Word: cukor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lacks feeling in his telling, and his sense of place comes out sparse and unfamiliar. But the old man often feels too much too fondly. Travels With My Aunt is altogether an old man's work. Written by an aging Graham Greene and directed by an aged George Cukor, it is a last grand grinning caper through a glamorous era long dead. It is something to be enjoyed in the spirit of camp--nothing more than a very foolish fond old movie...
...story Cukor tells is that of Henry (Alec McGowen), a forty-year-old virgin, the most conventional sort of English bankclerk, and his 70-year-old Aunt Augusta (Maggie Smith), as promiscuous and eccentric as Henry is straightlaced. She sweeps him out of his dreary English garden away on a precarious flirtation with the underworld...
...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...
...Cukor is proselytizing for the style of the good old days but he knows full well its illusions. He only half-heartedly retreats into a past he cannot believe in. As his camera traipses gaily through the scenes of Aunt Augusta's youth, lighting it in rich rose colors and tuning it to a soundtrack of syrupy violins, he risks distending what should be entertainment into statement...
...Cukor is caught between, unsure of which way to turn, so her compromises and gives a consciously corny edge to his romanticism. His irony saves his nostalgia from sickening. He pleads sympathy for bankrupt dreams on the condition that those dreams are not indulged. Travels With My Aunt is simply a sketchbook movie of daydreams gone aglimmering...