Auntie Mame

I hate it. It's like Rosalind Russell has forgotten how to act for film - it's all huge and hammy. Those little "blackouts" at the end of scenes are annoying. The only really good things in it are Coral Browne, Joanna Barnes, and Led Patrick.

I hate the name Pegeen

[quote] Coral Browne

That's my wife, the actress, Coral Browne.

R1 I think you're ghastly.

Bunny Bixler and I were in the semi-finals - the very semi-finals, mind you - of the ping-pong tournament at the club and this ghastly thing happened. We were both playing way over our heads and the score was 29-28. And we had this really terrific volley and I stepped back to get this really terrific shot. And I stepped on the ping-pong ball! I just squashed it to bits. And then Bunny and I ran to the closet of the game room to get another ping-pong ball and the closet was locked! Imagine? We had to call the whole thing off. Well, it was ghastly. Well, it was just ghastly.

Books are AWFULLY decorative, don't you think?

Upper Richman's a top drawer. Really top drawer.

...Chosen my major?

And this is Glory's first grade teacher, Miss Tuthill... I think the light was hurting her eyes...

Mums and Dadums and I went down to our place in Fort Lauderdale. We have a place in Fort Lauderdale.

Well, it's pretty obvious that "Little Glory" stole all her scenes.

But, I can't believe we've had all these replies and no one has said, "What's WRONG with Muriel Puce?"

There. Fixed now.

Yawn. So I guess this has devolved into a Gloria Upson Quotes thread.

Sally Cato: Why Mame, I'll just hold my breath til tomorrow morning.

Mame: You do that, honey.

[quote]Well, I take two cans of tuna fish and put them through the meat-grinder, then add clam juice and peanut butter. It's a recipe I cut out of the Ladies Home Journal.

OBITUARIES

Laura "Bunny" Bixler

Friends and family today paid tribute to New York socialite Laura “Bunny” Bixler following her death at the age of 75 from complications of jaw surgery.

The cooking-oil heiress was perhaps best known for her expose of the country club life of New York’s privileged young in the late 1950s. Her book: “Just Ghastly: What Happened At The Game-room Closet.” enjoyed surprising success when it came out in 1962. The book is held to be at least partially responsible for halting what many thought was a dangerous tendency toward inter-breeding among the social register’s top families.

Muriel Puce said of her long-time friend: “Bunny never really got over that ping-pong ball incident at the club when we were all at the Upper Richmond Girl’s School. It kind of haunted her. And Gloria (Gloria “Little Glory” Upson) was forever telling the story, everywhere she went – every party! We were all sick of hearing about it.”

Bunny, who lived at her family’s apartment at Park Ave and 71st, succumbed to a massive heart attack while undergoing temporomandibular joint surgery last week. She had suffered chronic jaw pain for most of her life due to the clenched-teeth style of talking preferred by east coast debutantes.

Mourners described Bunny as “really, top drawer.”

Hot damn! My sister's gonna bust a guy!

Holy shit!

That is hilarious, R15; thanks for the laugh!

I love it but it's very episodic.

R15, where did you get that from? It's hilarious.

R19 It's from a blog

The producer and director, Morton da Costa, also produced and directed The Music Man in which he employs the same device of having a single light illuminate one or two characters while the rest of the scene fades to black. Presumably he borrowed this scene-ender from the stage play of Auntie Mame, which he also directed. He was also the producer and director of a 1963 comedy called Island of Love, starring Robert Preston and Tony Randall. Those are the only three films he produced or directed.

WHY do you keep writing about this piece of shit Lucille Ball movie? I've seen your other posts on this same movie in the past. Why is your dick so hard for this crappy movie when the 1958 one with Rosalind Russell is a true and forever classic? Lucille Ball should never have been given this part. She just wasn't good enough to play this character. As Lucy fans worldwide know Ball for her outrageous housewife gig for years and years, that doesn't mean she's a good or even great actress. Put her in an expensive period piece musical and old clothes and surround her with great actors and the movie would still turn out to be a piece of shit! As the old saying goes, "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."

