This is another one of those movies that’s mainly a way to string together a bunch of musical numbers and call it a film… and also featuring Mae West, but it’s not a typical West vehicle, because she isn’t in it all that much.

Despite all that, this is much better than it has any reason to be. I guess it’s a testament to how good the Hollywood professionals were back then: They could take a nothing-much concept like this and make it into a really amusing movie.

And Mae West has several dozen of funny one-liners to hand out at any given moment.

This is the performer that’s given the most screen time, I think? And looking it up, she has to be Hazel Scott…

Yes, it’s during WWII, so we get a couple of patriotic numbers, too.

And this thing — a Gardening for Victory skit that seems to come out of nowhere, but I assume was sponsored by the gummint.

It’s a pretty madcap movie.

With a whole bunch of characters with character.

imdb hates it.

The Heat’s On. Gregory Ratoff. 1943. ⚄

Amazingly enough, this movie has good reviews — it has a 92% tomatometer.

The imdb rating is more realistic.

It’s a really, really bad movie — nothing makes much sense, and the characters’ motivations seem totally random. I was going “wha? wha?” throughout the entire thing.

The only thing here that worked was the ending, which I guess was trying to reference Beau Travail, perhaps?

The Swimmer. Adam Kalderon. 2021. ⚁

Even as a cigarette girl Marlene has the best lighting.

Nice drapes.

While watching the movie, I kept wondering whether the governor was that funny guy from all the movies, and:

It is! I didn’t know that Edward Everett Horton had done even slightly straight roles like this. But he’s excellent here, too.

This really isn’t that much of a movie — it’s mainly a vehicle to watch Marlene Dietrich being pretty on the screen. But even so, von Sternberg makes the most of it, and we get a very amusing little movie where Dietrich is The Bad Girl; the Baddest Girl Ever In A Movie.

The Devil is a Woman. Josef von Sternberg. 1935. ⚄