Auntie Mame

It’s as much as your life is worth to speak ill of Auntie Mame in certain circles, and I have no strong objections to it — except that it’s rather dull as filmmaking and that they cast Forrest Tucker (his presence has never helped any movie). It’s not that I have any objections to the attempt to preserve the theatricality of the stage show. No. It’s the fact that the film too often just comes across as cheap and stagey rather than theatrical with ocassional stabs at being cinematic. Plus, one of its big comic set-pieces — the fox hunt — is lifted almost exactly from Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight‘s stag hunt, with the slapstick increased and the charm surgically excised. And there’s the fact that the film just goes on too long. Its later scenes tend to drag and the comedy and social satire becomes painfully obvious — skewering the same old targets the movies have been skewering forever. (Upscale suburbia probably seemed fresher in 1958, but it’s just the same old stuff in a cheaper suit.)

All that probably sounds like I don’t like Auntie Mame — and that’s not true. I simply can’t buy it as a great movie, much less some kind of sacred cow. (The furor that resulted from Tilda Swinton’s plans — apparently, put on hold — to remake it with a Swinging London 1960s setting was nothing short of an elderly version of “you’ve ruined my childhood.) It’s mostly a fun movie that preserves some great — and some indifferent — performances (that only occasionally are pitched the last row of the upper balcony). Plus, a lot of the dialogue is very clever and funny, though if we’re honest most of that occurs in the film’s first hour. I can enjoy the film — I’ve even been known to incorporate “Oh, that moon is bright!” and “How bleak was my puberty” into conversation — just not too often.

The Hendersonville Film Society will show Auntie Mame Sunday, Aug. 9, at 2 p.m. in the Smoky Mountain Theater at Lake Pointe Landing Retirement Community (behind Epic Cinemas), 333 Thompson St., Hendersonville.