Go West, Young Man
represented the first time that
Mae West
starred in a film not originally written with her in mind. Based on Lawrence Riley's stage comedy
Personal Appearance
(which starred
Gladys George
on Broadway), the film casts La West as Mavis Alden, a pretentious and somewhat stupid movie star who is shipped out on a nationwide promotional tour of her latest picture,
Drifting Lady
. Stranded in a backwater Pennsylvania town, she finds time for a chaste romance with local gas-station attendant Bud (
Randolph Scott
). Her enthusiastic press agent tries to stage-manage a wedding between the two casual lovers, whereupon West wriggles out of the commitment by renouncing Scott -- repeating the flowery dialogue from her newest cinematic masterpiece. Mae West is moderately amusing in an uncharacteristic assignment, but one wonders what the results would have been if Paramount had allowed her to star in her first choice of assignments: A satirical biography of Catherine the Great.