She Done Him Wrong (1933)
Technically a movie
We’rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack! Yes, after a brief holiday hiatus your favorite movie review newsletter that you sometimes read1 is back with yet another movie you’ve never heard of that (somehow) was nominated by the titular Academy for Best Picture. As we ease into 2026, we figured we’d start everyone off with a short movie that clocks in at just over an hour: the 1933 Mae West vehicle She Done Him Wrong. Despite a low rental-dollar-per-movie-minute ratio, was this quick quipper quite adequate? There’s only one way to find out …
Previews
What, if anything, did we know about this coming attraction before we watched it?
Ellen: Yeah of course I’ve never heard of this, but I have heard of Mae West thanks to, you guessed it: Gilmore Girls.
Tyler: This movie could be anything, though with that kind of title you can just tell it’s from the 30s.
Plots & Feelings
This one’s pretty self-explanatory.
Short Version (courtesy of IMDb): In the Gay Nineties, a seductive nightclub singer contends with several suitors, including a jealous escaped convict and a handsome temperance league member.
Long Version (modified from Wikipedia and formatted to fit your screen):
As the intro card informs us: it’s the gay 90s! The 1890s, that is, marked by “handlebars on lip and wheel” and when “legs were confidential.” A few quick pops give you a vibe of the era, and yeah: folks seem pretty happy! And how could they not be, with large beers for just 5¢2 at Gus Jordan’s saloon in the Bowery. It’s not just the cheap drinks that keep the patrons happy: it’s bawdy singer Lady Lou. Every man within spitting distance is absolutely entranced by her, and she uses this to her advantage, mainly in the form of gifted diamonds.
Tyler: Lou’s whole deal (character, accent, overall schtick) is just three much, it’s like she manages to somehow under- and over-abbreviate every syllable. Surely she can’t keep this up the entire time?
Future Tyler: My sweet summer child …
Despite their current entwinement, there’s a lot Gus and Lou don’t know about each other. For instance, Gus’s associates Russian Rita3 and her lover Sergei Stanieff are money counterfeiters and involved in a prostitution ring, and they’ve roped in a young lady named Sally whom Lou attempted to take under her wing. Meanwhile, Lou is quite friendly with plenty of men for diamond-acquiring purposes, including one of Gus’s rivals and former “friend” named Dan Flynn. She also has a more romantic eye on the young director of the mission that’s moved in next door, Captain Cummings. In fact, the only man on whom Lou does not seem to have designs of any kind is her trusty bodyguard, Spider.
Ellen: This movie is chock full of one-liners, an emblematic one being when Lou is consoling Sally for a mistake, “Listen, when women go wrong, men go right after them.”
Tyler: I’m convinced that Lou is a machine that can only speak in quippy one-liners.
Spider is getting antsy. Lou’s boyfriend Chick Clark is currently in prison for violent robbery, and he’s got it in his head that Lou hasn’t been true to him. That’s an accurate suspicion, so Spider thinks it’d be a good idea for her to go down and provide reassurance. Lou is basically the mayor of the cellblock, where every inmate greets her warmly. Chick is kind of tweaking, but Lou manages to calm him down with false promises. As she leaves, it’s clear she’s glad he’ll be in prison for a long, long time…
Ellen: For days after we watched this, Tyler and I had fun imitating the fast-talking style, but in the case of Chick, my only note was, “Chick Clark has GOT to open his mouth, good gravy!”
Tyler: Mine was “Some of these men are like ventriloquists, their mouths barely move.”
This author must be honest with you: this bullet is kind of a mish-mash of info to know. Here we go: Dan Flynn is the one who helped send Chick to prison, he knows Gus is into shady stuff and a new mystery detective (“The Hawk”) is onto him, and he promises to protect Lou if 👀👀, but will also threaten her if that’s what it takes. Lou does several musical numbers, including “A Guy What Takes His Time.”4 She also secretly takes it upon herself to save the mission (and its handsome leader) by paying the landlord a diamond necklace worth $12,000.5 Lou also does her best to flirt with Cummings, but he’s like “diamonds have no soul blah blah blah.” Oh speaking of diamonds, Sergei can contain his attraction to Lou no longer and gives her a diamond pin that belongs to Rita.6
Tyler: I gotta say, I found Lou’s performance to be surprisingly lacking in … pizzazz? I expected so much more, or even any sort of real performance. Alas, she just kinda stood there and swayed and tbh isn’t even that great of a singer, and yet the crowd went wild.
Ellen: Boobs!!!!
It’s now time for all hell to break loose: Chick escapes from prison! He sneaks into Lou’s window and almost strangles her, but aw shucks, he’s still in love. Lou calms him down and promises that she’ll run away with him after she finishes her next number. He hides in the alley until she’s done, and when Lou goes back upstairs, Rita is there. She sees her pin on Lou’s dress and is enraged. The Russian woman has a knife, and in the chaos, Lou accidentally stabs her! When the police come to search her room for Chick, Lou is calmly combing the dead woman’s hair, strategically hiding her face. After they leave, she has Spider get rid of the body and tell Chick to come back up while she goes to do yet another song.
