One of my favorite fun movies, and definitely my favorite Rosalind Russell film, is Auntie Mame. Hilarious from start to finish, it takes me back to the adventures I used to have with my fiercely single yet sought after, staunchly independent and lovable grandmother Jean, who was as stylish and adventurous as Rosalind’s Mame. That’s why I identify so much with the mantra Mame proclaimed through the whole film, “Yes! Live! Life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!”.
Rosalind plays the beyond vivacious eccentric Mame Dennis, aunt to the recently orphaned Patrick (younger played by Jan Handzlik, older played by Roger Smith) and takes him in as his guardian. Patrick is immediately exposed to Mame’s bohemian and exciting world of parties, world travel, unconventional education and love of art, style, and interior design. Proctoring this relationship however is the conservative and judgmental executor, Mr. Dwight Babcock, played with great aplomb by Fred Clark.
With every new experience, Patrick is an open-minded and curious sponge to his thrilling auntie, while Babcock is equally as mortified as he is threatening to separate Mame from Patrick. Although viewers somehow understand these may be empty threats, it’s abundantly clear that Mame and Patrick developed a resilient and sweet love bond that they both cherish and will not let anyone ruin.
As we watch Patrick grow up under the fabulous influence of his Auntie Mame, we see this small family unit and their nonconformist oddball friends go through adverse times, all to comedic effect. When Mame's investments are lost in the stock market crash of 1929, she takes a series of jobs: stage acting, telephone operator, and finally a sales girl at Macy's, all of which end miserably. However it is at her job at Macy’s during the Christmas holidays that she meets her future husband, a rich Southern oil man named Beauregard Burnside. They fall in love and get married just at the point when Mame is about to lose everything.
One of the funniest scenes is when Beauregard takes Mame home to meet the family and she goes on a fox hunt to both fit in with the family and compete with an old flame of her fiancé’s, Sally Cato. Mame who has never ridden a horse in her life is set up by Sally to ride a wild horse; Mame manages to stay on the horse purely because she’s stuck in the saddle, and catches the fox at the end! This scene shows what a consummate pro Rosalind always was at high-brow slapstick comedy, long after her role in 1940’s His Girl Friday (with another pro, Cary Grant).
Another classic scene is when a college-aged Patrick brings home his vapid, bigoted and conceited snob of a fiancée, Gloria Upson, but out of pure love for him, she agrees to his request to mute and hide all her eccentricities. But the fire that is in Mame and exquisitely revealed by Rosalind’s expressive face is when she sets a plan in place to thwart the marriage of her beloved Patrick to the brash and elitist Upsons by simply being herself and including her entourage.
The party scene includes some of the best quotes, one that was repurposed in the 1983 film Trading Places but originated in Auntie Mame when Gloria tried to tell an amusing story:
“Bunny Bixler and I were in the semi-finals - the very semi-finals, mind you - of the ping-pong tournament at the club and this ghastly thing happened. We were both playing way over our heads and the score was 29-28. And we had this really terrific volley and I stepped back to get this really terrific shot. And I stepped on the ping-pong ball! I just squashed it to bits. And then Bunny and I ran to the closet of the game room to get another ping-pong ball and the closet was locked! Imagine? We had to call the whole thing off. Well, it was ghastly. Well, it was just ghastly.”
Not only does no one laugh, but Mame’s best friend Vera takes her drink and puts it in Mame’s hand, since she clearly needs it! Another great Vera moment, played by Coral Browne, is when Gloria makes a faux-pas:
Gloria Upson: Miss Charles, I've just got to tell you how I adored you in "Mary of Scotland."
Vera Charles: Did you dear? That was Helen Hayes.
Vera Charles: Did you dear? That was Helen Hayes.
The comical role of Mame’s secretary Agnes Gooch is played by character actress Peggy Cass, who undergoes quite a transformation from mousy hausfrau to a glamour girl make-over at the hands of Mame, to assumed unwed mother before the realization that she is in fact married after a drunken night with Brian O’Bannion, Mame’s editor. Agnes herself can barely keep up with the transformation, “I lived. I gotta find out what to do now!”
Throughout the entire film, both Rosalind and the amazing film set that is her apartment undergo several fantastic design changes, reflecting the style of the time and the mood of Mame. Rosalind won a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Mame Dennis, which added to the five Golden Globes she received in her career, a record she kept until Meryl Streep won her sixth in 2007. Rosalind was as outspoken and lovable off screen as she was on, married to her producer husband, Freddie Brisson, for 35 years until she succumbed to breast cancer in 1978.
The film Auntie Mame is a feast for the eyes and pure laugh therapy. The image of a grown Patrick, now married and a father, handing his son over to his eternally young at heart Auntie Mame so they can go off and find new adventures, has stayed with me always. I can still see Mame walking the young boy up her grand stairs describing the next foreign land they will explore, which is the image I’ll always keep of both Rosalind and my grandmother Jean, climbing new heights, giving love and a joi-de-vivre every step of the way.
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