The Rest is Entertainment podcast (devoted to insider showbiz gossip) recently named and shamed actors who eschewed memorizing scripts, opting instead to have their lines “fed” to them via a hidden earpiece: Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr Moreau, Johnny Depp in the later Pirates of the Caribbean movies and Robert Downey Jr in Ironman (his justification: “I’d rather spend time with my family”). While the hosts didn’t cite 84-year-old screen diva Mae West, she must have been an early adopter when she resorted to this method in her notorious final film, the unintended camp classick Sextette (released on this day (2 March) in 1978). The suggestion that the earpiece concealed under West’s Bardot-style bouffant wig would receive police signals that she would then recite as if they were dialogue was an urban myth spread by unchivalrous co-star Tony Curtis (perhaps his revenge for West loudly inquiring, “You’re going to wear a wig to cover that bald spot, aren’t you?” when they first met). Anyway, West – costumed by Edith Head, carefully shot in ultra-soft-focus, virtually immobile and never making eye contact with any of her co-stars - emerged from retirement to make Sextette (tagline: “She won’t be satisfied until she’s loved by all mankind - one man at a time!”), casting herself as much-lusted after bombshell Marlo Manners, surrounded by besotted male admirers (including 34-year-old future James Bond Timothy Dalton as her husband-to-be). A vanity project gone berserk, Sextette bombed at the time (the New York Times exclaimed “Granny should have her mouth washed out with soap, along with her teeth!") but has since been embraced by cult movie aficionados (I’ve screened it twice at the Lobotomy Room cinema club to appreciative audiences). As Paul Roen concludes in High Camp: A Gay Guide to Camp and Cult Films (1994), “The film is a campy, corny, funny, smutty romp just as one might expect.” My favourite moment: West and Dalton dueting on Captain & Tenille’s “Love Will keep us Together.”
