Charley's Aunt (1941)

Fresh and Exciting

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Since Brandon Thomas's play Charley's Aunt debuted on the London stage its popularity is unabated to this day. Somewhere in this world there's a stock company doing this material and some actor regaling his audience with the image of that cigar smoking matronly aunt in drag.For an English play this 1941 version boasts a mixed cast of Americans and English players that 20th Century Fox assembled. Purists would surely object to this mixed cast. But Darryl Zanuck in casting Jack Benny in the lead had guaranteed box office with one of the most popular radio stars around. James Ellison and Richard Haydn are trying to make time with a pair of young girls visiting Oxford played by Anne Baxter and Arleen Whelan. They kind of blackmail their roommate Jack Benny into donning the drag he will be using for one of the Oxford theater society plays into being Haydn's long lost aunt from Brazil.Trouble is that the long lost aunt has at the same time turned up in the United Kingdom. Kay Francis for reasons of her own has decided to visit her nephew Richard Haydn at Oxford. After this the story becomes hilariously confusing as both Edmund Gwenn as Baxter's guardian and Laird Cregar as Ellison's father become quite taken with Benny in drag. Think of Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot.Gwenn is an old miser who enjoys a rich income being the guardian of Baxter and her fortune. As for Cregar in real life he was three years younger than Ellison his son. But Cregar was a classically trained character actor could play a variety of parts. Back in the day Charles Laughton whose career Cregar's was starting to resemble said that the censor's could never censor the gleam in his eyes. Cregar had an exponential gleam in this and other parts. Sadly he would die within a few years.Probably an English production would capture the entire essence of Charley's Aunt. But the British were never blessed to claim Jack Benny as one of their own.

Most cross-dressing films ("Crying Game" excepted) require a fundamental stretch of the imagination--that Dustin Hoffman, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon (and Tom Hanks for that matter) can all be accepted as women with only a wig, a dress and a falsetto voice. Hoffman took the disguise farther since "Tootsie" was a much milder farce, and almost succeeded, but still there was that voice. Jack Benny in drag requires far more of a stretch than the rest, as he is easily the uuuugliest cross-dresser ever. Wearing only a bad wig and a Mother Hubbard over rolled-up pants (from which much humor derives), he could well have been used as the model for J. Thaddeus Toad's female get-up in Disney's "Wind in the Willows." What makes it funnier is, he's the most reluctant female impersonator of all, and not above mixing it up in most manly fashion with the fellow students who have coerced him into this masquerade. You can get the plot from several other reviews. What's weird is that the two gorgeous ingénues in the flick (one of them Anne Baxter, long before Eve and Nefertiri) spend a lot of time necking with this supposed old lady, and not reluctantly. WE know "she's" a man but THEY don't, yet there they sit smooching it up with "her" and enjoying it. Kinky-winky, as Paul (center square) Lynde used to say. Fortunately for those who find all this a bit too odd even for farce there's the wavishing Kay Fwancis, wavishing indeed, as the title character and reason for all this foolishness, and along with Laird Cregar (playing it straight for once) the calm center of the storm. Quite funny even if some of it is unswallowable.

A couple reviewers have commented that this film is not available, though it is now available on DVD. Unfortunately, some of Jack Benny's other films (such as THE MEANEST MAN IN THE WORLD) are not.Jack Benny plays perhaps the oldest college student ever filmed. At 47 years of age, casting this comedian seemed like an awfully big stretch. Through a series of mistakes, Benny pretends to be a rich widow in order to avoid being kicked out of college. Unfortunately, this ruse snowballs when two men fall for "her" and the real lady widow appears on the scene! CHARLEY'S AUNT is a film that is based on a play produced in 1892 and has been filmed on several occasions. This is the second American sound version and it is quite polished and clever (with an excellent supporting cast)--though the film also shows a bit of its age. While funny, it also seemed rather old fashioned and familiar--perhaps too familiar--with much similarity to many other films involving a man dressing up as a lady. Perhaps in 1941 it was a hit, but today it just seemed very reminiscent of too many other films, such as SOME LIKE IT HOT and TOOTSIE--both of which are better films. One of the main reasons is not just the script but Benny seemed miscast due to his age AND he just didn't look or sound like a lady. Dustin Hoffman and Jack Lemmon definitely seemed more suited for their parts.Still, despite these shortcomings, it's a pleasant time-passer and a film that is hard to hate.

1941 was the season for two comedies starring the inimitable Jack Benny with Charley's Aunt released in 1941 and the filming of Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be starring Benny and Carol Lombard in what was unfortunately her last film which was released early in 1942.Both are great ensemble films, and both stand the test of time. I find it difficult to say which of Benny's two characterizations I find the better; so, I must group them together as proof that Jack Benny was one of film's best but also one of its most under-appreciated comic actors.Benny is Charley's aunt just as he is Joseph Tura in To Be or Not To Be. Yes, some of Benny's persona with its slow takes that was a mainstay of his TV persona for so many years is evident in both films but, I might add, in entirely different ways and definitely in keeping wit the two roles.Benny is not just Benny but a great actor who has managed to assume the character of the two roles.Charley's Aunt continues to be performed and continues to be filmed; nevertheless, I recommend any film buff and any troupe planning on presenting Charley's Aunt to watch the Jack Benny version again and then again.