The sex farce, “She Done Him Wrong,” directed by Lowell Sherman, is the only Mae West film to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. This risqué film would not have been nominated a year later because of the newly imposed restrictions of the Production Code. (Mae West is in fact both blamed for and credited with enforcing it in 1934).
Mae West plays Lady “Diamond” Lou, a beautiful (though not young), witty woman who runs a Bowery saloon, owned by Gus Jordan (Noah Beery, Sr.). The very young Cary Grant, before he became a star, plays Captain Cummings from the nearby church mission, who visits Lou regularly, hoping to save her (but from what?)
After some exchanges of double entendres, Lou falls for Cummings and you can’t blame her. In a heroic deed, she helps a suicidal girl only to realize that the girl is being sold into white slavery. After Lou kills a criminal, Cummings drops his disguise and reveals his real identity as a police agent. He’s forced to arrest her, but Lou doesn’t mind that at all.
In this movie, West reprised her 1928 “Diamond Lil,” part in the scandalous Broadway play, adapted to the screen by Harvey Thew, John Bright, and Mae West herself. Some deletions were made in the text, taking out the rough elements, such as the notion of white slavery, which is thinly disguised; in the movie, the girls are shipped to San Francisco to pick pockets.
Like her other films, “She Done Him Wrong” shows West as a liberal and liberated, way ahead of her time, who flaunts and enjoys her sexuality. And it features subtle and not so subtle one-liners and innuendos, such as “Why don’t you come up sometime ‘n see me?”
Critics and viewers liked Mae West, who previously had a small part in “Night After Night,” singling out her performance as a brash, successful female predator, set against a colorful Bowery background.
The National Board of Review noted: “It is as frank as an old Police Gazette, and much livelier and more picturesque. It is an odd companion to be bracketed with ‘Little Women’ and ‘State Fair’ and ‘Mama Loves Papa,’ but it belongs with them as a faithful bit of Americana.”
Paramount scored a big hit with this picture, which was shot quickly and on a small budget, and reteamed West and Grant in “”I’m No Angel,” also in 1933.