Old Play in Manhattan

Diamond Lil (by Mae West; produced by Albert H. Rosen & Herbert J. Freezer) is probably the masterwork of the unversatile author of Sex, Pleasure Man, The Constant Sinner and Catherine Was Great. As a vehicle, at any rate, Lil remains after 21 years a good sturdy Mae Western. Too dated in 1928 to date much since, and so bad a play that it has considerable merit as a parody, Diamond Lil gives Miss West every chance to shoot the works, to be as majestically unrefined and unreformed as she knows how.

Against a flyblown Gay-Nineties backdrop, Lil queens it over a cosily archaic underworld of cokies and floozies, shoplifters and white slavers. She loves passionately and profitably, conceals a heart of gold under a breastplate of diamonds, commits murder once, gets away with it often, and renews--at the end of Act I--her hospitable invitation to come up and see her some time.

The performance in general, however, is less an invitation to lust than to laughter. Miss West's ideas about sex sometimes verge on the impracticable, while her manifestations of it are often a little too gaudy to be glamorous. But the lordly slink and the languid grunt are, for all that, the merely too emphatic mannerisms of an assured and perfected theatrical manner. When, for instance, a new suitor (Steve Cochran) sighs: "My love for you will last forever," it is with genuine mastery of timing and pitch that Miss West inquires: "How about your health?" In any theater world Mae West would be somebody, if only for being unlike anybody else.

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