While singing, Lou signals to Dan Flynn to go up to her room, and Chick shoots him dead! Gunfire draws out the cops, and it’s pandemonium. In the fray, Cummings shows his badge and reveals he’s “The Hawk.” He arrests Gus and Sergei. Chick is still lurking in Lou’s room and jumps out to try to get revenge on her, but Cummings stops him. As the crooks are being carted away in a paddywagon, Cummings leads Lou to an open horse-drawn carriage instead. He tells her she doesn’t belong in jail and removes all her other rings and slips a diamond engagement ring onto her left ring finger, and she takes it in stride.
Ellen: Girl what????
Tyler: I can’t with this movie.
Intermission
Even though ILTBTA is free, please indulge us further and enjoy this quick “advertisement.”
This installment of ILTBTA is brought to you commercial-free by … the mission next door!
When you’re tired of drunkenly gawking at the bejeweled hottie, sober up at the mission next door! You might even learn a thing or two.
Wiki-Wiki-Whaaat?
Love a good Wikipedia rabbit hole in search of some fun facts? Us too.
She Done Him Wrong’s Wikipedia page has some interesting facts and anecdotes that we recommend you read through, but here are a few of our favorites:
She Done Him Wrong is based on the 1928 Broadway play Diamond Lil, which also starred Mae West. The film was West’s first starring role in a movie after starting on Broadway at the age of eighteen and making her name as a writer and performer of provocative plays like Sex, The Drag, and The Constant Sinner.
Ellen: I feel somewhat better knowing that it’s based on a play, so rather than writing it with the intent to skip over connective plot points like mad, they probably just cut stuff for time. I’d argue they perhaps should have stepped back and put the scalpel down…
She Done Him Wrong was such a commercial hit (earning $2 million on a $200,000 budget) that it saved Paramount Studios from bankruptcy. Today, there is a building on the studio lot named after West in recognition of this.
While Cary Grant (who plays Cummings) eventually became one of the greatest movie stars of his era, he started out in vaudeville acts under his given name of Archibald “Archie” Leach. Paramount executives demanded he change his name to “something that sounded more all-American” so the British actor combined the first name of a character he had recently played in a musical with a pre-approved list of American-sounding last names.
At an extremely tight 66 minutes, She Done Him Wrong is the shortest movie to ever be nominated for Best Picture (though technically it was nominated for Outstanding Production). Ya know what movies were decidedly not short …?
Honorable Mentions
What other movies should you be watching?
The Lord of the Rings is a truly epic trilogy, a fantastic fantasy saga that feels like the rare exception to people complaining that “the books were so much better.”7 Look, I can already hear you saying “Guys that’s a big investment, aren’t those movies really long?” And while, yes, they are all long (even before the extended editions), it’s in service of bringing to life an entire world with stunning settings (we love you New Zealand ♥), CGI so good you’ll forget this is from the early 2000s, and a whole host of memorable characters along the way. (Bonus: some of the characters are hot!)
On the off chance that this has convinced you to watch (or rewatch!) this saga, you’re in luck: Fathom Events is showing each movie in the trilogy in select theatres over the next couple weeks to celebrate the 25th anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring.
Fill In The Blank
How did we really feel about The Academy nominating this?
Ellen: I’d like to skip town before The Academy breaks out of prison! Truly what is even happening in this movie. The plot hangs together by a thread, and that thread is “Mae West is so sexy that any man with whom she comes in contact is instantly cooked.” I leaned on the Wikipedia summary much more than usual in writing Plots & Feelings, because certain plotlines jumped around so much it felt like they cut some explanatory lines, or maybe even whole scenes! That being said, I did have fun! Mae West’s delivery is absolutely wild and of a time, so between that highly inimitable patter and the relentless one-liners, I was smiling the whole time. Confused, but smiling!
Tyler: I’d like to ask The Academy for a refund on the diamonds8 I bought it. This is a chaotically neutral, wild fever dream of a pre-Code movie that is somehow convoluted but also makes zero sense. As Ellen says above, it relies 100% on Mae West and her suggestively quippy appeal (for better or worse), and while I chuckled at some of her lines and snappy delivery, I just wasn’t charmed by her schtick. Maybe if I saw this at the time and was enthralled enough by the “showing” to balance out the “telling” it would’ve landed better for me, but much like the wine they probably serve at the saloon Lou performs at, it simply didn’t age well.
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Let The Credits Roll
Thanks for reading! Some quick housekeeping as you exit the theatre:
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Post-Credits Scene
Get a sneak peek at the next ILTBTA installment.
From 30s bombshells to 2000s literal bombs, buckle up for our next ILTBTA movie: the 2008 war drama The Hurt Locker. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker follows a bomb disposal team during the Iraq War. This critically acclaimed, Best Picture-winning film is available to watch for free with a Netflix subscription or can be rented from everywhere else.
Until then, good riddance Kevin Patullo please leave and never return hold onto your diamonds!
Make your resolution this year to watch more movies and share ILTBTA with a friend!
Made you look! We’ll do our inflation calculation on a more consequential number later.
Sounds like my ex-wife!
Ellen: This was the only song in the movie that I recognized, thanks to the Trainwreck Featuring Great Musical Numbers: Burlesque. You’re welcome.
That’s around $450k in today’s diamonds!
Ellen: Sergei you dog!!!
Basil: What, a dog? I’m awake I swear.
Full disclosure: I (Tyler) did not read the books.
AKA $3.99 plus tax.