Auntie Mame

(Morton DaCosta, US 1958, 143 min., 35mm)

“Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.” Rosalind Russell was nominated for her fourth Oscar when she duplicated her stage role as everyone's favorite eccentric aunt, a woman who abhors the emptiness of middle-class values and parlays traditional femininity into a comic romp. Mame Dennis becomes the guardian of her nephew after the death of her brother in 1928, changing her bohemian lifestyle. When she is bankrupted in the stock market crash of 1929, she is forced to take multiple jobs to support her ward, including a hilarious Christmastime interaction featuring Mame as a frustrated Macy’s sales girl.