Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Staci Frederick Blistering performances.

Brooklynn There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

bkoganbing 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.

JohnHowardReid Thanks to the enthusiasm and capable acting by the entire cast, as well as the opulently mounted art direction by Richard Day and Nathan Juran, this venerable stage vehicle comes across rather well. True, Archie Mayo's direction is not particularly distinguished. Nor could George Seaton's screenplay be described as a model of cinematic adaptation. But the film was made in a workmanlike fashion and its gains kudos for its lavish production values. Jack Benny plays "Babs" with an endearing enthusiasm, and receives excellent support from Kay Francis, James Ellison, Anne Baxter, Edmund Gwenn, Laird Cregar, Reginald Owen, Arleen Whelan, Ernest Cossart and company. It's still very much a filmed stage play, despite its cinematic opening sequence which includes some particularly well-timed slapstick. But then it goes straight into the play which has been filmed mostly in long takes – though they are skillfully disguised by fluid camera movements and smooth inter-cutting. Sad to say, the play itself has now lost its position as the most successful (in monetary terms) comedy ever written. Its author, Brandon Thomas was not a professional writer. The son of a Liverpool shoemaker, he was born on Christmas Day, 1848. At the age of twelve, he became a shipwright's apprentice in order to support his mother who took in lodgers – mostly actors who were always behind with their rent money! Eventually, Brandon took up acting himself and started to write plays – both with the same lack of success. One day, W.S. Penley, a highly successful London comedian, happened to cast his eye over one of Brandon's manuscripts. "This isn't bad!" he told the young author. "Why don't you write a comedy for me?" Young Thomas scratched his head. "What sort of a comedy?" he asked. "You've played every character under the sun! Wait a minute! Have you ever thought of playing a woman?" The play's record-breaking London run of 1,466 performances was only outclassed – until Agatha Christie came along – by "Chu Chin Chow" (a play so popular that its author, Oscar Asche, became such a household word that in rhyming slang, "Oscar Asche" became a synonym for "cash". "Got any Oscar Asche?" my grand-dad would often ask.)

blanche-2 Jack Benny is "Charley's Aunt," in this 1941 film version of the famous play, one of several film re-creations that exist. Benny plays Fancourt Babberly, a somewhat older student at a British university in the late 1800s who, through a series of complications, winds up playing Donna Lucia of Brazil, the aunt of another student, Charley, because Charley and his friend Jack need a chaperone in order to have the dates they've planned. The late-arriving aunt is actually portrayed by the lovely Kay Francis, and wait until you catch the look on her face when she sees what's been impersonating her. As ridiculous looking as Fancourt looks in his drag attire, he manages to win the hearts of both the ward of one of the young women and the father of Jack Chesney, who pursue him relentlessly. Fancourt, meanwhile, finds the real Donna Lucia quite a strudel.There's nothing like a man in drag for laughs, and when the man is Jack Benny, watch out! Benny, famous for his long takes, is delightful here, and what makes him even funnier is that every once in a while, he says one word or another with a British pronunciation in the middle of a sentence where he's using his typical American accent. It had to be on purpose.The DVD of the film has a short publicity reel shown in theaters called "Three of a Kind," which has Benny in the 20th Century Fox commissary trying to explain his role to Tyrone Power and Randolph Scott as a bellhop asks his approval on a girdle, a dress and shoes. It's very good.Jack Benny was a wonderful actor and comedian with a great, dry, sometimes exasperated delivery. He made audiences laugh for years. Thanks to the existence of his radio shows and movies, he's still doing it.

JHW3 I saw this movie about 25 years ago and have never seen it since. I've asked around about it for years, and nobody knows anything about it. Video stores don't carry it, and, of course, the young people who work in these stores have never heard ot it. It stars Jack Benny in what, I believe, is his greatest and funniest movie role. It has stood out in my mind for all these years as a truly hilarious movie, and, when I ran across it in IMDb, I wanted to be sure to add my favorable opinion to the list of comments.