Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Livestonth I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Alistair Olson After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

lasttimeisaw A George Cukor picture made in his twilight years, TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is adapted from Graham Greene's skylarking eponymous novel, and marks Dame Maggie Smith's much awaited follow-up to her Oscar-winning turn in THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODY (1969), resultantly is blissfully bestowed with an Oscar nomination No. 3. Playing the titular aunt, who is twice of her real age (by virtue of the able make-up artist José Antonio Sánchez), of London bank manager Henry Puling (McCowen, nearly a decade senior of Smith), Maggie's Augusta Bertram enters Henry's sedate life like a down-in-the-mouth raven during the funeral of Henry's mother. A long-lost aunt who has a flamboyant dress sense, an ear- piercing voice and eccentric makeup, from whom Henry receives the first bolt of blue that the woman whose ash he is holding is not his birth mother, and there's more to come. The film looks exceptionally rumbustious in the hands of a septuagenarian, a giddying caper globe-trots from London to Paris, then hopping on the Oriental Express to Istanbul and back, culminating in the terra firma of North Africa. Admittedly not everyone can stomach the whole package of garish fluff and ceaseless palaver prima facie, but once the ransom-collecting story- line is established, Augusta and Henry's adventure eases up into a more affable romp interspersed with Augusta's reminiscences of her youth and sundry love affairs. Maggie Smith's frivolously loquacious personage briskly corroborates the time-honored proverb "never judge a book by its cover", beneath all her self-absorbed wittering and jitters, Augusta emerges as a heart-of-gold, hopeless romantic even after toiling in the oldest profession for most of her life, and we can never quite decide whether she is dimwitted or not, when you think she is, she can gainsay it by intuitively snaffling something costly to shuck off her financial fix, so you opine maybe she isn't, then, how come she could be so credulously hoodwinked along the way? To counterpoint Smith's pyrotechnic extravagance, Alec McCowen's fusty nephew is tagged along with mild bewilderment but seldom loses his grip of his composure and slips into a plebeian laughingstock, he can be exasperating sometimes, but cunningly proves that he is worth his salt in the final reveal. Among the peripheral players, Louis Gossett Jr. is the cock of the walk as Augusta's currently live-in partner, an African fortune-teller called Wordsworth, who makes no bones about smuggling marijuana inside an ash-full urn and also lords over le quartier rouge in the Continent. A plush-looking, brassy-sounding, but ultimately spirit-elevating felix culpa doesn't desecrate Cukor's cachet, like its freeze-frame ending implies: coins have only two faces, and there is no one definite answer to the triad's final question because life is far more multifarious than that.

marcslope Such credentials--fine writers, Cukor direction, Maggie Smith--and this 1972 adaptation of Graham Greene's novel is a sad misfire. It looks slapped together, filled with handsome compositions elegantly shot by Oswald Morris, but they don't flow. The misadventures of a stuffy young banker and his unconventional aunt feel haphazard and random, and Smith tends to overplay. Alec McCowen, actually seven years Maggie's senior, is fine, but he doesn't do anything to surprise you, and I kept waiting for the character to discover what we've been suspecting for several reels about his identity. Lou Gossett, as her pot-smoking aide-de-camp, didn't impress me. The transitions between past and present are clumsy, the humor's wispy, the musical score overbearing in that early-'70s way, and in one scene, it sounded like one actor had been overdubbed--his voice is so much louder than everyone else's. The screenwriters don't know how to end this one, so it literally ends with a freeze-frame of a coin tossed in the air, and we don't much care about how it's going to fall. It feels pieced together, and like several scenes are missing; I don't know if MGM did a lot of pre-release cutting, but what's left can't really be said to hang together.

evanston_dad I'm fine with filmmakers adapting books to the screen and doing what they need to do to make the source material cinematic. But I'm always mystified by filmmakers who adapt a book to the screen and change so much that it's nearly a completely different story. I wonder why they wanted to adapt the book in the first place if they felt that so much of it was inadequate.This is a terrible adaptation of the wonderful Graham Greene novel, that even a dynamic performance from Maggie Smith in the title role cannot save. George Cukor directs this film like it's a relic from a different decade. Yes, the main character is stodgy and stuffy but that doesn't mean the movie has to be. And by the time the ending has rolled around, all vestiges of the source material have vanished completely, an unforgivable crime in my opinion when working with an author as great as Greene.Grade: D

Piafredux In a plot as zany as any the Marx Brothers could have hilariously mangled, the characters of Travels With My Aunt whirl you along with them through their oddball adventures. This is a film that just missed being a cinema landmark. But miss it does.Travels With My Aunt has everything going for it: splendid performances, helzapoppin' pacing (except for one or two brief languishments in the directorial doldrums), clever writing (adapted from Graham Greene's endearing story), and a cast working the material for all it's worth. So why does it miss?It misses because when it needs to be trying hard it lays back; and when it needs to lay back it tries too hard. And, more importantly, because it never grounds itself in the solid realm of the believable.ALlso, every VHS print I've seen suffers from sound so muddy that I found myself rewinding to catch, and enjoy, some of the film's funniest lines. The editing on VHS prints also leaves a lot to be desired; a hectic, zany film doesn't need any "help" from eye-startling jumps past the occasional few sprocket holes.Nevertheless the comic performances are brilliant, especially Louis Gossett Jr.'s as the patois-butchering, potheaded, half-mystical, half-cutthroat, hair-trigger-tempered Wordsworth. Maggie Smith's Aunt Augusta (a perfect name for a character who's anything but august) reigns like a mad queen over the whole cast throughout Augusta's self-narrated, self-indulgent, breathless reverie and search for her past loves & losses & triumphs. Alec McCowen plays Henry Pulling with perfectly understated aplomb, making you believe that his dowager aunt is leaving him breathless, bewildered, and yet bewitched by the world she leads him, from out of his insipid workaday life, to experience. As Tooley the young Cindy Williams deftly sends-up the pop-culture-soaked American youth of the time on a European spree: neither of Tooley's two feet ever seem to touch the earth, but her heart reaches out to touch Henry Pulling. And Henry, being Henry, manages to mismanage - but later learns that mismanaging is just part of...c'est la vie!This film urges you to stop taking life and yourself too seriously, and to instead, as the old Schlitz beer spots used to exhort, "Grab for all the Gusto you can!" This is all well and good, but the film wants some sort of bottom, a sense of grounding, a matter of connection that's just not there despite the lovely pathos the energetic characters generate. Maybe it's that a film that's not just a vehicle for comic antics can't be all sparks and no fuel? That worked for the Marx Brothers, but their "storylines" were mere props for their well-rehearsed antics and brain-boggling doubletalk. But Travels With My Aunt actually tries to tell a touching human tale - yet, like Tooley's, the film's feet never touch the ground that an engaging tale needs to convince, to captivate its audience.In the end, which seems to leave cast and audience suspended somewhere between earth and a fifth dimension, you wonder: is Maggie Smith's character really Henry Pulling's mother, and not his "aunt"? One thing's for sure: Henry's not going back to being a bank manager, or to anally tending his little garden where the loud trains - of life and experience and adventure - had always, until now, passed him by.