Word: augustas
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Cukor juggles stock character types and familiar plot complications with playful expertise. Henry and Augusta, along with her 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 ranson to Visconti (her wildly romantic first lover) 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. When she finally does deliver the ransom, she collapses hysterically in her now aged lover's arms only to find that...
...AUNT AUGUSTA'S was a persistent past, and she dwells in reminiscence. She drapes herself in shoulder furs and slinky sequinned gowns, and mannerizes the carefree twenties with every flourish of her cigarette holder. Her figure has the lines of a Beardsley and her history mimics the twists of those lines. Her life was all amour--she mock-swooned at lovers' seranades, whirled waltzing in their arms, and made indulgent love to them. And when they abandoned her, she resurfaced like an unsinkable Molly Brown. This life spent sipping champagne in Grand Hotels with vast baroque rooms and parlors caressed...
...Aunt Augusta crowds the apartment she and Wordsworth share with souvenirs of her continental high life, but they give it only a faded ratty elegance. Glass ornaments flash everywhere -- the powder jars and pin bowls, gold cherubs and a chandelier that looks like an upside-down wedding cake are cheap reminders of now hollow dreams. For at 70, 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. Henry simply hasn't lived. And it is his travels with her, to Istanbul in the flesh and into her past in reminiscence, that initiate him. Surviving one shocker after another, his stolid primness relaxes into tolerance. Augusta tells him that his legal mother was a virgin, he is accosted by whores in a sleazy Paris nightclub while a stripper twirls platinum nipples in the spotlights. It is as if Aunt Augusta were Henry's wicked fairy...
...father is in the CIA, her boyfriend a pop artist, and she can talk of nothing but the fact that her period is late and whom among her countless bedmates could the culprit be? Then Henry sleeps with her. The girl is just a modern version of Aunt Augusta, but stripped of the illusions. She faces facts with the same irresponsible gaiety in which Aunt Augusta cloaked her dreams...