Sextette: A Review

SEXTETTE

This review is part of the Summer Under the Stars Blogathon. Today's star is George Hamilton.

If Mae West had lived today, she might have adopted LL Cool J's opening lines from Mama Said Knock You Out as her slogan. "Don't call it a comeback! I been here for years!". Come to think of it, West probably would have adopted LL Cool J himself as one of her many boytoys. West famously listed her home phone number in the telephone book, in case anyone wanted to come up and see her sometime. After an absence of twenty-seven years, West made a "comeback" in Myra Breckinridge. It took eight years after that notorious debacle for her to make another comeback with Sextette. This, her final film, is a most inglorious way to end a filmography. 

International screen siren and eternal sex goddess Marlo Manners (West) has married for the sixth time. Husband Number Six is Sir Michael Barrington (Timothy Dalton). The now-Lady Barrington is looking forward to her wedding night in the bridal suite. Marlo is the fixation of the world. Even the peace conference taking place at the same hotel where she will be deflowered again is no match for our sultry bombshell. Sir Michael would like to get it on with the lusty grand old lady of stage and screen. However, things keep popping up, and not the ones that Lady Barrington would like to see.

Her agent Dan Turner (Dom DeLuise) has her set up for a new film. He is desperate to get Marlo to do screen and costume tests. Dan also has been approached by someone at the peace conference for help. It so happens that one of the many ex-Mr. Manners is Alexie Andrea Karansky (Tony Curtis). He is representing the Soviet Union at the conference and won't budge from saying "nyet" to everything. In order to change his mind, Sexy Lexie has but one condition: time with the former wife. Marlo, Lady Barrington, will have to lay herself down for world peace.

Dan works to keep Sir Michael out of the bridal suite by forcing him to do many interviews. These interviews keep making Sir Michael sound as if he's coming out of the closet. He is befuddled as to why people think that he might be gay even after he tells a reporter on live television that he is gay. Why wouldn't he be "happy"? 

Some men are quite happy to see Marlo, like the entire U.S. track & field and gymnastics Olympic teams. Other men are less than happy. One of her ex-husbands, director Laslo Karolny (Ringo Starr) insists on having screen test in her bridal suite. Dan is not happy either, but for other reasons. Marlo has been dictating her memoirs onto tapes. Her various exploits would send shockwaves worldwide and he is determined to destroy the tapes. Finally, we have Husband Number 5: gangster Vance Norton (George Hamilton). Presumed dead, Marlo cannot remember if she divorced him or not. If she didn't, her new marriage is invalid. Will Marlo lose her knight in shining armor? Will she or Vance spill the beans that will bring down various governments? Will Sir Michael ever get the British Invasion going? 

In the Are You Being Served? episode Front Page Story, the middle-aged senior saleswoman Mrs. Slocombe (Mollie Sugden) appears in a shocking green negligee that startles everyone. The store's maintenance man, Mr. Harman, was tasked to introduce the various "Holiday Girl" contestants. So shocked was he at her brazen, garish appearance that he quipped to her, "I'm glad I haven't got your nerve in my tooth!". I had a similar thought when watching Sextette. There was a difference in that Sugden was clearly in on the joke. It is doubtful whether Mae West was.

It took eight minutes into Sextette to see the walking cadaver of Mae West amble in. One is startled at her appearance, and not in a good way. Shuffling through, Mae West looks more than her then-eighty-four years. Mae West's character may be called "Marlo Manners". However, it is clear that she is playing herself, or rather a parody of her screen persona. One sits in pretty stunned silence seeing and hearing West warble out solo musical numbers. She performs After I'm Gone to a besotted Alexie and then croons Happy Birthday Twenty-One to the Olympic teams' mascot. The latter is a reworked version of the Neil Sedaka single Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen, since the Olympic team was not going to have a sixteen-year-old on the squad in any capacity.

I think any semblance of reality left long before West and Timothy Dalton broke out into Love Will Keep Us Together. I need to walk that back a bit. West didn't actually sing this so much as she spoke some words like "Stop!" in her particularly cadence. Sextette is a weird blend of contemporary and ancient. You have the then-three-year-old Captain & Tennille hit performed in the film. On the other hand, you have Baby Face, which was well over fifty years old by the time West recites it to the delighted conference. 

In fairness, the oddest musical number did not belong to Mae West. In a surprising turn, that distinction goes to Dom DeLuise. His rendition of the Beatles' Honey Pie is flat-out bizarre and pointless. It is bad enough to be one. It is deadly when it is both. This mishmash of musical styles, from Tin Pan Alley to early disco, is one of less odd elements of Sextette.

