General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Sextette

Sextette is a 1978 American musical comedy directed by Ken Hughes, starring Mae West in her final film role as movie sex goddess Marlo Manners, who marries her sixth husband, Sir Michael Barrington (Timothy Dalton), on the same day that a world peace summit convenes in her London hotel.¹ The supporting cast mixes classic Hollywood names with 1970s rock figures: Ringo Starr, Tony Curtis, Dom DeLuise, George Hamilton, Alice Cooper, Keith Moon, Walter Pidgeon, and George Raft.¹ The film was a commercial failure that found a second life as a camp (deliberately exaggerated, ironic bad taste enjoyed knowingly) midnight movie, and it is frequently listed among the worst films ever made.²

Key fact	Detail
Release	2 March 1978 at the Cinerama Dome, Hollywood; New York opening 9 June 1979¹
Director / writer	Ken Hughes; screenplay by Herbert Baker from West's stage play¹
Producers	Daniel Briggs and Robert Sullivan (Briggs & Sullivan, Inc.), with Harry Weiss as associate producer¹
Budget	Estimates ranged from $4 to $7 million; West reportedly earned $1 million plus a percentage of profits¹
Box office	Cost between $5 and $8 million and grossed less than $50,000²
Physical properties	91 minutes, color, sound, rated PG, United States, English¹
Critical score	25% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 12 reviews³

Spoilers

Plot

In London, news outlets cover two simultaneous events at the Sussex House Hotel: a world peace summit and the wedding night of American movie star Marlo Manners, who has just married her sixth husband, Sir Michael Barrington.¹ Her manager, Dan Turner (Dom DeLuise), juggles a costume fitting, a screen test, and a request from a government contact that Marlo perform a mysterious task "for Uncle Sam," while an ex-husband and other admirers intrude on the honeymoon.¹ The musical numbers are disco-flavored versions of standards including "Hooray for Hollywood," "Baby Face," and the Beatles' "Honey Pie," sung by West and the cast.⁶

The source play

The stage play behind the film has an uncertain history. Early trade reports referred to the property as Sextet, and accounts differ on when West wrote it: Daily Variety stated in 1970 that she wrote it about ten years earlier, then reported in 1976 that she wrote it in 1928.¹ Later accounts give 1961⁴ or 1959.² A 1976 Box account said the play ran successfully on Broadway in 1941 and was set in a high-class English hotel in the 1930s, while the Los Angeles Times noted that it toured in the 1960s.¹

West sold the film rights, together with a screenplay adapted by Leonard Spigelgass, to James T. Aubrey, Jr. and Hunt Stromberg, Jr. in 1968 and 1969, with production planned for Warner Bros.-Seven Arts; that version never reached the screen.¹ The major studios declined to meet West's stipulation that she retain complete artistic control of the adaptation, and producer Perry Paulding briefly held the rights before the project passed to Briggs & Sullivan Productions, announced in February 1976.¹

Production

A long road to the first take. Scheduled start dates slipped repeatedly through 1976, from June to August to October to late November, before principal photography finally began on 1 December 1976 at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles.¹ Irving Rapper was reported as director in mid-1976 but left the project, and Ken Hughes, whose credits included Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Casino Royale, took over.¹^•² Filming ran more than twelve arduous weeks and finished in March 1977 with a budget that had ballooned to over $7 million.⁵

West was 85 during filming and played a glamorous star of about 26.² According to Hughes, she declined to rehearse, had difficulty learning dialogue of more than a few words, and needed 74 takes for a four-line exchange with a supporting actor; the director eventually gave instructions through a microphone hidden in her wig.² West held a cattle call at Samuel Goldwyn Studios on 30 June 1976 at which nearly one thousand men auditioned to be her leading man; she chose none, though eighteen were cast in small roles.¹ Edith Head designed West's gowns, and the Sheraton Town House hotel and the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles stood in for the film's Sussex Court Hotel and St. Martin's Church.¹

Release and distribution

No distributor wanted it. Although Warner Bros. sponsored a preview at the Westwood Bruin Theatre in September 1977, no studio would take the film, and rumors circulated during editing that it was a flop.¹^•⁵ A planned mid-February 1978 opening at Mann's Chinese Theatre was displaced when the run of Star Wars was extended, so the producers opened Sextette themselves on 2 March 1978 at the Cinerama Dome.¹ New World Pictures took international distribution in May 1978, but the film still had no domestic distributor; it also played at the Berlin Film Festival in February and March 1978.¹ Crown International Pictures acquired worldwide distribution in late 1978, premiering it at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco on 16 November 1978, and the New York opening followed on 9 June 1979.¹

Crown deliberately played up the film's camp qualities, running it as a midnight movie at New York's 8th Street Playhouse in 1979, where a predominantly gay audience dressed as the characters and shouted lines at the screen, and scheduling midnight runs in Southern California that December.¹ In 1981 it became one of the first films Crown sold to pay and subscription television services.¹

Reception

Critical response ranged from mildly positive to strongly negative. The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner acknowledged that West delivered the performance her fans wanted, while Daily Variety called the film a "pitiful and embarrassing attempt at camp" whose only amusing element was DeLuise's Dan Turner.¹ Vincent Canby's New York Times review of 8 June 1979 opened by calling Sextette "a disorientating freak show" and compared West's appearance to a sheep stood on its hind legs.⁴ Rex Reed, who had appeared with West in Myra Breckinridge, called it "a total, unbearable bomb."⁷ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds 25% from 12 critics, and Jonathan Rosenbaum, while calling it one of the world's all-time worst movies, credited it with "immense charm and lewd fascination."³

Camp afterlife

The film's reputation settled into a distinctive niche. Critics of the time were divided along age and sexuality lines, with young gay critics embracing it and older straight critics deriding it, and later assessments treat the film as a document of West's unshakable persona rather than a conventional comedy.⁷ The A.V. Club described it as both an act of self-love and a valentine to an earlier era, noting that the cast, including Starr, DeLuise, Dalton, Cooper, Hamilton, Moon, and Raft, participated largely out of affection for West.⁸ West died in 1980, two years after the release, and never starred on stage again after Sextette closed out her career.⁸^•⁹ The film remains available on streaming rental services.¹⁰

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Musical and music films (individual works) › Musical films of the 1970s and 1980s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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