Travels with My Aunt
George Cukor (1972)
It starts with a cremation. In that first scene you say goodbye too to your hopes for Travels with My Aunt. The coffin grinds to a halt en route to its exit to the furnace; the officiating priest anxiously tries to unjam the mechanism. The moment might be funny if it broke a solemn mood but the sparse turnout for the crematorium service includes Maggie Smith as the titular Aunt Augusta. Within the first minute of the film, she has already done so much histrionic business that the coffin joke is – well, buried … or would be if George Cukor didn’t spin it out so long that you watch the joke die a slow death on screen. My crap morbid puns give a fair idea of the level of verbal humour in Travels with My Aunt: in the next fifteen minutes, there must be a dozen droll references to the ashes of the crematee – the mother of the story’s principal male character, Henry Pulling. Because the source material here is Graham Greene’s 1969 novel, adapted for the screen by Jay Presson Allen (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Cabaret) and Hugh Wheeler (who went on to write A Little Night Music), it’s taken as read that the comedy has class. But the ashes lines are numerous and feeble enough to have shamed any self-respecting British television sitcom of the early 1970s.
Henry Pulling is a stuffy, forty-something bachelor – an assistant bank manager, who lived with his mother but whose only real attachment is to the dahlias that he grows in the large garden of their home in the London suburbs. (Dahlias are a good choice to signal a horticulturist’s dullness of soul.) Outside the chapel, Henry immediately learns from his long-lost Aunt Augusta that the woman whose body has been cremated – Augusta’s sister, Angelica – was not in fact his biological mother. In the eccentric confection that Travels with My Aunt seems meant to be, Alec McCowen, who plays Henry, isn’t permitted to react to this news with any kind of realism. Henry is the first- person narrator of Greene’s novel but not of the film. That allows him to keep silent until near its end about what’s obvious from his first conversation with Augusta – that she’s his birth mother – but, for the most part, it makes McCowen’s task all the more difficult: he has few opportunities to voice Henry’s thoughts and feelings. When he and Augusta do eventually speak home truths to each other, she ridicules his uneventful life and dreary personality: ‘When we first met’, she tells Henry, ‘I could hardly see you, you were so dim’. The viewer can see Alec McCowen, though, and the experience of watching him here is sometimes uncomfortable because he’s not a charismatic screen actor (it may well have been a different matter on stage). He’s not an Alec Guinness or a Ralph Richardson, who transfigure their unprepossessing features into something luminous and, perhaps because of their ordinary appearance, seem to confirm a truthfulness which it’s harder to see in many more glamorous stars. Nevertheless, McCowen’s portrait of Henry is by far the best thing in Travels with My Aunt and I was glad I saw the film almost entirely thanks to him. (It was a particular pleasure – and relief – to get a sense of his real talents, only a few days after watching the abominable Frenzy.) McCowen does some very clever and amusing things – especially when Henry loosens up and giggles as he (unknowingly) smokes pot on the Orient Express, and uses his professional experience for some high-speed counting of a mountain of bank notes.
Those two details give a flavour of the kind of travels Henry undertakes with his growing-old-disgracefully aunt, who’s lived a long life of sexual and criminal adventure in exotic places. The broad, clichéd characterisation of the natives in many of these locations is consistently tedious and Tony Hatch’s blah music isn’t any better; but, as the story tours continental Europe, and eventually reaches the shores of North Africa, the landscapes and décors, photographed by Douglas Slocombe, are often ravishing to behold – or would have been when the film’s print was young. Maggie Smith’s youth is, however, a serious problem. She was thirty-seven at the time, roughly half Augusta’s age. Smith doesn’t do the predictable geriatric thing – the tottering hunchback – but her physical vigour inevitably lacks the appeal it might have had if a real septuagenarian had played Augusta (Katharine Hepburn was the first choice). When Maggie Smith dashes about the screen here, she gives the impression merely of having forgotten that she’s meant to be an old lady. The involutions of Smith’s body, her facial, vocal and gestural exaggerations are soon exhausting – and cut her off from whomever she’s playing a scene with: her performance mostly takes place in a vacuum. Although the flashbacks to Augusta’s courtesan youth are lame, Maggie Smith’s appearance in them is a respite: pretending to be someone younger than she was at the time, she’s remarkably free and witty – qualities which make her very beautiful. (The only time she made me laugh was when Augusta trips lightly, and at wonderful speed, up a grand staircase.)
In contrast to Smith, perhaps George Cukor, who made only two more cinema films after this one, was too old for the job. He never seems, in spite of the frenetic unfunniness, to get a handle on the material – the film often has the quality of taking place far away from the man behind the camera. This famed director of comedy manages to get performances out of the likes of Louis Gossett Jr (as a Sierra Leonean fortune-teller called Wordsworth) and Cindy Williams (as a hippie on the Orient Express) which feel dead wrong. Robert Stephens is, oddly, more convincing in his brief appearance as the elderly version of the rascally love of Augusta’s life than he is in the flashbacks to their first meetings, in which Stephens is playing someone of his own age. Anthony Powell’s costumes won him an Oscar. Some of the outfits are wonderfully elegant: I wasn’t sure if the ones that were garish were always meant to be but they certainly add up to an eye-catching clothes show.
5 January 2015