Whirlwind Tour

By J.C.

TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT

Directed by GEORGE CUKOR Screenplay by JAY PRESSON ALLEN

and HUGH WHEELER

Some movies released at holiday time are like small children in a department store: easily lost in the Christmas crush. Such is the case with Travels With My Aunt, a fragile, beguiling and elegant entertainment released at year's end, when it tended to be drowned out in the general bustle. Its charms look now to be considerable.

The movie concerns the adventures and misadventures of Henry Pulling (Alec McCowen) and his Aunt Augusta (Maggie Smith), an extravagantly and endearingly daffy trafficker in improbable intrigues who has succeeded in dealing old age a most severe trouncing. Pulling has heretofore worked in a London bank, lived quietly in a suburb and cultivated his dahlias. After meeting Aunt Augusta at his mother's funeral, he is spirited away by her to become part of a conspiracy involving a quantity of pot--concealed by Augusta's "companion" Wordsworth (Lou Gossett) in the ashes of the deceased--an illegal exchange of money, a journey on the Orient Express, an arrest in Turkey and an escape to Paris. All this occurs because Augusta is very desperate to rescue her one true love, an Italian confidence man called Visconti (Robert Stephens), who is being held for ransom by a murderous band of Uruguayan revolutionaries.

The film is more breathy and headlong than the Graham Greene novel from which it is adapted, although there remain strong traces of Greene's vitriol and hard ironies. The long train sequence, for example, is a good-humored send-up of the milieu Greene treated in early thrillers like Orient Express. There is also a sharply etched portrait of a young American hippie who smokes dope and inquires of Pulling: "You're not a Catholic, are you? I almost became a Catholic once because of Bobby Kennedy."

Basically, however, Travels is in the easefully luxurious style of its director, whose sense of subdued but splendid theatricality is everywhere in evidence, from the meticulous mise en scene and the unobtrusive movement of the camera to the careful, practiced composition of every scene. (Cukor stashes a bouquet in the corner to balance the frame the way Aunt Augusta might bedeck her room with roses.) During a career spanning four decades, Cukor, 73, has directed such models of cultivated craftsmanship as Dinner at Eight, Holiday, The Philadelphia Story, Adam's Rib, The Actress, Heller in Pink Tights--these last two among the few fine films about the American theater. Katharine Hepburn once said of him, "All the people in his pictures are as good as they can possibly be."

That holds true here. Maggie Smith gives him a deliberately mannered, histrionic performance of unflagging energy and great technical virtuosity. Alec McCowen is a perfect foil for her, his mathematically precise timing producing an effect of cunning, effortless humor. Robert Stephens, with a slight but crucial role, is superbly seedy, right down to a suspiciously affected Italian accent.

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