She marries a wealthy Southern plantation owner (Preston), is widowed, yet through it all, with the help of her dearest friend, Vera Charles (Arthur), manages to keep things under control.
A desperate Mame takes a job in a department store, where she meets Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside, to whom she attempts to sell a pair of roller skates.
When Burnside dies in an avalanche, Mame returns home to be reunited with a now-grown Patrick, who is dating a snobby, conservative girl named Gloria Upson.
When Mame meets Vera for a drink, the two trade snippy comments, which they insist are not being made out of hatred, but simple honesty, as that is what "Bosom Buddies" do.
After finding the Upsons to be insufferable bores and bigots, Mame is asked to help pay for a piece of property next door so that Patrick and Gloria could live there, as opposed to "the wrong kind of people".
And she does this not with makeup, but with her personality... Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Zindel ["The Effect of the Gamma Rays on the Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds"] is credited with the screenplay for "Mame," and it's a mess.
Aside from Robert Preston's brief appearance as the wealthy southerner, and an amusing music hall routine that smacks of the fine burlesque comedy of the original I Love Lucy television show, "Mame" is a failure.
"[7] Time Out London declared she "simply hasn't the drive and steel of a Rosalind Russell, an Angela Lansbury, or a Ginger Rogers, all of whom played the part before her," and wrote of Saks: "When he's not ogling his star in perpetual soft focus and a $300,000 fashion parade, [he] fails to get enough retakes, match his shots, or inject the essential vim.
"[8] Pauline Kael in The New Yorker wondered, "After forty years in movies and TV, did she discover in herself an unfulfilled ambition to be a flaming drag queen?"
The New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann, though he pointed out that Ball would have made a perfect Mame had she played the role "fifteen years earlier," described her as "too old, too stringy in the legs, too basso in the voice, and too creaky in the joints."
Virtually every critic took notice of the heavy-handedness in photographing Ball out of focus, Rex Reed going so far as to suggest, albeit jokingly, that chicken fat was put over the lens.
"[citation needed] In his Movie Guide, critic Leonard Maltin rated the film as "BOMB" and wrote: "Hopelessly out-of-date musical...will embarrass even those who love Lucy.
Canby went on to praise Ball as well: "When the character of Lucy, an inspired slapstick performer, coincides with that of Auntie Mame, the Big-Town sophisticate, 'Mame' is marvelous.
I think of Lucy's turning a Georgia fox hunt into a gigantic shambles, or of her bringing the curtain down on a New Haven first-night when, as a budding actress, she falls off a huge cardboard moon.
"[10] Variety reported in its February 27, 1974 review that Ball was "showcased, coiffed, made-up and ably guided from almost television-like slapstick to character sincerity with loving care."
Molly Haskell in The Village Voice was "pro-Ball but anti-'Mame'" and felt that Lucy, "a great comedienne...brings it off and even manages to make palatable the kind of character--relentlessly 'on' and trying desperately to be unforgettable--you'd walk a mile to avoid in real life.
"[11] In the March 18, 1974 issue of New York, Judith Crist similarly was displeased with the film but supportive of its star: "Lucille Ball is – and no 'still' about it – a first-rate entertainer, supplementing her superb comedic sense with a penetrating warmth and inner humor.
She is without peer in making a hung-over stagger from bed to bathroom an exercise in regal poise, in using her slightly crooked smile to vitiate the soppiness of an overly sentimental sequence, in applying her Goldwyn Girl chorine know-how to a dash of song and dance.
[14] The DVD includes a remastered version of the film in anamorphic widescreen with Dolby Digital 1.0 mono sound, the original theatrical trailer, and the featurette Lucy Mame.