REVIEW: Auntie Mame (1958)

Hello cinema lovers. This week's retro slot goes to a fossil of a movie that refuses to die, and thank god for that. Auntie Mame (1958) is not queer cinema the way we usually recognise it, but it's queer cinema in the way we've always decided. Before anyone was handing out permission slips. Rosiland Russell stars in this perfect vehicle that proves love has no limits, nor does kindness or sass.

Orphaned in 1928 (rich people problems, this isn't Annie), young Patrick gets dumped on his aunt Mame, played by Rosalind Russell, an actress who took a role she'd already conquered on Broadway and decided the screen hadn't suffered enough. Russell had spent the '30s and '40s being typecast as Hollywood's reigning career gal in trousers, all clipped putdowns and withering one-liners.

Auntie Mame was the role that let her finally be as over the top as she always wanted. Gay socialite Mame throws parties jammed with gin-soaked dandies. She loses her fortune in the Great Market Crash without missing a beat. She marries a Southern oil baron (Forrest Tucker), gets involved in a farcical fox hunt and works as a charmingly inept sales clerk in a department store. She spends two decades outlasting Patrick's stuffy trustee for sole custody of the boy's imagination and heart, and mostly wins.

Peggy Cass gives a terrific turn as secretary Agnes Gooch, sadly destroyed by precisely one wild night. Hers is a performance so committed to hysteria that it earned her an Oscar nomination for essentially one scene of falling apart in a cocktail dress. Coral Browne steals whatever scenes she can as boozy, cynical actress Vera Charles, a role she plays with such gusto that it feels she's waited her whole career for the role. The entire plot sprawls across two decades and endures constant redecoration and reinventions of mames expansive New York apartment.

Russell is the main event here, obviously. Every camp gesture is calibrated within an inch of its life. Every line lands exactly where she's aimed it. shes Big, Fast and Fearless. Her characterisation is built for a Broadway show and somehow works on a cinema screen just as well. Russell originated the role on Broadway. Eight years after Norma Desmond introduced audiences to shrill monstrosity in Sunset Boulevard, Russell gave us Mame, a much kinder but no less formidable woman. There's a sharp scene in which Mame outwits some terrible antisemites that's as notable as it is satisfying.

Director Morton DaCosta works like he originated this project on Broadway and has simply moved the proceedings to Hollywood. Scenes arrive and vanish at speed. Orry-Kelly's costumes are amazing; he's a designer who'd already dressed many of Hollywood's divas and clearly saved his most bonkers ideas for a character that would appreciate the effort. The script is stuffed with quotable lines and is witty and thoughtful. The runtime is a little overlong but well worth the effort.

Here's the thing: Patrick is straight (and quite cute in later scenes). Mame is straight. Nobody comes out here. Nobody so much as glances sideways at someone of the same sex on screen. What do we get instead? Two unnamed women in tweed, obviously a couple, glimpsed at Mame's first party and never referenced again. No lines. No plot function. Just there on view as the backdrop of Mame's world, like nothing unusual is happening. Because to Mame, nothing is. That's the entire conceit in this movie, refreshing for its time.

What Auntie Mame offers is a sensibility, camp before the word was used more commonly. A woman who chooses her family on merit instead of blood, who treats convention as something to be ignored rather than observed. Patrick Dennis, the bisexual novelist who created her, knew precisely what he was doing. Gay audiences have known precisely what to make of her once she arrived on screen.

Seek this movie out. It's a camp classic that modern audiences won't be aware of but really should be. We've all seen The Wizard of Oz and All About Eve before. They are fine movies, but Auntie Mame deserves a similar status. A recent remaster does right by the costumes and the shape-shifting apartment sets, and Russell's performance deserves the biggest screen you own. Its Essential viewing for anyone who's ever needed an aunt like this one, whether or not life was generous enough to provide her. Let her open such doors for you. Essential viewing.

Auntie Mame is available to stream on Apple TV and Amazon Prime.