Auntie Mame
US (1958): Comedy
Auntie Mame began as a novel by Patrick Dennis (aka Ed Fitzgerald), then was adapted into a long-running Broadway play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. This popular 1958 film version permits Rosalind Russell to recreate her stage role as Mame Dennis, the flamboyant, devil-may-care aunt of young, impressionable Patrick Dennis. Left in Mame's care when his millionaire father drops dead, young Patrick (Jan Handzlik) is quickly indoctrinated into his aunt's philosophy that "Life is a banquet -- and some poor suckers are starving to death." (the original line on stage was "sons of bitches" rather than "suckers", but the film was made while Hollywood was still under the thumb of the hidebound production code). Social-climbing executor Dwight Babcock (Fred Clark) does his best to raise Patrick as a stuffy American aristocrat, but Mame battles Babcock to allow the boy to be as free-spirited as she is. After losing her fortune in the 1929 Wall Street crash, Mame makes the acquaintance of the charming oil tycoon Beauregard Jackson Picket Burnside (Forrest Tucker). She proves that she loves Burnside for himself rather than his millions during a zany fox-hunt sequence, and her subsequent marriage to Burnside assures her nephew's financial future. Left a widow when her husband falls off an Alp, the disconsolate Mame decides to keep busy by writing her memoirs, with frowzy secretary Agnes Gooch (Peggy Cass) acting as her stenographer. Mame and her best friend, eternally drunken actress Vera Charles (Coral Browne) decide to come to the loveless Gooch's emotional rescue by fixing her up with a date -- and the result is an almost instantaneous pregnancy for the luckless Agnes, who is then "adopted" by big-hearted Mame. All of the film's various plot lines are threaded together in a climactic party scene, in which Mame tries to save nephew Patrick (now grown up to become Roger Smith) from a disastrous marriage to a shallow socialite (Joanna Barnes). Directed in the sledgehammer manner of a summer-stock performance by Morton Da Costa, Auntie Mame nonetheless delivers solid laughs throughout, with Rosalind Russell absolutely brilliant in the role she was born to play. In 1974, Auntie Mame was remade as the filmmusical Mame with Lucille Ball. The less said the better. (Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide)
6 nominations
· Best Picture 1958: Jack L. Warner, producer (Warner Bros.)
· Actress 1958: Rosalind Russell
· Supporting Actress 1958: Peggy Cass
· Art Direction/Set Decoration 1958: Malcolm Bert - Art Direction, George James Hopkins - Set Decoration
· Cinematography (Color) 1958: Harry Stradling
· Film Editing 1958: William Ziegler