Sextette (1977) – Review

There are cult classics, there are vanity projects, and then there’s Sextette, a film that somehow manages to be both, and neither, all at once. Whether you find the result horrifying or hilariously watchable depends entirely on your tolerance for the absurd.

Based on West’s own stage play, Sextette tells the story of an aging yet still adored screen siren on her sixth honeymoon, this time with a young British aristocrat. The plot—such as it is—features a revolving door of diplomats, ex-husbands, and Cold War hijinks. Our story opens in a five-star London hotel, where Hollywood legend Marlo Manners (Mae West), the world’s most famous actress, sex symbol, and international icon, is enjoying her sixth honeymoon. Yes, sixth. Marlo’s new husband is Sir Michael Barrington (Timothy Dalton), a handsome, dashing British aristocrat who’s somehow not put off by the fact that Marlo is, well, 84 years old and speaks like she’s being dubbed in slow motion.

 

The couple of the…century?

But this is no ordinary honeymoon…oh no. Marlo’s hotel suite becomes the epicentre of international chaos. Global delegates have descended on the hotel for a peace conference (don’t ask why it’s in the honeymoon suite), and everyone is distracted because Marlo Manners is in the building, as international politics grinds to a halt when Mae West saunters by in a feather boa. Enter the ex-husbands. One by one, Marlo’s previous lovers start popping in, like ghosts of poor decisions past. First, we have Alexei Andreyev Karansky (Tony Curtis), a Russian delegate at the conference, who threatens to derail the intense negotiations unless he can have another sexual encounter with her. Not to be outdone by a Russian, we have Laslo Karolny (Ringo Starr), a mystic film director/rock star who talks like he’s stoned and disappears after one scene. That he escapes that early means his agent did something right. But will Marlo make the ultimate sacrifice for world peace?

 

“This is what the Cold War has come to?”

But there’s more; we also have gangster Vance Norton (George Hamilton) as another smarmy suitor with slicked-back hair and bedroom eyes. He arrives with a tan and some serious mustache energy, but not much else. And then there is an entire American athletic team, all of whom want to have sex with her. Of course, Marlo, in turn, reacts to them with the same sedated smirk and sultry catchphrases she’s been using since Prohibition and drives the film’s “plot” right off the rails. Have I mentioned that Keith Moon of the Who and Alice Cooper pop in for some reason? Add to all that nonsense, we also have the revelation that Marlo secretly works for the United States government as some kind of secret agent, using her fame and influence to shape the political stage. Because why not just chuck reality right out the door? 

 

This isn’t a vanity project. It’s a sad narcissistic nightmare.

Meanwhile, Marlo has to give a speech to the U.N., stop nuclear war, dodge a blackmail scandal involving a secret sex tape, and maybe rekindle romance with Sir Michael, all while wearing heels that should be illegal in 49 states. Her manager, Dan Turner (Dom DeLuise), who is the go-between Marlo and the government, spends most of his time running around screaming and sweating like he’s in a completely different movie, and to be fair, he might be. If at times you feel like you’ve set sail on a deranged episode of The Love Boat, you’re not too far off. Eventually, the film crawls it its grand finale, with Marlo strutting into a conference room full of world leaders, delivering a rousing speech about peace, maybe flirting with nuclear war into submission, and saving the world by the power of innuendo and shoulder pads. Then she kisses her husband, winks at the camera, and the credits roll over yet another inexplicable musical reprise.

 

“Is world peace really worth all this?”

Stray Observations:

• Dan Turner says that Sir Michael Barrington is a spy who’s “bigger than 007.” Which seems like foreshadowing, as Timothy Dalton would later take on the role of Bond for The Living Daylights and License to Kill.
• The entire film was shot in a real hotel in Los Angeles, because… budget. Most of it takes place in corridors, banquet rooms, and oddly generic hotel suites pretending to be “international embassies.”
• There is an interview between Rona Barrett and Sir Michael Barrington that is nothing but a series of “Gay Panic” jokes. That none of them are funny goes without saying.
• The infamous “Happy Birthday” number was not a parody. It was meant to be sultry. The disco arrangement, slow dancing, and sultry eye contact were all intentional. And unforgettable.
• Mae had difficulty hearing on set, so co-stars would reportedly speak their lines into a microphone that transmitted directly into a hearing aid in her wig. Yes. Her wig. That’s Hollywood ingenuity, baby.
• Non-singer Timothy Dalton sings “Love Will Keep Us Together” to Mae West. Not only that — she sings back. It’s not so much a duet as it is a hostage situation wrapped in disco.

