Plot: 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, All Movie Guide.
