TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT (1972)

Something of a doomed project. Bought as a vehicle for Katharine Hepburn in the wake of GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER/’67 and LION IN WINTER/’68, hopes of molding Graham Greene’s 1969 novella into a sort of senior citizen Auntie Mame died in development. Nixing a Jay Presson Allen/Hugh Wheeler script, Kate’s own revised version was turned down.* But maybe Kate got it right. As made, the Allen/Wheeler script became one of those films where cast & crew have a grand time that never makes its way to the viewer. And with no one locating a proper style or tone to play in, everyone winds up pressing too hard. None more than Maggie Smith, in for Hepburn as the aging Aunt, urging Alec McCowen’s middle-aged Bartleby character to ‘live, live, live’ while they cross international borders on a picaresque cash-smuggling adventure. Meant to be ‘fun, fun, fun,’ it’s just tiresome. Worse, you can see exactly how this might have worked every time the film flashes back to Smith in earlier days, going from innocent schoolgirl to sophisticated woman-of-the-demi-world. Like one of those musicals where you go out humming the scenery instead of a tune, there's plenty of surface charm (immaculate tech work: Doug Slocombe lensing; John Box design; Anthony Powell costume) with director George Cukor moving it briskly along. Yet it ultimately manages the unusual trick of being half-baked and over-cooked.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Two years later, the musical MAME/’74 was an even bigger flop. (An underwhelming Auntie Mame, Lucille Ball might have been just right here.) While in-between, Smith redeemed herself mentoring Timothy Bottom’s boy/man playing a lonely, melancholy eccentric in LOVE AND PAIN AND THE WHOLE DAMN THING/’73.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: *That’s the accepted story. More likely the project, made while James Aubrey ran M-G-M, got taken away from Hepburn after her major flop with a similar OTT character in THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT/’69. Enter Maggie Smith whose last lead, THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE/’69, from a script by this film’s Jay Presson Allen, was Oscar’d.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-madwoman-of-chaillot-1969.html