Auntie Mame is an amazing movie: shot as a filmed stage production, it is the story of an over the top personality in an over the top life. Sort of the original "the most interesting (wo)man in the world", but many decades earlier.

BTW, scene changes require the lights to go down on a stage production.

The Music Man is on TCM right now.

R22 Who brought up Lucy? Only you

[quote]BTW, scene changes require the lights to go down on a stage production.

Yes, but in Auntie Mame, at the end of most scenes all the lights go down except one or two that isolate Auntie Mame in a pool of light for a few seconds before fading to black. It's a neat trick, but rather conspicuously stage-y when replicated in the film.

It's not half as bad as those horrible colors Josh Logan used in "South Pacific."

I'm watching it r24. I see how Shirley Jones ended up on TV.

[quote] It's not half as bad as those horrible colors Josh Logan used in "South Pacific."

As true in the early 21st century as the mid 20th.

I never miss a Buddy Hackett musical.

[quote]BTW, scene changes require the lights to go down on a stage production.

No shit, Sherlock. But we're talking about a film here. Da Costa deadened it by trying to make it copy a stage technique.

Wrong thread for your rant, R22.

It's stagey as hell, but it really doesn't matter because it's paced like a locomotive train and the best scenes are at the end. (Compare the Lucy version, which drags a lot.) Russell doesn't tone down her performance at all, but that doesn't really matter either; you can see that she must have been sensational in the part on stage.

I hated the hydraulic seats almost as much as the name Pegeen.

But if it was on now I'd be watching it.

[quote] the best scenes are at the end.

I agree with your assessment, R33, except for the bit quoted above.

Jerome Lawrence (who co-wrote "the book") grew-up with one of my aunts. Always a big queen.

Screenwriters Comden and Green came up with the hydraulic furniture and a few other things that weren't in the play. Stage authors Lawrence and Lee believed that Rosalind Russell prevented them from being hired by Warner Bros. to write the film script as payback. The egotistic Russell dearly wanted the producers to close the Broadway show when she left it to make the movie. She went as far as to leak "inside info" to the NY press that the show would have to close and never tour when she left it, as though it were bound to fail without her. Lawrence and Lee emphatically argued to the producers that, wonderful as she was, the play was good too and it would run without Russell. And so it did, first with Greer Garson then with Bea Lillie. Russell never forgave the writers for defending their own work in defiance of her vanity.

R36, I like how you put "the book" in quotes.

Russell was a bitch. There's a reason she never won a competitive Oscar.

Russell even claimed in her autobiography that she and Morton Da Costa played script doctors and "fixed" Lawrence and Lee's script in a hotel room during out-of-town tryouts. The playwrights vigorously deny that either star or director wrote a single word of the script. Cast members recalled that, beyond the barest civilities, Russell never spoke to anyone in the play except on stage in character. When Greer Garson took over the role, she was well aware that many in the company were not sorry to see Russell go.

Russell had the original Mother Burnside fired out of town, which set up an "us against her" feeling in the cast. Russell's only ally was Cris Alexander, who did several small roles. That's is why he, along with the irreplaceable Peggy Cass and Jan Handzlik, were the only stage cast asked to do the film.

Russell was a well-known prevaricator. She even insisted - in her autobiography - that she sang every note of "Gypsy" and that Lisa Kirk had been approached but then producers decided it wasn't necessary to dub her.

Technically, Roz did sing every note in GYPSY. She did not record any advance tracks (which would have forced her have to listen to her own inept singing in front of other people.) She went straight to the set and sang the songs live, croaking away as the cameras rolled. In pre-release publicity, she made much of the fact that she did her own singing. But the results were so intolerable that the filmmakers called in Lisa Kirk to dub most of Roz's vocals. She was forced to match Russell's scatter-shot approach, which accounts for the odd phrasing here and there from the usually meticulous Kirk. Of course, after selling the idea that she did her own singing, Russell never admitted that she had been dubbed after all.

