Mae West gives a hot time to the nation.


"I'm the finest woman who walked the streets," declares bejeweled, hip-swishing Lady Lou (Mae West) at the beginning of She Done Him Wrong. Lou works as a singer at the Gay Nineties saloon of Gus Jordan (Noah Beery Sr.), who plies her with diamonds to keep her by his side. She runs afoul of stalwart mission captain Cummings (Cary Grant), who warns her that she's on the road to perdition. Mae West's first starring film, She Done Him Wrong literally saved Paramount Pictures from bankruptcy. It would remain the best of her feature films, most of which were severely watered down by the Production Code (whose renewed stringency of 1933 was brought about in great part by West herself). She Done Him Wrong was based on West's own stage play, Diamond Lil, which ran on Broadway for 97 weeks. West sings "Frankie and Johnny," "I Like a Man Who Takes His Time," and ""I Wonder Where My Easy Rider's Gone.""


She Done Him Wrong is a Pre-Code 1933 Paramount Pictures comedy romance starring Mae West and Cary Grant. Its plot includes melodramatic and musical elements. Others in the cast include Owen Moore, Gilbert Roland, Noah Beery, Sr., Louise Beavers and Rochelle Hudson.
The film was directed by Lowell Sherman and produced by William LeBaron. The script was adapted by Harvey F. Thew and John Bright from the successful Broadway play Diamond Lil by Mae West. Original music was composed by Ralph Rainger, John Leipold and Stephan Pasternacki. Charles Lang was responsible for the cinematography, while the costumes were designed by Edith Head.
The movie is famous for West's many double entendres and quips, including her seductive, "I always did like a man in a uniform. That one fits you grand. Why don't you come up sometime and see me? I'm home every evening."
Blonde Venus, starring Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant, predates She Done Him Wrong by a year even though Mae West always claimed to have discovered Cary Grant for her film, elaborating that up until then Grant had only made "some tests with starlets."


Though Mae West's famous line to Cary Grant is "Why don't you come up some time and see me?" in She Done Him Wrong, she changed it to "Come up and see me sometime" in her next movie, I'm No Angel, which was released the same year and also co-starred Grant.
She Done Him Wrong bears some resemblances to The Bowery, a film released the same year by United Artists starring Noah Beery's brother Wallace Beery in a similar role. Also, the part Wallace Beery played in The Bowery, a saloon owner named Chuck Connors, appears in She Done Him Wrong as a small role and is played by a different actor.
Mae West loved to take credit for "discovering" Cary Grant for She Done Him Wrong but Grant had already made seven movies, including playing Marlene Dietrich's leading man in Blonde Venus the previous year. Of the people who appeared in this film, Louise Beavers became the only African American actress to be brought aboard the film by Mae West personally. She wanted a black woman to appear opposite her, and Beavers was happy about that. When she did stage and screen work, West made it a point to act with Black American actors and actresses, helping to break racial discrimination in entertainment. Stage shows West did saw her arrested for saucy material and, sometimes, having black people on stage, Now with this film, she and her Paramount bosses called the shots: black stars appeared in a few of her films after this one.


Release Date: February 9, 1933 @ The Paramount

Distrib: Paramount


Boxoffice: $2,150,000 2013: $79,256,000