“Travels with My Aunt” also suffers from choppy storytelling due no doubt to the fact that Jay Allen

Although she received an inexplicable Oscar nomination for her performance, Maggie Smith's work in the 1972 "Travels cheap hotels myrtle beach with My Aunt" is so misguided and so over-the-top that her peers in the acting division of the Motion Picture Academy must have been honoring the star's bravery as much as anything.
The adaptation of the 1969 Graham Greene novel was originally put together for Katharine cheap hotels myrtle beach Hepburn who — at the time — was still almost ten years too young for the part of the 70something globe-trotting adventuress cheap hotels myrtle beach Augusta Bertram.
Hepburn had problems with the screenplay by Jay Presson Allen, was angered when some of her casting decisions were ignored, and then probably reached the end of her rope when MGM studio boss James Aubrey insisted on flashbacks that would show Augusta as a young woman.
Hepburn might have also started to worry that the role of a live-for-today cheap hotels myrtle beach eternal optimist might have been too close to the part she played in the disastrous 1969 film version of the Jean Giraudoux play "The Madwoman of Chaillot." The star had won some points there for taking a role that went against the grain of her Yankee common sense persona, but she would have been just as miscast as Augusta (who appeared to be cut from the same cloth as the Madwoman ).
The producers toyed with the idea of putting Angela Lansbury in the role — she might have been perfect (old enough at 45 to play the present day scenes and young enough to pull off the flashbacks)  — but she was not considered a big enough movie name to carry a major MGM production.
But, to pass the role on to Maggie Smith — an actress who was a vivacious 37 at the time of production and would have to spend most of the movie under heavy, disfiguring make-up — was a crazy decision on the part of director cheap hotels myrtle beach George Cukor and the producers Robert Cryer and James Cresson.
It's a mostly terrible movie that is nevertheless fascinating to watch because we can see Smith doing her damnedest to make the part work for her. The sort of arch, mannered role that she would grow into a few decades later was still too big a stretch cheap hotels myrtle beach for the warm and funny young actress who had just won an Oscar a few years earlier for "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie."
"Travels with My Aunt" also suffers from choppy storytelling due no doubt to the fact that Jay Allen was fired the film and replaced by Hugh Wheeler — neither of them apparently paid too much attention to the source material which greatly distressed fans of the Graham Greene novel (one of the few of his that I haven't read yet).
The only one to really benefit from this flop was costume designer Anthony Powell who won an Oscar for his stunning clothing and would go on to do terrific work on screen and stage. Six years later, Powell would design clothes for Smith and the Augusta also-ran Lansbury in "Death on the Nile."
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