Patrick Dennis Movies

Lucille Ball stars in this film version of the hit Jerry Herman Broadway musical, which featured an electrifying performance by Angela Lansbury. As Patrick Dennis' plucky and resilient Auntie Mame, Ball's low-pitched, growling moan of a voice (a spine-chilling reminder of the sound of Linda Blair's demon-possession in The Exorcist) and her gaudy and lumbering fashion-horse gait turns Mame into an elderly cross-dresser. In this guise, Mame rehashes the plot from Dennis's novel and the previous non-musical Rosalind Russell film. During the Depression era 1930s, she enrolls her nephew into a liberal private school, tries a turn in show business (with the help of her friend Vera [Beatrice Arthur]), and marries a well-to-do Southern planter (Robert Preston). After her husband's death, Mame concerns herself with her now grown-up nephew, his girlfriend, and the girlfriend's intolerant parents. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

Auntie Mame began as a novel by Patrick Dennis (aka Ed Fitzgerald), then was adapted into a long-running Broadway play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. This 1958 film version permits Rosalind Russell to recreate her stage role as Mame Dennis, the flamboyant, devil-may-care aunt of young, impressionable Patrick Dennis. Left in Mame's care when his millionaire father drops dead, young Patrick (Jan Handzlik) is quickly indoctrinated into his aunt's philosophy that "Life is a banquet--and some poor suckers are starving to death." Social-climbing executor Dwight Babcock (Fred Clark) does his best to raise Patrick as a stuffy American aristocrat, but Mame battles Babcock to allow the boy to be as free-spirited as she is. In 1974, Auntie Mame was remade as the filmmusical Mame with Lucille Ball. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi