Travels with My Aunt (1972)

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

The amazing Dame Maggie Smith has had many great roles in her career, and on film she has played a variety of characters, from the corruptible Miss Jean Brodie, the acerbic but fun loving Dora Charles in "Murder by Death", the rigid cousin Charlotte in "A Room with a View, and currently the role which introduced her to millions who otherwise may not have known her, the Lady Grantham on BBC's "Downton Abbey". In "Travels With my Aunt" she is a 70 year old eccentric woman who mysteriously appears at a strange woman's funeral, and claims to be her sister, thus adopting her suppose it nephew home she engages in a series of wacky adventures. Along the way, he finds himself learning more about life and he could ever hope to imagine while she flashes back to the truth of her real past which isn't a life to be quietly dismissed.The alleged nephew is Alec McGowan, a rather square peg who is easily manipulated by her lust for life and is easily taken for a literal ride BT her. Along the way she introduces him to drifter Cindy Williams and her black companion, Louis Gossett Jr. She tells him of her many affairs which the audience gets to see through some magnificently filmed flashbacks. In period costume, she is absolutely ravishing and while in a scene depicting her as a teenager, she does not appear to be under 30. I actually thought she resembled Vanessa Redgrave in those scenes. The 20's period costumes fit her very well, clad in outfits that her TV granddaughters would definitely be wearing.As the truth about her erupts, the real motivations are exposed and it isn't what you think. This is definitely not a rip-off of "Auntie Mame" which some reviewers have suggested although the moral of live life to the fullest and give yourself to others to make their lives a little better is loud and clear.The film was to be a reunion for director George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn, but that did work our. Hepburn's original casting may give way to the fact that the costumes look very Hepburn in style. The current career of Dame Maggie is very comparable to Hepburn's later career which is why some people, myself included, consider Dame Maggie a modern day British version of Hepburn.The film is certainly very theatrical and an artistic way of looking at life that pragmatic people may frown upon. So this may not appeal to the sensible, the non-dreamers, the dreary. Stay behind then and leave thus voyage to us. I'll take this aunt any day. She knows where the banquet is.

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.

Graham Greene's novels can be so subtle as to tend toward the obscure. It's no wonder, then, that "Travels" translated to film tends to meander a bit. Greene himself admitted that he wasn't really sure where Henry and Aunt Augusta were going to land next.The travels here are of two types -- physical, across Europe, and temporal, as Augusta reminisces. One breaks up the other, while still advancing the plot, such as it is, although at times it seems to disappear.The chief enjoyments here are the travels of the physical kind -- the varied scenery, the sumptuous architectures, the brilliant photography, the geographically-appropriate costumes.The acting isn't bad, either. One can but wish they'd had more to work with.

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.