User reviews

I was disappointed in this as so much is just great.

Cindy Williams is terrific as a hippy-dippy train passenger. Alec McCowan is wonderful as the bewildered strait-laced nephew who gradually allows himself to cut loose from his narrowly defined life. It was great to hear and see a much different Lou Gossett, with outrageous robes and an odd African accent that works in this. The location shooting was beautifully done, particularly in Paris.

Maggie Smith's performance (and I am a fan of Maggie's) was just too loud, too dramatic, just way too over the top, so that when her sad side emerged, it came across as equally phony. Her makeup as a very much older woman is flawless and when she played her younger self, it was a much more controlled performance.

I think Maggie could have used better direction here. A great story that at some time needs to be filmed again. Alec Mc Cowan's performance makes it highly watchable. He gets is just right.

I gave it a 7 out of 10.

Dull stuffy bachelor meets flamboyant eccentric aunt, who seeks to show him the world's pleasures. Sound familiar? While based on a Graham Greene novel, "Travels with My Aunt" plays on screen like a subdued version of "Auntie Mame." Unlike the rowdy broadness of the Patrick Dennis play and the Rosalind Russell film, George Cukor's adaptation of the Greene work tries to be high-toned and literary, while simultaneously striving to seem madcap and funny. Unfortunately, the film succeeds more in its pretentiousness than it does in its comedy.

Alec McCowen is fine as Henry Pulling, the bank clerk who fusses with dahlias in his spare time and fumes prissily when cannabis is mixed with the ashes of his mother. Henry is a prime candidate for an Auntie Mame, although he's a bit beyond his formative years. Henry's out-of-character dalliance aboard the Orient Express with Cindy Williams, as a young drifter on her way to Katmandu, should have been cut. The tryst adds nothing to the plot and only confuses perceptions about Henry. Maggie Smith, at times stunningly garbed in luscious gowns by Anthony Powell, plays Aunt Augusta for all she's worth, and Maggie is certainly worth a great deal. Although the actress is clearly too old to play the younger Augusta and too young, even with the age makeup, to play the elder woman, Smith is always fascinating to watch. Despite her mannerisms, which at times overwhelm the characterization, Smith is generally convincing and should have taken a shot at playing Mame Dennis in either the comedy or the musical version of "Auntie Mame."

Although "Travels with My Aunt" was beautifully filmed by Douglas Slocombe against scenic splendor that stretches from Istanbul to Venice to Spain, the pace is often sluggish, and the plot preposterous. The proceedings are propelled by Augusta's need to raise the ransom money to rescue a former lover, whose minor appendages are being sent to her one by one as a warning. However, coincidences abound, plot holes deepen, and threads are left hanging all over. Without McCowen and Smith, the film would be little more than a stylish, if soporific, travelogue.

This is a pretty odd movie that mixes drama with adventurous elements and yet somehow works.

The movie is definitely entertaining to watch, with a good cast, some fine comedy moments and a good solid adventurous story. Nothing too big or fancy, just a decent enjoyable movie quality movie to kill some time with.

The movie has a perfectly adventurous way of storytelling, meaning that lots of places around the world are being visited in short amount of time and many different characters come and go.

The movie obviously had some great production values, since the movie is set all around the globe, from Paris to Istanbul and everything around it and between. The movie is also looking with some lively, deliberately over-the-top looking sets and costumes (both nominated for an Oscar with the costumes even eventually winning.). But what else was to expect from a George Cukor movie. The man who is known for director cheerful and good musical mostly in the '50's and '60's including "My Fair Lady" but also comedies, like "Born Yesterday" and well known serious drama classics as well, such as "Gaslight", "The Philadelphia Story" and for some part, before he was booted from the set, also "Gone with the Wind".

He mixed all those previous styles he had worked with before in this movie. The end result is a quite unique and one of a kind movie, that works fine on the adventurous level, as well as the comical and dramatic one.

The movie is well cast with Maggie Smith in an absolutely splendid role. A role that even got her an Oscar nomination. She also had some great chemistry with Alec McCowen, who is obviously the least known actor of the main cast. His role even got him a Golden Globe nomination. Abolutely great and humorously entertaining was Louis Gossett Jr. in his role. He not only shows that he is a great actor but also how well he can handle the comedy genre. His character provides the movie with the most and biggest laughs. Too bad that his career has derailed so badly the last couple of decades, ever since his Oscar winning role for "An Officer and a Gentleman", from 1982.

But no, when you look at this movie you'll realize that it also is far from a perfect one. The story gets a bit too odd at times and the storytelling is just off. The movie also too quickly ends some potentially interesting or amusing plot lines and the different adventurous/comedy and drama elements don't always go together well.

