Travels With My Aunt

Another of my recent movie watches was the early 1970s comedy Travels With My Aunt, which is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

Henry (Alec McCowen) is a conservative bank manager attending the relatively sparsely-attended funeral of his mother in London. Showing up at the funeral chapel is his Aunt Augusta (Maggie Smith), who hadn't seen her sister of Henry in ages, to the point that he's not going to recognize her. So after the funeral, she approaches him.

She's got a crazy story for him claiming that the woman Henry knew as his mother was not in fact his biological mother. Stunned by this, Henry accompanies Augusta back to her apartment where she lives with some oddball black guy Wordsworth (Louis Gossett Jr.) and tries to learn more.

But it turns out that Augusta has more plans in mind for Henry. We've already seen that she called up somebody from the funeral chapel talking about ransom money, and once Henry gets home, the police show up at his house and demand to search his mother's ashes without a warrant. My immediate thought was that this was a ruse by Aunt Augusta, although I don't think this is actually mentioned.

What does transpire is that Augusta's lover Visconti (Robert Stephens) has supposedly been kidnapped, and the kidnappers are holding him for a $100,000 ransom, which was quite a sum back in the early 1970s. One of the ways Augusta is going to raise some of the funds for it is to smuggle some cash from England into France, this being the era of capital controls. But she needs somebody staid like a banker to help her, somebody the authorities wouldn't expect.

The two get to Paris, and it turns out that's not enough for Augusta. The increasingly shaggy dog story means she's going to have to hop on the Orient Express, and Harry with her, to get to Istanbul to exchange that money, or something. Along the way, Wadsworth is generally obnoxious, while Henry meets a hippie named Tooley (a young Cindy Williams before she played Shirley Feeney).

They get to Istanbul, and then they have to go back to France because reasons, and eventually to North Africa via Spain where Visconti apparently is. All the while, Henry is learning a bit more about his aunt through flashbacks.

Frankly, I found this movie terrible, largely because I found the Augusta character to be a selfish jerk who upends Henry's life for no good reason other than her own happiness. Wadsworth was, I'm guessing, supposed to be comic relief, but is as obnoxious as Augusta and terribly unfunny. The flashback sequences also go on way too long, screwing up the pacing (even though the movie as a whole is only 109 minutes, so a fair bit under two hours).

Still, other people are probably going to like this one, so you may want to get a hold of the DVD and judge for yourself.