Happy new year!
I don’t know about you, but I have one resolution this year: live, live, live! Inspired, of course, by Auntie Mame:
I saw Camille Paglia introducing this ageless, subversive 1958 classic at the National Film Theatre in London a few years ago. Paglia identified herself not, as you might expect, with Mame herself, rather with her dowdy secretary. Or as she put it, “Agnes Gooch, c’est moi!”.
Here Gloria Upson, the anti-Mame, relates an anecdote of near-lethal tedium:
Mame has the super-saturated colour and busy ensemble work of a musical, which it later became, in a widely derided 1974 film which killed Lucille Ball’s movie career stone dead. Something Tilda Swinton might want to bear in mind as she bids to remodel Mame for the teenies (is that what we’re calling it?).
