Travels with My Aunt

Travels with My Aunt is a 1972 American comedy film directed by George Cukor, written by Jay Presson Allen and Hugh Wheeler, and starring Maggie Smith. The film is loosely based on the 1969 novel of the same name by Graham Greene. The film's plot retains the book's central theme of the adventurous, amoral aunt and her respectable middle class nephew drawn in to share her life, and also features her various past and present lovers who were introduced in the book, while providing this cast of characters with different adventures to the ones thought up by Greene, in different locales (North Africa rather than the book's South America). It was released on December 17, 1972. Plot While attending the cremation of his mother's remains, London bank manager Henry Pulling meets eccentric Augusta Bertram, a woman who claims to be his aunt and announces that the woman who raised him was not his biological mother. She invites him back to her apartment, where her lover, an African fortune teller named Zachary Wordsworth, is waiting for her. Shortly after, she receives a package allegedly containing the severed finger of her true love, Ercole Visconti, with a note promising the two will be reunited upon payment of $100,000. Augusta asks Henry to accompany her to Paris, and he agrees, unaware she actually is smuggling £50,000 out of England and transporting it to Turkey for a gangster named Crowder in exchange for a £10,000 fee she can put toward the ransom. The two board the Orient Express, where Henry meets Tooley, a young American hippie who takes a liking to him and gets him to smoke marijuana with her in her compartment. When the train reaches Milan, Augusta is greeted at the station by Visconti's son Mario, who presents her with a bouquet of flowers and an ear that supposedly belongs to Visconti. When they arrive at the Turkish border, officials confiscate the money Augusta is carrying and send her and Henry back to Paris. Augusta attempts to secure the money she needs from her former lover Achille Dambreuse, but the wealthy Frenchman dies of a heart attack in her hotel suite. Efforts to extort 1 million francs from Dambreuse's widow in return for their silence about the circumstances of his death fail. Augusta takes a portrait of herself she claims was painted by Amedeo Modigliani from Dambreuse's home, which she plans to sell to raise the money.