Auntie Mame

Auntie Mame is a 1958 American Technirama Technicolor comedy film based on the 1955 novel of the same name by Edward Everett Tanner III (under the pseudonym Patrick Dennis) and its 1956 theatrical adaptation by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee. This film version stars Rosalind Russell and was directed by Morton DaCosta. It is not to be confused with a musical version of the same story that appeared on Broadway in 1966 and was later made into a 1974 film, Mame, starring Lucille Ball as the title character. Plot Patrick Dennis, orphaned in 1928 when his father Edwin dies unexpectedly, is placed in the care of his aunt Mame Dennis in Manhattan. Mame is flamboyant and exuberant, hosting frequent parties with a variety of guests and free-spirited friends including the frequently-drunk actress Vera Charles; Acacius Page, who runs a nudist school; and Lindsay Woolsey, a book publisher. Mame quickly becomes fond of Patrick, and aims to give him as broad a view of life as possible. Patrick's inheritance is managed by Dwight Babcock, a trustee of the highly-conservative Knickerbocker Bank, who was instructed by Edwin to restrain Mame's influence. Without Babcock's knowledge, Mame enrolls Patrick in Page's school. When this is discovered, Babcock forcibly enrolls Patrick into his alma mater, preventing Mame from seeing her nephew except during holidays and during the summer. When Mame is bankrupted by the 1929 stock market crash, she takes a series of jobs which end disastrously. During one job as a Macy's sales girl, she meets Southern oil baron Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside. Both are smitten, and he invites Mame to his estate. Despite an attempt on her life by Beau's original betrothed, Mame and Beauregard are married, travelling around the world for their honeymoon. Mame continues to receive letters from Patrick (and vice versa), indicating Babcock is influencing him into a more conventional personality. After Beau dies while climbing the Matterhorn in 1937, Mame comes home after a prolonged period of mourning to discover the now-adult Patrick gifted her with a dictaphone, typewriter, and secretary, Agnes Gooch. He and her friends persuade her to write her autobiography. Patrick and Lindsay arrange for a collaborator/ghost writer for Mame, Brian O'Bannion, who rapidly proves to be a fortune hunter. Patrick announces to Mame that he is engaged to Gloria Upson, a girl approved by Babcock from a "restricted" community in Connecticut called Mountebank.