MAME (1974)

You’d never guess that AUNTIE MAME was the top-grossing film of 1959 after seeing this woebegone 1974 musicalization.  Then again, you’d never guess it after watching the 1959 film.  Time hasn’t been kind to Dennis Patrick’s carefully fictionalized memoir of his youthful days with his social-anarchist guardian aunt.  Mame’s iconoclastic upper-crust bohemianism long defanged, even smug; our erstwhile heroine not so far off the bourgeois conventionality she so stridently rejects.  The original stage play & ultra-faithful film version a triumph for Rosalind Russell*; again as a B’way musical with Angela Lansbury.  So, it’s easy to put the blame on Mame, here a painfully over-parted Lucille Ball, filmed in the softest of focus to hide 62 years of pratfalls & smoking.  Limping thru the part without the clothes-sense to pull off the Theadora Van Runkle monstrosities passing as outré couture; vocally ‘challenged,’ posing while dancers twirl about her; and missing the edge needed to meet the character halfway.  (Mame in the book far more abrasive, abusive, even scary.)  But the idea that Lansbury, or someone else (Cher, Carol Burnett*, Barbara Harris, this film’s eccentric co-star Bea Arthur) would have made much difference is nonsense.  (A decade after the film, a Lansbury led revival on B’way, with key members of the original cast repeating, closed in a month.)  And definitely not with flat-footed director Gene Saks, who’d done the 1966 stage musical, calling the shots.  Here and there, choreographer Onna White pulls off something simple (like the hat doffing backtrack shot in the title number), but elsewhere, her party scenes a mess.   Only Ms. Arthur’s basso-best pal (Mrs. Saks, BTW) and Robert Preston’s rich southern savior, get any kind of rhythm going.  These two carry just the right stylized style within.  They’re like cockroaches of musical comedy, they’d survive anything . . even without help from an army of technicians unable to get anything right.  (Though even Preston can’t do much with the ballad composer Jerry Herman added to beef up his part.)  Producer Robert Fryer, musing on this disaster in his office one day put it this way: ‘Well, the studio gave us a choice.  MAME with Lucy or no MAME.  Isn’t it better to have that?’   Discuss.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *As mentioned, the 1959 film version of AUNTIE MAME. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/auntie-mame-1958.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Film musicals are hard!  A film genre all but lost for a couple of generations after duds like MAME and the insanely awful LOST HORIZON/’73 of the year before.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/02/lost-horizon-1973.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Carol Burnett as Mame?  This Blackgama ad, from their famous ‘What Becomes A Legend Most’ series, sells the idea.  Shot  the same year MAME was in production.