This is a George Raft picture, but fourth-billed Mae West enters about halfway through and proceeds to dominate every scene she's in. Her part of this movie is why it is remembered as much as it is. Aside from her, it was entertaining enough as a parable about class and social climbing, with George Raft on the make and Constance Cummings the fallen-down-the-social-ladder woman he develops an interest in. Wasn't the most compelling story I've ever seen, but it works when seen in the context of the Depression and the growing realization that, as the Joker might have said, aristocratic moral respectability (at least as an inherent quality) was a mask dropped at the first sign of trouble. In other words, underneath all the education, manners, etc., they were just as venal, greedy, and corrupt as the criminal element that George Raft's character is trying to escape. And Mae West was the saucy, sassy personification of that, a walking contradiction who inhabits and shows the absurdity of each social domain.
Review of Night After Night
