more ›

Of I'm No Angel (1933), which screened Sunday at the Pacific Film Archive, film critics like to write that if star Mae West had spoken only one line in her career--"Beulah, peel me a grape"--she would still have been one of her era's brightest screen stars. That's always seemed hyperbolic, but the film itself makes a pretty convincing case. West (at right), more imposing than coquettish as Tira the Lion Tamer, wields physical presence like a boxer and sexuality like a gunslinger throughout the film. From her opening scene, where she's introduced to a carnival crowd as "the girl who discovered you don't need feet to be a dancer," until the end, when she gets her man (Cary Grant, 29 years old and looking about 14, as upstanding society fellow Jack Clayton), Tira owns the screen. more ›