Word: augusta
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Cukor fabricates stock character types and conventional plot complications with playful expertise. Henry, the stodgy middle-class bourgeois, Augusta, the eccentric aunt, Visconti, her wildly romantic macho first love, and her present lover, Wordsworth, a fortune-telling black African, wind up on a mock spy adventure on the Orient Express as Augusta delivers an illegal $100,000 ransom to Visconti held captive in Africa. Fortified by the belief that love conquers all. Aunt Augusta cajoles, lies, steals, blackmails, and is deported in the course of her mission. Having sacrificed practically all she own when she finally does deliver the ransom...
Travels With My Aunt is the story of Henry (Alec McGowen), a forty-year-old virgin and the most bankclerky of Englishmen, and his seventy-year-old Aunt Augusta (Maggie Smith), as promiscuous and unconventional as Henry is straightlaced. She sweeps him out of his dreary English garden away on a precarious flirtation with the underworld...
...Aunt Augusta chases after the dream of her youth and finds it seedless. Hers is a persistent past, and she dwells in reminiscence. She drapes herself in shoulder furs and slinky sequined gowns, and mannerizes the carefree '20s with every flourish of her cigarette holder. Her figure has the lines of Beardsley, and her history mimics the twists of those lines. Her life was all amour--she cavorted at their serenades, whirled waltzing in their arms, and made indulgent love to them. And when they abandoned her, she resurfaced like an invincible Molly Brown...
...Aunt Augusta crowds the apartment she shares with Wordsworth with souvenirs of her continental high life, but they give it only a faded ratty elegance. Her dresser-gleams with mirrors, powder jars and pin bowls; glass ornaments flash ever-where--curlicue knicknacks, gold cherubs, and a chandelier like an overturned wedding cake, are cheap reminders of now hollow dreams. For at seventy, she is unmarried, childless, and penniless, and the mauve colored gauze through which she views her world cannot protect her from...
Whimsical, quirky, sensuous Aunt Augusta is Henry's last chance at life. For he has risked nothing, suffered nothing, lost loved, given nothing, dreamed nothing. Travelling, both to Istanbul and into Aunt Augusta's past, is Henry's initiation into life. As this provincial survives one mindblower after another, stiff primness relaxes into tolerance. Augusta tells him that his legal mother was in fact a virgin, Wordsworth substitutes that woman's ashes with cannabis, he is accosted by whores in a sleazy Paris nightclub while a stripper twirls platinum coated nipples in the spotlights. Aunt Augusta is Henry's wicked...