Such credentials--fine writers, Cukor direction, Maggie Smith--and this 1972 adaptation of Graham Greene's novel is a sad misfire. It looks slapped together, filled with handsome compositions elegantly shot by Oswald Morris, but they don't flow. The misadventures of a stuffy young banker and his unconventional aunt feel haphazard and random, and Smith tends to overplay. Alec McCowen, actually seven years Maggie's senior, is fine, but he doesn't do anything to surprise you, and I kept waiting for the character to discover what we've been suspecting for several reels about his identity. Lou Gossett, as her pot-smoking aide-de-camp, didn't impress me. The transitions between past and present are clumsy, the humor's wispy, the musical score overbearing in that early-'70s way, and in one scene, it sounded like one actor had been overdubbed--his voice is so much louder than everyone else's. The screenwriters don't know how to end this one, so it literally ends with a freeze-frame of a coin tossed in the air, and we don't much care about how it's going to fall. It feels pieced together, and like several scenes are missing; I don't know if MGM did a lot of pre-release cutting, but what's left can't really be said to hang together.
Review of Travels with My Aunt
