Another of the movies that's on my DVR and is coming up on TCM is the musical Mame, tomorrow, April 27, at 3:45 PM.
Mame is a film version of a Broadway musical, which in turn was adapted from the play/movie Auntie Mame, with that ultimately having been adapted from a novel. I'm pretty certain I did a post on Auntie Mame ages ago, and the story is well-known enough that you might know the basics of it. Patrick Dennis is a 9-year-old kid in late-1920s Chicago whose well-to-do and conservative parents have died. The movie opens with the reading of Dad's will, which stipulates that he's going to live with his only living relative, Aunt Mame (Lucille Ball), in New York. But the will also stipulates that trustee Mr. Babcock (John McGiver) is going to be able to ensure that Patrick goes to a good traditional school and is raised Protestant. These are important for reasons we shall soon see.
Patrick shows up to Mame's large New York house one night with his nanny Agnes. His arrival is technically not unannounced, but Mame has made an error: the arrival is on December 1, as the telegram informed her, while Mame thought today was November 31. So when Patrick shows up, Mame is throwing a fairly wild party with a ton of guests and performing a Broadway-type musical number since this is after all a musical. Agnes is a bit put off at first, but Mame is a lot of a bohemian and a complete change of pace from the life Patrick knew up to this point. Some might think it's just what he needs, although Mr. Babcock is definitely not one of those people.
Life is pleasant enough for them, however, at least until October, 1929. That is of course the date of the stock market crash, and Mame is one of the people greatly affected by the lose in value of her investments. Somehow, though, she's able to retain her servants -- not on Patrick's money, since that is controlled by the trustees. But she has to go out and actually work, first in a Broadway show where her best friend, actress Vera (Bea Arthur), gets her the part, and then in a department store. It's there that Mame meets wealthy southerner Beauregard Pickett (Robert Preston), who ultimately marries her and makes her financially secure, at least until he dies suddenly.
By this time, Patrick has grown up (played as an adult by Bruce Davison) and is about to go off to college, with it not really beine mentioned that Pearl Harbor would have happened about the time he'd be a senior in college. Some time presumably after the war, Patrick has become conservative and is engaged to nice Connecticut girl Gloria Upson, who has fabulously wealthy relatives. The only thing is that they're also conservative in all the ways Mame abhors.
Mame was savaged by critics when it was released in 1974, and it's easy to see why. In the musical number at the party early on, the shots shift from long-focus and medium shots to close-ups of Mame. Every close-up is in exceedingly soft focus, to the point that it's distracting. Rosalind Russell was in her late 40s when she made Auntie Mame; the first stage musical version of Mame starred Angela Lansbury when she was about 40; Lucille Ball, however, was in her early 60s when she made this. She's not quite up to the singing, and the more slapstick screen persona of Lucille Ball is not what the Mame character needs. It's like all the charm was sucked out of the movie in turning it into a musical.
But, as always you may want to watch and judge for yourself.
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