bear1955 This film seems to me to be about nostalgia and genteel decadence vs. new decadence of late 60s in midst of 'sexual' and other liberation(s). I don't know how this was presented in the original Graham Greene novel. I suspect a differently shaded picture would come to our mind. Otherwise, I've just read one critics review of "Travel" elsewhere, which somehow refers to plot and the main characters lives beyond the time period shown in the film. Perhaps he got mixed up. Noted that Katherine Hepburn wouldn't didn't do this one. Imagine!It is good but too self-important. Maybe one would feel better watching it in a purple haze while chuckling over the over-the-top story and some of the acting, to enjoy the sumptuous, exotic interiors and location shots. With mood enhanced by the score.

marcslope Such credentials--fine writers, Cukor direction, Maggie Smith--and this 1972 adaptation of Graham Greene's novel is a sad misfire. It looks slapped together, filled with handsome compositions elegantly shot by Oswald Morris, but they don't flow. The misadventures of a stuffy young banker and his unconventional aunt feel haphazard and random, and Smith tends to overplay. Alec McCowen, actually seven years Maggie's senior, is fine, but he doesn't do anything to surprise you, and I kept waiting for the character to discover what we've been suspecting for several reels about his identity. Lou Gossett, as her pot-smoking aide-de-camp, didn't impress me. The transitions between past and present are clumsy, the humor's wispy, the musical score overbearing in that early-'70s way, and in one scene, it sounded like one actor had been overdubbed--his voice is so much louder than everyone else's. The screenwriters don't know how to end this one, so it literally ends with a freeze-frame of a coin tossed in the air, and we don't much care about how it's going to fall. It feels pieced together, and like several scenes are missing; I don't know if MGM did a lot of pre-release cutting, but what's left can't really be said to hang together.

sol- 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.

Piafredux 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.