Auntie Mame

Director: Morton Dacosta

1958 / 143min / DCP

“Life’s a banquet… and most poor suckers are starving to death!” So says, time and again, Rosalind Russell’s extravagant, radiantly ridiculous Auntie Mame, any anarchic girl or boy’s aspirational fantasy of a feckless, off-the-rails bachelorette to end all others. A pizzazz-y slave to her appetites, she gratefully, glamorously, and fundamentally ineptly takes on the task of instructing her orphaned nephew on the art of living at her Park Avenue palace, where the Jazz Age is swinging at its hardest when it swings, and the so-called Great Depression, when it arrives, is to be received as a momentary embarrassment at most. An opulent Technicolor delight whose charms, most of them found in its blissfully bitchy put-down humor and proto-feminist chutzpah, are so great that it couldn’t shake its cult if it wanted to.