of heft to her figure.
Mae wrote the script as she did in most of her films and she wrote it with an awareness of the times she grew up in. Klondike Annie might not sit well with some audiences today, but it's also the sad truth about those times. Anyway, she's got fabulously sassy lines.
score 7/10
bkoganbing 17 July 2007
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1695341/ |
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21-2-2021 18:05:03