Mame

It has been a puzzlement to me ever since seeing Mame in it's premiere run way back in 1974, that so many people have so many different views of this movie. It is either absolutely loved or positively hated by the people who see it. I believe Lucille Ball is, and always will be Mame. She plays the character exactly the way she should be played, hard, tender, funny, bitchy, loving, sophisticated and free-spirited.

This film has a bright cheery look and feel with big splashy production numbers which lovingly look back at the grand old Hollywood Musicals of the past. The production values are stunning, with beautiful sets and costumes that are truer to the period than the ones in Auntie Mame. The supporting cast is great, with Bea Arthur as Vera Charles and Jane Connell as Gooch. And concerning the complaints about the filming of Lucy through gauze, just go back to the MGM Musicals of the 40's and 50's and you'll see almost every major female star, young and old, filmed through heavy gauze.

I've come to the conclusion that this movie has been labeled a bomb for so long that some people already have their minds made up not to like it before the opening credits have ended. And the ones who see it for the first time without any idea of it's troubled history, end up loving it!

This was Lucille Ball's penultimate film ("Stone Pillow" being her last) and proves, despite her age, she still has all her youthful charms and charisma, but strengthens the "Lucy Ricardo" in her as well--she can't sing. But she is quite talented on her feet (and she was recovering from a broken leg!). She brought a bit of the 'Lucy' persona into the Mame, which I feel didn't hurt the character-- now Auntie Mame is both free-spirited and screwballed; strengthening Mame's brother's wariness to let his son stay with her.

Rosalind Russell's 50's version was great as well, but was more solemn and serious than this, and was the nonmusical adaptation. That's all good and well, but I feel music enhanced the airy blitheness that is Mame.

Oh, and I forgot to mention Bea Arthur, who played Vera Charles impeccably, as if she was born for the role.

Let's face it: If you like Russell, you'll abhor this film; if you like Lucy you'll fall in love with it; if you like the nonmusical you'll feel the musical was deprived of proper depth; and if you liked the musical you'll think the nonmusical was rather pensive.

For those who enjoyed seeing this lively piece in the 1960s, or who liked the novel thirty years ago, Mame could be not only an entertaining sentimental journey, but an interesting view of how times have changed.

Lucille Ball is an interesting if not entirely right choice for the main role. She shows Mame Dennis's vivacious personality beautifully, accenting - naturally - the comic aspects of the character. It is a demanding role, covering eleven years from the heyday of the twenties until the start of the forties. Among the character developments are a period of job-hunting, the Southern-belle wooing of a second husband, and the growth involved in raising a child. Her acting is ideal. However, the role asks for a singer equal to the actor, and Ball is not up to it. Her low, aging voice has some depth, especially in the elegiac "Boy with the Bugle," but not the force and clarity of a good singer. The music and lyrics give her a hand, however, with an especial highlight in "Bosom Buddies," the scathing and hilarious duet with Bea Arthur as Vera Charles, "the first lady of American theater." Other catchy tunes you might remember are the title song ("You coax the blues right out of the horn,) Mame," and the romantic, "My Best Girl."

Beware of what you may get into as you watch it though: Mame is a piece whose message has become dated. Mame Dennis was a hero to a generation of young novel readers some forty years ago, and those who saw her character on the original musical stage were struck by her energy and her view of the world. "Live!" she says. "Life is a banquet, and most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death!" But those viewers were from a different era, when women did not work, were expected to be domestic, and her world-hopping would have been seen as radical: an early expression of women's spirit. She was inspirational in her context.

Today, though, she represents a different notion. Coming from a vantage point of extreme wealth, her admonition, "Live!" is easy for her to say. She did not create her wealth, but inherited it from her first and second husbands. On her own, Mame cannot provide for herself. When her first inheritance is wiped out in the Great Crash of 1929, Mame gets fired from job after job, relying on her former butler and nanny to pay the bills, until she fortuitously manages to marry into wealth again.

So in a modern context, we see Mame not as a freedom-loving feminist expressing herself against the prevailing social constraints, but as a woman who must depend on men to provide her with the necessary element of her freedom: money. In the depression, she could afford to fly around the world and spoil her children on her inherited money, while those who may have wished to be inspired by this spirit could not.

Her heroism was not in how she gained her money, but in what she did with it. Even so, taking a two-year honeymoon and holding thirteen parties in two weeks ("She had to cancel one," the butler explains) is hardly politically correct, today. Even her altruistic gesture at the end, when she buys a plot of land for a home for single mothers, is as much a jab at her nephew's future in-laws as pure philanthropy, and the plight of her beneficiaries is only brought home to her when her secretary becomes one of them.

It is therefore difficult today, to find Mame unambiguously admirable or inspiring. Her spirit comes from wealth; her wealth is unearned; and is used primarily to pump her own spirit. Her charm notwithstanding, the view of her lifestyle has taken a turn in an age when the wealthy can know how to live, while most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death.

Mame, therefore, is worth a second glance, not only for its tuneful exuberance and wonderful comic moments, not only as a vehicle for a sentimental review of an old favorite, but as a historical piece: a view of the admirability that was.

Mame was Lucille Ball's last movie, and to honest she was too old to be convincing in much of it. She throws away probably the best song in the musical - If He Walked Into My Life - but claws back a bit of class for Bosom Buddies (with the fabulous Bea Arthur, from the stage production), and the whole Southern sequence, starting with the hunt and culminating in 'Mame' the song. Lucy on roller skates is also pretty funny. I'd have liked to have seen someone like Angela Lansbury or Janis Paige, both who had done the role successfully in stage, star in it, but there are compensations (Jane Connell, who was Agnes on stage, is good here, as is Robert Preston as Beau). It's not bad - it just could have been just that bit better.

Critics at the time complained that "Mame" was overproduced, but you simply can't stage a musical version of Patrick Dennis' novel/memoir "Auntie Mame" and not have it be splashy with all the trimmings. Screen-adaptation of the hit Broadway show (previously staged and filmed without songs as "Auntie Mame" in 1958 and starring Rosalind Russell) had a lot of people in 1974 crying foul over the casting (they were "anti-Mame"). The by-passing of Broadway's Angela Lansbury for the lead brought nothing but slings and arrows for this new Mame, Lucille Ball, who--despite a sandpaper voice--is to be commended for giving her all to a distinctly old-fashioned presentation. Ball has several amusing scenes, particularly when she's due to be on stage with gal-pal Vera Charles (Beatrice Arthur) and can't stop primping in her vanity mirror. The plot is the same as before: an orphaned lad goes to live with his merry, madcap aunt in 1920s New York and learns about life. Robert Preston is well-cast as a romantic suitor, and Arthur is wonderful reprising her Tony-winning role as Vera. The picture has gauzy, gaudy razzle-dazzle, though not enough to justify a two hour-plus movie. Portions of it creak and sag with the weight of sentimentality; worse, an unnecessary montage of hugs-and-kisses at the finish line is grueling. Still, the cast works hard to keep things bubbling along and there are some choice highlights. ** from ****