Screen: 'Auntie Mame'
The New York Times Bosley Crowther
Patrick Dennis's eccentric caregiver. Tasty, frothy fun with magnetic Russell.
/vi-assets/static-assets/favicon-d2483f10ef688e6f89e23806b9700298.ico
HURRICANES may be out of season, but one blew into the Music Hall yesterday, along with the Christmas stage show. The name of it is "Auntie Mame" and it should be causing much turbulence in this area until well after the Christmas holidays. For this full movie version of the stage play, with Rosalind Russell again at the center of it all, does sure enough generate gales of laughter as it sweeps across the screen.Like the stage play before it and, indeed, like the character of Auntie Mame, its Beekman Place maharance, it is largely inflated with hot air—or a sort of intoxicating vapor or theatrical laughing-gas. There is little or no solid substance to its heroine and her milieu of cafe society jokers, free-loaders, phonies and freaks.Most of its whirling, swirling action is in a succession of virtual skits, strung together in a loose chronological order that extends from the Prohibition era until the present. And it scatters anachronisms as freely as a cloud scatters rain.But for all its absurd exaggerations and bland inconsistencies, this picture of a tireless party-giver is a highly entertaining thing to see. And, because of the gags that gush from it, it is a constantly amusing thing to hear.What's more, in its superficial racing across several strata of rich society, it does catch some glimpses of behavior that flash a few glints of irony. The picture is every bit as potent, if not a good deal more so, than the play.Actually, the stage play, as written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee from the novel of Patrick Dennis, was more like a movie script in its pile-up of pictorial business and its multiplicity of scenes. The invitation to expansion was hand-engraved in the play. Now it has been accepted by screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green and by the director, Morton DaCosta, who has reveled in the greater physical range.Everything is expanded—the party in Auntie Mame's duplex, with which the entertainment is appropriately introduced; the tryout of her one play in New Haven, the foxhunt on the South Carolina estate, where Mame snags herself a wealthy husband, and the bit on the Matterhorn. The lavish décor of Mame's apartment is changed almost as frequently as are her flashy costumes, and all of them are dazzling, in color and on the modified wide-screen.But obviously most expansive is Miss Russell, who lets herself go with even more gushiness and grandeur of gesture than she did on the stage. As the downright incredibly fluid and spirited sybarite who, nonetheless, gives her orphaned nephew an abundance of attention and love, she succeeds in creating a creature that is as comically engrossing as a clown and yet possessed of surprising little pockets of tenderness that, every now and then, she suddenly opens and empties of a touching largess. It is this tenderness in Miss Russell that makes Auntie Mame tolerable, for without it she would be an inexcusable egomaniac and a bore.Closest to reality among the others are Jan Handzlik and Roger Smith, who are almost plausible and quite appealing as the nephew in his respective stages of boy and man. Forrest Tucker is broadly humorous as the rich Southerner whom Mame smartly weds, and Fred Clark is mad as a banker who tries to make a prig of the boy.Farcical and funny among the others are Peggy Cass as a myopic secretary who makes a mistake of a delicate biological nature, Coral Browne as an actress who drinks and Lee Patrick and Willard Waterman as a Connecticut couple who raise Babbitry and bias to a high estate. Yuki Shimoda as a houseboy, Connie Gilchrist as a maid and Joanna Barnes as a finishing-school's end product do variously lively caricatures."Auntie Mame" is unrestrainedly a wild and innocent spoof, but it manages to make it apparent that it has a heart and that it's in the right place.The stage show at the Music Hall is introduced with the traditional Christmas pageant, "The Nativity." It offers in its lighter entertainment the Kirby's Flying Ballet, the Columbus Boychoir, Victor Julian's animals and the Corps de Ballet and Rockettes.

AUNTIE MAME, screen play by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, from the Patrick Dennis novel as adapted for the stage by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee; directed by Morton DaCosta; a Warner Brothers presentation. At the Radio City Music Hall. Running time: 143 minutes.Mame . . . . . Rosalind RussellBeauregard Burnside . . . . . Forrest TuckerVera Charles . . . . . Coral BrowneMr. Babcock . . . . . Fred ClarkPatrick Dennis . . . . . Roger SmithLindsay Woolsey . . . . . Patric KnowlesAgnes Gooch . . . . . Peggy CassYoung Patrick . . . . . Jan HandzlikGloria Upson . . . . . Joanna BarnesPegeen Ryan . . . . . Pippa ScottMrs. Upson . . . . . Lee PatrickMr. Upson . . . . . Willard WatermanBrian O'Bannion . . . . . Robin HughesNorah Muldoon . . . . . Connie GilchristIto . . . . . Yuki ShimodaSally Cato . . . . . Brook ByronMrs. Burnside . . . . . Carol VeazieAcacuis Page . . . . . Henry Brandon