I liked the end of scene fadeouts -- it was quite stagey, or what I imagined the stage to be like in far away New York.

Interesting posts on Roz's mean side -- we like her in our faamily because her work for Rheumatoid Arthritis research really helped find new treatments

Roz enjoyed a long career at least equal to the better-known stars of her era such as Crawford, Davis and Stanwyck. But unlike those three, she never demeaned herself in third-rate horror films and TV. She remained in A pictures and did top theater well into her 60s.

[quote]she never demeaned herself in third-rate horror films and TV.

True. She preferred to demean herself in third-rate comedies like "Rosie" and "Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows," and the excrable "Mrs Pollifax - Spy."

As for TV, she did a lot of it in the 1950s, and her final performance was in a TV movie.

She probably would have had the Oscar she craved if she had allowed herself to be nominated in Supporting Actress for "Picnic." She was offended at the mere idea and refused to let the studio push her for it.

I had no idea that she was such a horror. Was she that bad earlier in her career?

did someone say Roz and Joan?

[quote]Was she that bad earlier in her career?

Roz was a surprise casting choice as Sylvia in The Women. George Cukor had planned to go with Ilka Chase who created the role on Broadway. Russell had never comedy before but her audition for Cukor convinced him that she could pull it off. Although the movie established her as a comedienne, In her autobiography, Russell blames Cukor for the broadness of her performance. She claims she had intended to play the role in a more subdued and realistic manner (as was the fashion in movies when Roz wrote her book.) She says she had given Cukor several versions of how Sylvia might be played and it was he and not her who insisted she go as far over the top as she did.

Still, the buzz during filming of The Women was that Roz was doing Oscar-worthy work in a Supporting Role. Russell waited until enough of her role had been filmed to suddenly demand that she receive star billing over the title of the movie, alongside Shearer and Crawford. Perhaps it was hubris on her part. Maybe she wanted to be considered for a best leading lady Oscar (which required billing over the title) but Cukor and MGM were firm in refusing her. Russell responded by calling out sick for days. She let the studio know that nothing would cause her to recover but star billing. Finally they relented and put her name above the title of the movie in the credits and all publicity - but only in smaller letters than Shearer and Crawford who were, along with Garbo, MGM's biggest female stars.

Was Lisa Kirk completely dubbed in for Gypsy, or was she overlaid to "sweeten" Roz's vocals? The final product still sounds a lot like Rosalind Russell to me.

R45 You're wrong.

Roz's movies you named were all A pictures, even though their artistic merit is arguable. (I like the glossy, Ross Hunter-produced Rosie).

Now compare those to the low-budget campfests of The Anniversary and Bunny O'Hare with Davis; Berserk and Trog with Crawford; and The Night Walker with Stanwyck. There's no comparison.

The Pegeen in the book was way feistier.

At least they never sank to doing blaxploitation like Miss Shelley Winters in "Cleopatra Jones."

R51, isolated phrases of Roz's "singing" voice remain in patches. It can be heard fouling the soundtrack like so many spilled drinks and cigarette butts ground into the carpet the morning after a party.

Maybe we weren't the most sophisticated kids, but the movie was magic to us.

Never seen it, OP.

Roz Russell was ghastly, just ghastly I tell you.

Never get tired of this movie. Never.

The 2015 bump troll is at it again.

Slagging on Roz rather than Lucy (whose awfulness as Mame already well known to us) was fun. Glad the thread was bumped. I thought she overacted in Picnic. Trouble with Angels might have qualified as an A picture but not so much the sequel.

I'd love to have seen Roz as Mame onstage. The movie's too gigantic and bloated (Rosalind mentions her distress at the size of the sets in her book). The book it's based on is far more biting and fun (though the sequel Around The World With Auntie Mame or something like that, is a more coarse and crude rehash of the first book).

Hilarious.

One of my favorite movies.