Review of Charley's Aunt

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.