Nevertheless it was a movie I mostly enjoyed watching and I wouldn't mind viewing it again.

A good entertaining movie, that definitely deserves to be seen.

7/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Saw it in Vietnam the year it was released, and it did what a movie is supposed to do - took me somewhere else, and made me forget reality for a while. Any movie that could hold the attention of a bunch of GI's under those circumstances has to be entertaining! Haven't seen the movie in over 30 years, but can recall enjoying it. What more can be expected of a movie?

My recollection is the main character reminded me of a composite of two of my own aunts. Made me laugh. I'm usually not too keen on period-movies, but this one didn't overdo the genre.

Good cinematography.

Anthony Powell died recently, so I decided to watch a movie for which he won an Academy Award for designing the costumes. George Cukor's "Travels with My Aunt" is no masterpiece but enjoyable enough, with Maggie Smith as a fun-loving woman who takes her nephew across Europe. There's a number of high jinks along the way. It looks like a movie that they had fun making. It's not any sort of great movie, but I liked it.

In addition to Alec McCowen as the nephew, the supporting cast includes Louis Gossett Jr. (An Officer and a Gentleman) and Cindy Williams (American Graffiti).

With all the talent connected to this film, it's amazing that it isn't better. Katharine Hepburn was the original choice for the lead, but some kind of contract dispute stopped her from doing it. Maggie Smith took over the role and won an Academy Award nomination. Even so, many critics complained at the time that she over-acted, but I feel she's the life and breath of what fun there is in the movie.

I didn't read the book. I don't care if a movie is accurately or loosely based on a book. I don't care if it's nothing like the book. I simply judge a movie on what it is. A complete book can never be filmed anyway so stop complaining. This movie is not great but it has it's moments and some of them are very good. Maggie Smith deserved her Oscar nomination. I like the contrast between Maggie Smith's performance as a young Augusta Bertram compared to her performance as the older Augusta which borders on caricature but she is fun to watch. I have had aunts who behaved similarly & so the Augusta I see here is very real to me. The stuffy nephew is obviously necessary but his character's story arc barely interested me. The color, the costumes, sets & locations are lush but the movie has the worst, cheap sounding bad background music. The complete musical score is perfectly awful. It makes an average but pleasant movie almost unbearable because it is constant & becomes an unwelcome unnecessary additional character who never leaves. Other than that, the movie is perfectly okay.

I'm fine with filmmakers adapting books to the screen and doing what they need to do to make the source material cinematic. But I'm always mystified by filmmakers who adapt a book to the screen and change so much that it's nearly a completely different story. I wonder why they wanted to adapt the book in the first place if they felt that so much of it was inadequate.

This is a terrible adaptation of the wonderful Graham Greene novel, that even a dynamic performance from Maggie Smith in the title role cannot save. George Cukor directs this film like it's a relic from a different decade. Yes, the main character is stodgy and stuffy but that doesn't mean the movie has to be. And by the time the ending has rolled around, all vestiges of the source material have vanished completely, an unforgivable crime in my opinion when working with an author as great as Greene.

Grade: D

The movie is great fun, flaws or no flaws. I just sat back and enjoyed it from start to finish. I have seen Travels three times and still think it's great fun. I think it's a movie that will seem better and better with time. Any movie that remains entertaining after repeated views has got to have something worthy in it.

Maggie Smith is questionably cast as a wacky British eccentric, enlisting the aid of her uptight "nephew" (the terrific Alec McGowen) to help her out of a complicated blackmail scheme. Lumbering comedy-drama adapted from a Graham Greene novel is heavily padded with pinched, salty wit and lots of gossipy chit-cat and theatrical flair. It can't compensate for a lack of substance in the story, nor that Smith is too smart of an actress to be completely convincing as this merry madcap. George Cukor directed, with a heavy hand. Lou Gossett and Cindy Williams are both fine in support, but the movie is a featherweight farce undercut by faded-memory pathos. More heart and humor would have sufficed. ** from ****

This is one of those filmed novels--like "The Prince of Tides", "The Object of My Affection", or "THe Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"--which readers of the book will find disappointing.

I'm guessing, however, that most people who discover it now will not have read the book. And as a stand-alone film, how could you not like it? Maggie Smith is hilarious; and now that she IS the age of the character she was playing at the time, it makes her broad performance even more amazing. (There are hints of this character in the role she played 29 years later in "Gosford Park".)

The real gift for first-time viewers will be discovering Alec McCowen's wonderful acting as the stiff, stodgy nephew. He's one of those actors you see once, and then immediately you'll want to find out what else he's done. Lou Gossett Jr, and Cindy WIlliams are also enjoyable in early career roles.

