A great way to kick off 2025 as a moviegoing year is by visiting an earlier year, namely 1933. At 6:30 p.m. Saturday, January 4 only, the Orpheum Theatre screens I’m No Angel, a classic comedy written by and starring Mae West.
Directed by Wesley Ruggles, I’m No Angel chronicles the adventures of Tira (West), a “Sister Honky Tonk” who performs with a circus, first as a midway song-and-dance act and later under the big top, sticking her head into the mouth of a lion. She scandalously vaults up the economic ladder via various worshipful, affluent men, and consultations with an astrological table. Early on, when a fortune teller (Nigel de Brulier) looks into his crystal ball and tells her he sees a man, she frowns and says “What, only one?”
Eventually Tira does indeed boil it down to one man, however, a rich swell played by the young Cary Grant, with whom she does the unthinkable — truly fall in love. Everybody ends up in court by the finale, where Tira, acting in her own defense, soon has the judge and jury eating out of her hand.
The faint of politically correct heart may be unsettled by the movie’s racial and ethnic stereotypes, though they’re all sympathetically intended, as well as by footage of an earlier era in the treatment of animals in entertainment. But even allowing for this, I’m No Angel is a blast. West’s familiar persona — the swaggering walk, the purring, offhand delivery — hadn’t curdled into a cornball cliché at this point, and her throwaway lines have a cheerful insouciant vibrancy.
Along with She Done Him Wrong, also with West opposite Grant, and the Wheeler and Woolsey comedy So This is Africa, both from 1933, I’m No Angel is thought to be one of the films that led, in 1934, to the adoption of the Hays Code and of studio self-censorship. It’s also loaded with favorite West one-liners, like “Beulah, peel me a grape” and the immortal “Come up and see me sometime,” among others.
The Orpheum show on Saturday is in celebration of that venue’s 96th anniversary. I’m No Angel played there in ’33; the marquee trumpeted West as “AMERICA’S MOST STARTLING WOMAN.”
The following day, at 2 p.m. on Sunday, January 5, the Orpheum celebrates another movie giant with a showing of the 1925 Buster Keaton silent Seven Chances, with live musical accompaniment on the theater’s Mighty Wurlitzer organ. Both shows are rare cinematic experiences, not to be skipped lightly.
Tickets for I’m No Angel are $16; for Seven Chances they’re $20 for adults. Go to orpheumphx.com for details.
