Auntie Mame

Front Row at the Movies by Shirrel Rhoades

[mr_rating_result]

I used to live near Darien, Connecticut. It was a town that functioned as a gated community, a refuge for highly paid New York executives. It was very exclusive. Blacks or Jews were rare. Even the maids and yardmen were bused in, not welcome to live there.

That’s what made the “revenge” in the 1958 movie “Auntie Mame” so sweet when the eponymous Auntie Mame – a free-spirited woman played so exquisitely by Rosalind Russell – left her fortune to build a Jewish children’s home there.

In the movie, this “restricted” community is called Mountebank (identified in the stage version as being located “Just past Darien. You’ll love it. It’s the most restricted community in our part of Connecticut”).

“Auntie Mame” is getting a retro showing at Tropic Cinema. The movie is based on the 1955 novel by Patrick Dennis (the pseudonym of Edward Everett Tanner III) and the subsequent 1956 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee.

One of the bestselling satirical novels of the 20th century, “Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade” chronicled the adventures of a boy growing up as the ward of his eccentric aunt. The character is said to have been based on Dennis’ real-life aunt, Marion Tanner – but Dennis denied the connection.

“I write in the first person, but it is all fictional,” insisted Tanner. “The public assumes that what seems fictional is fact; so the way for me to be inventive is to seem factual but be fictional.”

Rosalind Russell played the title role in the Broadway adaptation, and then starred in the movie version. Russell won a Golden Globe for her screen portrayal.

The madcap storyline: When his father dies, young Patrick is placed in the care of his aunt, Mame Dennis. Mame is a flamboyant Manhattanite, hosting frequent parties with such friends as the frequently drunk actress, Vera Charles; Acacius Page, who runs a nudist school; and Lindsay Woolsey, a book publisher.

Mame quickly becomes fond of Patrick, and “aims to give him as broad a view of life as possible.”

As Auntie Mame puts it: “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!”

Thus, we follow the comedic struggle between Mame, trying to instill these open values in the boy, and the efforts of Dwight Babcock, a tight-fisted trustee of the highly conservative Knickerbocker Bank, to restrain Mame’s influence by separating them.

Patrick grows up to be a bit of a prig, engaged to a spoiled and prejudiced girl in Mountebank. Her family (appropriately named Upson) looks down on Mame and her circle of questionable friends.

But, of course, Mame triumphs and Patrick winds up marrying her new secretary and agrees to let his Aunt take their son on a trip to India – the story coming full circle.

There’s a wacky cast – from an exuberant Russell to Jan Handzlik as the young Patrick Dennis and Roger Smith as his older self. Fred Clark is the uptight conservator Babcock; Peggy Cass repeats her Broadway role as Mame’s confident Agnes Gooch; Forrest Tucker is the millionaire whom Mame snags; Joanna Barnes is Patrick’s antisemitic fiancée; and Pippa Scott is his true-love-to-be.

Leonard Maltin gave the film 3.5 out of 4 stars. He called it: “Episodic but highly entertaining, sparked by Russell’s tour-de-force performance.”

The movie is listed as one of American Film Institute’s “100 Years … 100 Laughs,” the 100 funniest American movies of all time.

And it ranks 93% on Rotten Tomatoes.

In 1958, Patrick Dennis (A/K/A Ed Tanner) wrote a sequel titled “Around the World With Auntie Mame.” But my favorite was his 1961 celebrity parody, “Little Me: The Intimate Memoirs of that Great Star of Stage, Screen and Television.”

However, all of Tanner’s books went out of print in the 1970s and he gave up writing to become a butler. At one time, he worked for Ray Kroc, head of McDonald’s. His employers had no inkling that their butler, “Edwards,” was the famous author Patrick Dennis.

Email Shirrel: srhoades@aol.com