Mame

In general, critics have been much too harsh regarding their comments on MAME. It's simply an old-fashioned, entertaining musical that's fun to watch. Lucille Ball does a fine job in the title role. She gives a thoroughly professional performance and looks fantastic in all those wonderful costumes. She was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Musical/Comedy Motion Picture. The rest of the cast is terrific. It makes a delightful addition to your video collection. MAME may not be great art but it is very enjoyable, especially if you are a Lucy fan.

...for example, Bea Arthur as Vera Charles has one solo and parts of three duets--she steals the film easily, no contest. Robert Preston has one solo & is part of two other numbers, in limited screen time--he does his best to make Lucy look good in the title song and dance and succeeds. The instrumental music is so loud during Lucy's numbers it almost drowns her out, along with other cast members who can't sing.

Now for the bad - Lucy didn't have the range to sing the title part and shouldn't have been cast. She ruins her first two songs, then she and the kid cast ruin song number three. From then on she alternates between a very limited tenor range and talk-singing her songs, like Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady (1964). Also, all of the choreography seems slowed down--there is so much blurring of the camera lens one can barely see the pearls Lucy is wearing--they look to be dots. In the end the film just barely avoids disaster and today is considered a bit of a camp classic.

I wasn't surprised to learn that Lucille Ball bankrolled this movie adaptation of the Broadway musical MAME -- that explains her miscasting. Don't get me wrong: Ball looks gorgeous in the spectacular costumes and her slapstick is still up to par. But even her bullfrog singing voice (which proves that even the worst voice can't completely ruin Jerry Herman's wonderful songs. They *could* ruin Cole Porter's songs in AT LONG LAST LOVE, but that's a review for another time :-) didn't bother me nearly as much as the fact that Ball is too old and, worst of all, too *COLD* to play lovable madcap Mame Dennis. It's comical in the wrong way to see Lucy in soft focus in her solo shots and everybody else photographed crystal clear. She looks more like she's modeling than acting, and she has all the warmth and tenderness of the iceberg that sank the Titanic. She also tends to look like she's trying to seduce Kirby Furlong and Bruce Davison as, respectively, the younger and older Patrick -- creepy! Moreover, it's obvious the dances have been slowed down considerably to accommodate Lucy's rusty dancing skills (notice how people seem to dance *around* her rather than with her). Madeline Kahn, the original choice for Agnes Gooch, should've been playing Mame, not Ball. Luckily, Lucy's miscasting is balanced out by the terrific casting in the other roles, especially the hilarious Beatrice Arthur and Jane Connell recreating their stage roles as Vera Charles and Agnes, Joyce Van Patten as Sally Cato, and Robert Preston as dashing Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside. Worth a look for both its good and bad points, if you stumble across it on AMC in its letterboxed form.

Critics at the time complained that "Mame" was overproduced, but you simply can't stage a musical version of Patrick Dennis' novel/memoir "Auntie Mame" and not have it be splashy with all the trimmings. Screen-adaptation of the hit Broadway show (previously staged and filmed without songs as "Auntie Mame" in 1958 and starring Rosalind Russell) had a lot of people in 1974 crying foul over the casting (they were "anti-Mame"). The by-passing of Broadway's Angela Lansbury for the lead brought nothing but slings and arrows for this new Mame, Lucille Ball, who--despite a sandpaper voice--is to be commended for giving her all to a distinctly old-fashioned presentation. Ball has several amusing scenes, particularly when she's due to be on stage with gal-pal Vera Charles (Beatrice Arthur) and can't stop primping in her vanity mirror. The plot is the same as before: an orphaned lad goes to live with his merry, madcap aunt in 1920s New York and learns about life. Robert Preston is well-cast as a romantic suitor, and Arthur is wonderful reprising her Tony-winning role as Vera. The picture has gauzy, gaudy razzle-dazzle, though not enough to justify a two hour-plus movie. Portions of it creak and sag with the weight of sentimentality; worse, an unnecessary montage of hugs-and-kisses at the finish line is grueling. Still, the cast works hard to keep things bubbling along and there are some choice highlights. ** from ****

For those who enjoyed seeing this lively piece in the 1960s, or who liked the novel thirty years ago, Mame could be not only an entertaining sentimental journey, but an interesting view of how times have changed.

Lucille Ball is an interesting if not entirely right choice for the main role. She shows Mame Dennis's vivacious personality beautifully, accenting - naturally - the comic aspects of the character. It is a demanding role, covering eleven years from the heyday of the twenties until the start of the forties. Among the character developments are a period of job-hunting, the Southern-belle wooing of a second husband, and the growth involved in raising a child. Her acting is ideal. However, the role asks for a singer equal to the actor, and Ball is not up to it. Her low, aging voice has some depth, especially in the elegiac "Boy with the Bugle," but not the force and clarity of a good singer. The music and lyrics give her a hand, however, with an especial highlight in "Bosom Buddies," the scathing and hilarious duet with Bea Arthur as Vera Charles, "the first lady of American theater." Other catchy tunes you might remember are the title song ("You coax the blues right out of the horn,) Mame," and the romantic, "My Best Girl."

Beware of what you may get into as you watch it though: Mame is a piece whose message has become dated. Mame Dennis was a hero to a generation of young novel readers some forty years ago, and those who saw her character on the original musical stage were struck by her energy and her view of the world. "Live!" she says. "Life is a banquet, and most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death!" But those viewers were from a different era, when women did not work, were expected to be domestic, and her world-hopping would have been seen as radical: an early expression of women's spirit. She was inspirational in her context.

Today, though, she represents a different notion. Coming from a vantage point of extreme wealth, her admonition, "Live!" is easy for her to say. She did not create her wealth, but inherited it from her first and second husbands. On her own, Mame cannot provide for herself. When her first inheritance is wiped out in the Great Crash of 1929, Mame gets fired from job after job, relying on her former butler and nanny to pay the bills, until she fortuitously manages to marry into wealth again.

So in a modern context, we see Mame not as a freedom-loving feminist expressing herself against the prevailing social constraints, but as a woman who must depend on men to provide her with the necessary element of her freedom: money. In the depression, she could afford to fly around the world and spoil her children on her inherited money, while those who may have wished to be inspired by this spirit could not.

Her heroism was not in how she gained her money, but in what she did with it. Even so, taking a two-year honeymoon and holding thirteen parties in two weeks ("She had to cancel one," the butler explains) is hardly politically correct, today. Even her altruistic gesture at the end, when she buys a plot of land for a home for single mothers, is as much a jab at her nephew's future in-laws as pure philanthropy, and the plight of her beneficiaries is only brought home to her when her secretary becomes one of them.

It is therefore difficult today, to find Mame unambiguously admirable or inspiring. Her spirit comes from wealth; her wealth is unearned; and is used primarily to pump her own spirit. Her charm notwithstanding, the view of her lifestyle has taken a turn in an age when the wealthy can know how to live, while most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death.

Mame, therefore, is worth a second glance, not only for its tuneful exuberance and wonderful comic moments, not only as a vehicle for a sentimental review of an old favorite, but as a historical piece: a view of the admirability that was.