Mame

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Buy This Item Mame by Warner Home Video  Available from Amazon  $15.99  on 8-27-2008     Lucille Ball plays Auntie mame, loving life and living it to the hilt with her nephew and assorted eccentrics in tow. Robert Preston, Beatrice Arthur and Jerry Herman's smashing Broadway score add pizazz. Year: 1974 Director: Gene Saks Starring: Lucille Ball. Robert Preston, Bea Arthur Reader Reviews Among connoisseurs of unintentionally hilarious movies, the 1974 musical MAME separates the men from the boys. It's so terrible that it's not just funny, it's frighteningly funny. Watch it and wonder, "What were they thinking of?" SUNSET BOULEVARD aficionados will quickly realize that this movie, rather than the SALOME that Norma Desmond hoped would return her to glory, is the faded Hollywood star's vanity production nonpareil, and that Lucille Ball as Auntie Mame is a good deal scarier than Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond. The difference, of course, is that Swanson was SUPPOSED to be scary. Ball allegedly sank a large chunk of her personal fortune into the making of this musical Titanic, which is the only possible explanation for how anyone in Hollywood could possibly have offered her the title role. A movie chorus girl way back in the years before she was Lucy Ricardo, Ball envisioned a triumphant return to the silver screen in Jerry Herman's hit Broadway musical (based on the earlier play and movie AUNTIE MAME). But -- to put it kindly -- it had been so long since she'd sung or danced, every number in MAME had to be s-l-o-w-e-d down for Ball's minute vocal range and one-two terpsichorean talents. The results are like watching a musical taffy pull. It's a model of self-deception: Ball, trying to look young enough for the middle-aged role, employs every trick of the trade to have her wrinkles and lines pulled tautly into a mask-like visage of middle age. When she dons a plastic Santa Claus face for the song "We Need A Little Christmas," the eerie effect of one mask over the other sends chills up the spine -- it stops the show, all right, but not in the way Ball and company imagined. Maybe you won't want to watch Mame all the way to the end, but do: The conclusion is a loony montage of Auntie Mame hugging one co-star after another--a movie first and, one hopes, a movie last. With Jane Connell, who stepped in to recreate her Broadway role of the nanny Gooch after Ball had Madeline Kahn fired (perhaps Ball realized that it was Kahn who should have been playing MAME?), Robert Preston, the fabulous Bea Arthur (also on hand from the Broadway original as actress Vera Charles), Bruce Davison, and as the young Patrick, the utterly RESISTIBLE Kirby Furlong.

Mame Available from Amazon Price: $15.99 Updated on 8-27-2008.

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