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Radio and Stage Variety star Jack Benny plays the spoof Aunt from Brazil in this 1941 remake (the fourth version!), and looks fairly passable; here with Laird Cregar.
Variations of Charleys Aunt seem to be the most widespread portrayal of the female impersonation genre. The original story was a stage play first shown in 1898. Jack Chesney and Charley Wykeham are undergraduates at Oxford University, and they are both in love, with the ward and the niece respectively of a stuffy solicitor, Stephen Spettigue.
In those chaste days, actually getting the chance to tell your girl that you love her was itself a tricky business, and in this case the boys take advantage of the impending visit of the millionairess aunt of Charley, who nowadays lives in Brazil. If she's invited for the afternoon, the girls can come under her chaperonship. They invite an older man, Lord Babberley ("Babbs") to amuse the Aunt. Then Jack's father, Colonel Chesney joins in the planned party.
Then it all goes wrong when the Aunt telegraphs to say that she will be delayed by a few days: the opportunity to woo the girls will evaporate. Just then Babbs appears in drag that he is trying out for a stage revue, and everyone realises that he can take the role of the Aunt.
Babbs isn't too enthusiastic but goes along with it, and it starts off all right. Then two other men arrive, Jack's father as invited, and Spettigue, even though he was supposed to be out of town. Babbs is warming to the role and both older men are charmed by her, but then the real Aunt arrives after all, with a lady companion. She quickly sees what's going on and plays along with it, but the pretence can't keep going for ever. As everyone declares their real identities, everyone manages to pair off romantically, and that kind of neat ending was considered important at the time of writing the play.
The stagey portrayal, involving a static location (for the theatre stage) and the large group of central characters, shows through in some of the more faithful film versions of the play, even though few of them retain the University undergraduate setting. Later films that are freer with the setting and the personalities are often more appealing to modern tastes.
The film is also known as Charlie's American Aunt. There are at least twelve other film versions of the story, including a porn one.
HF September 2002
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