This film was made in an era where greats like George Cukor were getting in a few last licks out of lengthy, distinguished career. (William Wyler and Joseph L. Mankiewicz were also showing they still had greatness in them during this period.) The film's score deserves mention, as it teleported me back to 1972, where I could imagine myself seeing this in a theatre wearing bell-bottoms and sporting a shag haircut (like WIlliams' in the movie). The theme song, "Serenade of Love", should have been nominated for an Oscar.

So again, if I'd read the book--which I now plan to do--I might feel differently; but compared to much of today's dreck, this is a whole lot of fun. From the moment that portrait winked at me at the beginning, I enjoyed it.

In a plot as zany as any the Marx Brothers could have hilariously mangled, the characters of Travels With My Aunt whirl you along with them through their oddball adventures. This is a film that just missed being a cinema landmark. But miss it does.

Travels With My Aunt has everything going for it: splendid performances, helzapoppin' pacing (except for one or two brief languishments in the directorial doldrums), clever writing (adapted from Graham Greene's endearing story), and a cast working the material for all it's worth. So why does it miss?

It misses because when it needs to be trying hard it lays back; and when it needs to lay back it tries too hard. And, more importantly, because it never grounds itself in the solid realm of the believable.

ALlso, every VHS print I've seen suffers from sound so muddy that I found myself rewinding to catch, and enjoy, some of the film's funniest lines. The editing on VHS prints also leaves a lot to be desired; a hectic, zany film doesn't need any "help" from eye-startling jumps past the occasional few sprocket holes.

Nevertheless the comic performances are brilliant, especially Louis Gossett Jr.'s as the patois-butchering, potheaded, half-mystical, half-cutthroat, hair-trigger-tempered Wordsworth. Maggie Smith's Aunt Augusta (a perfect name for a character who's anything but august) reigns like a mad queen over the whole cast throughout Augusta's self-narrated, self-indulgent, breathless reverie and search for her past loves & losses & triumphs. Alec McCowen plays Henry Pulling with perfectly understated aplomb, making you believe that his dowager aunt is leaving him breathless, bewildered, and yet bewitched by the world she leads him, from out of his insipid workaday life, to experience. As Tooley the young Cindy Williams deftly sends-up the pop-culture-soaked American youth of the time on a European spree: neither of Tooley's two feet ever seem to touch the earth, but her heart reaches out to touch Henry Pulling. And Henry, being Henry, manages to mismanage - but later learns that mismanaging is just part of...c'est la vie!

This film urges you to stop taking life and yourself too seriously, and to instead, as the old Schlitz beer spots used to exhort, "Grab for all the Gusto you can!" This is all well and good, but the film wants some sort of bottom, a sense of grounding, a matter of connection that's just not there despite the lovely pathos the energetic characters generate. Maybe it's that a film that's not just a vehicle for comic antics can't be all sparks and no fuel? That worked for the Marx Brothers, but their "storylines" were mere props for their well-rehearsed antics and brain-boggling doubletalk. But Travels With My Aunt actually tries to tell a touching human tale - yet, like Tooley's, the film's feet never touch the ground that an engaging tale needs to convince, to captivate its audience.

In the end, which seems to leave cast and audience suspended somewhere between earth and a fifth dimension, you wonder: is Maggie Smith's character really Henry Pulling's mother, and not his "aunt"? One thing's for sure: Henry's not going back to being a bank manager, or to anally tending his little garden where the loud trains - of life and experience and adventure - had always, until now, passed him by.

Maggie Smith is the aunt in "Travels with my Aunt," a 1972 film also starring Alec McCowen, Lou Gossett Jr. and Robert Stephens, and is directed by George Cukor.

The movie centers around an old woman, Augusta (Smith) approaching her nephew Henry (McCowen) at his mother's funeral and pulling him into her web. She's trying to raise money to ransom her current boyfriend, Mr. Visconti, from kidnappers as she is receiving his body parts one by one. Before stuffy Henry knows it, she's suggested he steal money from the bank (he won't), his mother's ashes have cannabis in them, and they are on the Orient Express shooting across Europe. As they travel, he learns more about his aunt's life as she tells her story in flashback, including when she first met Mr. Visconti.

This is a beautifully produced film, with gorgeous color, costumes, and scenery. Despite the production values and the cast, there is something not quite there with the story. Part of it is because we have no idea what's true and what isn't. Something like the Chinatown she's my sister/my daughter, Henry is either Augusta's son, her nephew, or she just lied to him at the funeral because she needed someone with access to money. Her stories of men, her time in the convent school and as a high-class call girl are either true, embellished, or complete lies. Mr. Visconti is either Henry's father or he isn't. Given the timing of this announcement - when Henry is wavering about pulling a scam - one wonders. So while we may like Augusta and think she's funny, she can't anchor the story.