One figures that Sextette might have worked, admittedly very dubiously, if our leading lady was maybe in her late twenties to late thirties. Seeing this very senior citizen strut around with all the men in ardent passion for her is frankly a bit creepy. I think that most of the performances played it as if it was a joke that no one could take seriously.

No one except for Mae West. Her screen persona was always a bit broad, almost an exaggeration of a woman. Here, she seemed to act as if she really was the object of naked desire to every man that she encountered. There is a montage of her past glories in her own brand of shuttle diplomacy. One newspaper headline has her posing with presumably Moshe Dayan. West's ego and/or vanity (perhaps delusions) was so great that the picture did not bother to show West in her younger days. Instead, the photos all showed her as she was at the time. Dayan may have had an eye patch, but he was nowhere near that blind.

In certain ways, Sextette seemed more like a Mae West Greatest Hits montage than a genuine film. In a fashion montage, West rattled off some of her past quips to presumably her designer (Keith Moon). It, however, does not look as if she is speaking to him. Instead, it looks more as if she was filmed somewhere else, gave her old quips, and Moon was meant to "react" to them when he had nothing and no one to react to. 

While watching Sextette, I wondered why and how Mae West never became a drag act. Not West herself literally, though I can somewhat see her become the first female drag queen before Faye Dunaway's Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest took that dubious title. Instead, I wondered why modern drag queens don't do Mae West impersonations. She seems a ready-made vehicle for such acts: the big wigs, big hair, big everything. Yet, I digress.

As stated, almost everyone played their roles big or small as if Sextette was not to be taken seriously. I figure that was director Ken Hughes' intention. Either that, or he was as nutty as anyone else in Sextette. The musicians seemed to have the most fun being ridiculous. Keith Moon from The Who was camping it up way past the Nth degree as Marlo's costume designer. The Beatles' Ringo Starr similarly had one scene as Laslo. He was surprisingly good, being so silly in his performance. Alice Cooper himself appeared as the "Singing Waiter". He really had no purpose apart from singing Next Next (that generation's version of Ariana Grande's Thank U, Next). 

The actual actors similarly took a broader manner with varying degrees of success. The best of the lot is Timothy Dalton as the perpetually frustrated Sir Michael Barrington. What makes him successful is that he does not go fully broad. He is not strictly speaking playing it straight. His declarations of passion are not exaggerated. Dalton is playing things as if Sir Michael was more a naive man than a blind idiot. He is somewhat underplaying things. That allows him to look more amusing when he inadvertently comes out by going on about how he had relationships with his all-boys school teams.

Dom DeLuise was going the opposite way and going full-on camp. Intentionally or not, his Dan Turner threw shade at our love goddess. "Now listen, you--caliptuous plants eat up a lot of oxygen. And tonight, of all nights, Miss Manners is going to need as much oxygen as she can get!". He tells this to a poor hotel worker bring in a eucalyptus plant into the bridal suite. Whether or not Herbert Baker's adaptation of West's own play Sextet meant to draw attention to how old West was is open to speculation. The twist involving Sir Michael is not bad but like a lot of Sextette, a bit odd. 

George Hamilton was somewhere between Dalton's straighter manner and DeLuise's full-on craziness. He was trying to be comically menacing when pointing out that Marlo may not have gone through with the divorce when he was reported dead. When he, for reasons unknown, meets "the godfather" in the world peace conference room, he was more exaggerated in manner. Hamilton was clearly in on the joke, even if he went a little overboard in showing it. Tony Curtis looked a bit bored with things, and I hope he got a decent paycheck out of this. 

In retrospect, I think Walter Pidgeon was the straightest player in the bunch. Like with West, Sextette would be Pidgeon's final film. Like with West, it is a sad way to end their careers. However, he did not look either crazed or delusional. 

To be fair, there were a few clever quips. Alexie misunderstood who Marlo's "Uncle Sam" was. When asked what he did, she replied he was a tax collector. At the peace conference, we see a freakish-looking Jimmy Carter lookalike. Flashing a frightening grin and eating peanuts, he looks straight into the camera and tells us, "Billy was right. These people are nuts". I think that applies to everyone involved in the film. Sextette is worth watching only if you want to complete a Mae West filmography collection or enjoy seeing freakishly awful films. 

DECISION: F