Word: cukor
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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...
...movie isn't really an ode to romanticism; rather, it is an elegy to its passing. Cukor turns sentiment to laughter, to a capricious form of skepticism that knows "the good old days" to be illusionism. The loops of his freewheeling narrative dip eagerly into the past only to circle back a bit crestfallen. And in between, that cherished romance becomes sappy to the taste...
...Cukor's playful digs at romanticism still haven't inured him to it. Over-fond of the past, he brings confused eyes to the present, and stretches the contrast between to ludicrous dimensions. On the Orient Express Henry smokes dope with a wealthy bluejeaned backpacking American girl. Her 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...