Lou Gossett, Jr. plays Augusta's wacky assistant who's into everything from drugs to mysticism, with a personality that can change in a second. He is hilarious. Alec McCowen plays the uptight Henry perfectly, secretly loving the adventure and the worlds it opens up to him while being a nervous wreck at each new moment. Smith's real-life husband, Robert Stephens, is great as Visconti. He was a fantastic actor who should have done more films. Cindy Williams is very good as a young, free-living woman Henry meets on the train.

Maggie Smith is one of my favorite actresses. I am so privileged to have seen her on Broadway in "Lettice and Lovage," in which she was side-splittingly funny yet tugs at the heartstrings toward the end of the play. She's a phenomenal stage actress. Maybe a little big for the movies. Personally, I like performances that take a lot of risks, and her characterization of Augusta was out there. After all, wasn't Augusta? If we go on the premise that she's exaggerating and lying when it suits her, I think Smith's take on Augusta is excellent.

Katharine Hepburn was the first choice for this role. I frankly think the film, for all the faults it has, would have crashed and burned with Hepburn. She was a fabulous actress and as a young woman an expert comedienne with superb timing and rapid-fire delivery, but I think in this role she would not have had the necessary flamboyance. While Smith didn't necessarily pull off the youth in the flashbacks, Hepburn, 27 years older than Smith, couldn't have approached them or being a high-class call girl. I think seeing another actress do this role would make one appreciate Smith's contribution even more.

All in all, a film with some fun moments and fine performances, definitely worth seeing.

But what it lacks is a solidly convincing performance from MAGGIE SMITH. Instead we get an over-the-top, absurd characterization of an eccentric elderly woman with money and romance on her mind as she tries to convince her stuffy nephew to change his straight-laced ways.

It's astonishingly overdone by Smith, so theatrical it makes Auntie Mame look like a demure housewife by comparison.

What moves here is the scenery, handsomely photographed in vivid Technicolor all over European locales--and sumptuous looking costumes, colorful, vivid, always in character. But someone should have told MAGGIE SMITH to tone it down several octaves. George Cukor has allowed her to perform as though she were spoofing every eccentric lady she ever played--and then some.

ALEC McCOWEN is subdued and very good as the bewitched and bewildered nephew who gradually comes to admire his aunt for her style. But the ending, where he and LOU GOSSETT, JR. toss a coin in the air, leaves everything very unresolved.

Summing up: Fluffy material that could have been so much better. But when has Hollywood ever done right by Graham Greene--with a couple of rare exceptions.

On the credit side: The twist at the end is clever until you stop to think about how it really doesn't make that much sense. Still, it's clever enough and it works.

Boring bank clerk Henry Pulling (Alec McCowen) is overseeing his mother's funeral. He meets his aunt Augusta Bertram (Maggie Smith) for the first time. His mother had told him that she had died. She has a shady life and nefarious plans for her nephew.

Maggie Smith is camping it up plenty. It's fun but maybe it could be more fun if Henry is a younger chap. It would allow him to be more innocent. That would make it more acceptable for him to be fooled time and again. At the very least, I want to reduce his over-two-decades-age-difference with Cindy Williams and thereby elevate the sexual heat without being creepy. Nevertheless, Cindy is giving her comedic skills the full workup and she's very cute. She really needs to join them in the final caper. In the end, this has its fun moments and Maggie is fun. It's good fun.

Great costumes and scenery and Maggie Smith doing her best Auntie Mame routine still add up to very little. I'm not sure what novelist Graham Greene or director George Cukor had in mind, but surely its not this disappointing mess of a movie.

I love films made in the 1970s. There seems to be something about how movies had real conversations & films were not filled with a never-ending action sequences. There are events in this film for sure but the characters travel through encounters & deal with the events. The acting and the story are wonderful. Maggie Smith was already playing the older woman back in 1972! Lou Gosset plays a relatively minor role, but imbues the film with a reality of an African man making it in a world of Europeans. His warmth & humanity in his role shines through, but equally can be said for the two leads. An undiscovered film for many, waiting to be discovered. Get ready to travel to other places in another time! Where Anglo culture meets the continent & beyond!

A George Cukor picture made in his twilight years, TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT is adapted from Graham Greene's skylarking eponymous novel, and marks Dame Maggie Smith's much awaited follow-up to her Oscar-winning turn in THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODY (1969), resultantly is blissfully bestowed with an Oscar nomination No. 3.