 

License to Thrill?

Directed by Ken Hughes, Sextette was ostensibly intended as a campy musical comedy, but the film became instead a surreal spectacle of misguided nostalgia, proof that not all icons can withstand the ravages of time—or the harsh lighting of a movie set in the polyester-drenched late 1970s. The most glaring issue is the miscasting, or rather, the misplacement of West herself. At 84 years old during filming, West was far removed from the sultry, sharp-tongued bombshell who had scandalized and dazzled audiences in the 1930s. She recites lines in a slow, laboured monotone, often appearing confused or disengaged, and is clearly being fed her dialogue through off-screen cues. The effect is not glamorous or cheeky; it’s uncomfortable. Her refusal to adapt or update her persona gives the film a sense of time-travelling awkwardness, as if the ghost of old Hollywood has wandered uninvited onto a Brady Bunch set.

 

“Gloria Swanson wants her bed back.”

The screenplay is a complete mess. You can feel the script clawing at relevance like a desperate lounge singer. The jokes are older than Prohibition, and the pacing is so slow you could go make a sandwich between scenes and not miss a thing. And Mae West—bless her rhinestone-covered soul—is visibly reading cue cards, dubbed to high heaven, and seemingly unaware that the 20th century has progressed beyond 1939. The dialogue is like it was written by a horny ghost. Every line is a double entendre, sometimes triple, delivered with the timing of a rotary phone. Everything is bathed in a Vaseline-smeared lens of glamour, as if the cinematographer declared war on focus. Dialogue is whispered, mumbled, and occasionally forgotten entirely. Scenes end because the actors seem to give up. Plot points appear and vanish with the logic of a dream, if that dream involved being stuck inside a 1970s variety show hosted by Liberace’s ghost.

 

Alice Cooper as a substitute for Liberace…sure, why not?

Musically, Sextette isn’t much better; it’s a patchwork of ill-fitting cover songs awkwardly shoehorned into the narrative. The musical numbers come out of nowhere and go nowhere. One minute, someone’s talking politics, the next they’re disco-dancing in a gym with Alice Cooper. West croons pop standards like “Happy Birthday Twenty-One” and “Baby Face,” often in a strained whisper, as if the songs themselves are embarrassed to be there. The choreography is uninspired, the sets are flat and garishly decorated, and the cinematography veers between hazy glamour shots and flat television-style framing. Yet perhaps what makes this film such a fascinating failure is its sincere belief in its own fabulousness. The film is not self-aware; it truly believes that Mae West is still the magnetic, taboo-breaking superstar of the 1930s. It expects the audience to believe it, too. This dissonance—between the reality of what’s on screen and the fantasy it wants to sell—is where Sextette becomes unintentionally surreal. 

 

This film is a rhinestone-studded denial of time itself.

This would be West’s final film, a deeply unfortunate epilogue to an otherwise groundbreaking career. And yet, in the years since, Sextette has become something of a cult artifact: a symbol of faded glamour clashing with disco-era absurdity, a film so wrongheaded that it loops back around to fascinating. It’s camp, yes, but not always the good kind. But here’s the thing: Sextette is also weirdly fascinating. As a time capsule of 1970s excess and Hollywood delusion, it’s unmatched. It’s so tone-deaf, so egotistically strange, so determined to make Mae West into a sex goddess well into her eighties that you can’t look away. It’s bad… but in a glitter-covered, camp-tastic, please-never-let-this-happen-again kind of way.

 

“Lights, camera and…roll credits?

In conclusion, Sextette is not a good film by conventional standards, but it remains a valuable case study in stardom, legacy, and the perils of nostalgia. For admirers of Mae West, it may offer a bittersweet farewell. For others, it’s a curiosity—uneven, over-the-top, and unforgettable in its own peculiar way. It’s sad that for one who was once a notorious sex bomb, her career ended with an infamous box-office bomb.