Film:
Family Film Sunday: Auntie Mame
Showtimes:
Sunday May 08 11:10 AM
Sunday May 08 04:00 PM
Location:
Doris Duke Theatre
About the Film:
Directed by Morton DaCosta
USA, 1958, 143 mins
Who wouldn't want Rosalind Russell at her zaniest as their mom? Celebrate Mothers’ Day with the crazy aunt we all wish we had! Russell is the wacky and warm Mame Dennis in this Technicolor classic based on the popular novel and Broadway hit. Just-orphaned 10-year-old Patrick moves in with his Auntie Mame on the eve of the Great Depression and finds her Upper East Side apartment filled with Manhattan partygoers sipping bathtub gin and chatting up Indian mystics. Impressionable Patrick embraces his aunt’s joie de vivre. Woe to the social-climbing executor of Patrick’s parents’ estate who tries to wrest the boy from his eccentric aunt and raise him as an blue-blooded prepster. Made during the Eisenhower era and McCarthy hearings, this film was the “auntidote” to widely held ’50s prejudices about race, anti-Semitism and all things foreign. (Adapted from NPR review). General admission $3, children $1.
See the trailer.
Read the 1958 New York Times review.