Playing the titular aunt, who is twice of her real age (by virtue of the able make-up artist José Antonio Sánchez), of London bank manager Henry Puling (McCowen, nearly a decade senior of Smith), Maggie's Augusta Bertram enters Henry's sedate life like a down-in-the-mouth raven during the funeral of Henry's mother. A long-lost aunt who has a flamboyant dress sense, an ear- piercing voice and eccentric makeup, from whom Henry receives the first bolt of blue that the woman whose ash he is holding is not his birth mother, and there's more to come.

The film looks exceptionally rumbustious in the hands of a septuagenarian, a giddying caper globe-trots from London to Paris, then hopping on the Oriental Express to Istanbul and back, culminating in the terra firma of North Africa. Admittedly not everyone can stomach the whole package of garish fluff and ceaseless palaver prima facie, but once the ransom-collecting story- line is established, Augusta and Henry's adventure eases up into a more affable romp interspersed with Augusta's reminiscences of her youth and sundry love affairs.

Maggie Smith's frivolously loquacious personage briskly corroborates the time-honored proverb "never judge a book by its cover", beneath all her self-absorbed wittering and jitters, Augusta emerges as a heart-of-gold, hopeless romantic even after toiling in the oldest profession for most of her life, and we can never quite decide whether she is dimwitted or not, when you think she is, she can gainsay it by intuitively snaffling something costly to shuck off her financial fix, so you opine maybe she isn't, then, how come she could be so credulously hoodwinked along the way?

To counterpoint Smith's pyrotechnic extravagance, Alec McCowen's fusty nephew is tagged along with mild bewilderment but seldom loses his grip of his composure and slips into a plebeian laughingstock, he can be exasperating sometimes, but cunningly proves that he is worth his salt in the final reveal. Among the peripheral players, Louis Gossett Jr. is the cock of the walk as Augusta's currently live-in partner, an African fortune-teller called Wordsworth, who makes no bones about smuggling marijuana inside an ash-full urn and also lords over le quartier rouge in the Continent.

A plush-looking, brassy-sounding, but ultimately spirit-elevating felix culpa doesn't desecrate Cukor's cachet, like its freeze-frame ending implies: coins have only two faces, and there is no one definite answer to the triad's final question because life is far more multifarious than that.

Somewhat of an intriguing film, as one is always trying to figure out what exactly is going on, it is a strange mix of flashiness and eccentricities overall, and not quite a fully satisfying combination. In an Oscar nominated role, Maggie Smith gives it her all, but yet comes off as bit over-the-top. Alec McCowen is better as the as a man who has never done anything outlandish in his life before. The vibrant costumes won the film an Oscar and perhaps are the best part of the production. It is very uneven in how fascinating the storyline is, with flashbacks that drag in a style that involves sharp zooms and fuzzy close-ups, and with a number of nasty events. It is rather shallow stuff: not emotionally involving, but neither very funny… just quite weird overall with a convoluted and contrived scheme as a backdrop to the events. The music choices are not exactly wonderful either. Make no mistake - this is not a terrible film, and there is enough worth watching for that the film arguably is worth checking out. It comes however best recommended to those who are into bizarre, unusual and somewhat silly films, wanting something different for a change. I cannot see this strange mix satisfying most tastes.

I have always thought that Cindy Williams was a fine comedic actress I have all 178 episodes of Laverne & shirley on tape. she was just marvellous as Touly in this movie. Good work Cindy! Also liked the scenery. It was a very Nice movie from a visual standpoint.

I enjoyed this movie but can't help thinking there might have been a better choice for the lead, I can't help seeing some of those more suited to mad- cap movie heroines from the '70s - Barbra, Goldie, even Dyan Cannon - a la "Heaven Can Wait". I liked the Cindy Williams arc, I thought her hippie persona here was a nice counterpoint to her good girl sit-com character. The plot skitters about, I found it difficult to follow at times but, all in all, a pleasant enough ride.

Maggie Smith's follow-up to her 1969 Best Actress Oscar win has her playing an eccentric woman who appears at her sister's funeral & befriends her uptight, by the book nephew. Intrigued by the woman's flights of fancy, he follows her on a whirlwind travelogue of European locales which only serve her purposes since she is collecting a ransom to free a once & ever lover from when she was younger. Directed by George Cukor (probably one of his last efforts) but never really hitting the ground running, this lively tale needed someone like Stanley Donen (who got a second wind to his career in the 60's making offbeat caper/comedies like Charade/Arabesque) or Richard Lester (A Hard Day's Night/Help) to bake this souffle to perfection but as it is, the mood & storytelling are at odds w/each other, never engendering any sympathy or pathos from the viewer.