The strangest trick George Cukor’s buoyant adaptation of Travels with My Aunt pulls is to make the 38-year-old Maggie Smith, who plays the titular aunt, into the elderly relative of her 47-year-old co-star Alec McCowen. McCowen plays Henry Pulling, a mild-mannered bank manager who grows dahlias in his spare time. When Henry meets Aunt Augusta, his mother’s long-estranged sister, he is immediately drawn into the chaotic and occasionally criminal whirlwind of activity surrounding her.

Aging Smith allows for a series of flashbacks in which the age makeup comes off. These sequences, along with the film’s ending, represent the script’s most significant departures from Greene’s novel, a tight first-person narrative with a sinister tone. His Henry is a man who can never escape the sense that he is always one step away from taking the fall for his aunt. The film adaptation, by contrast, refuses to see her only through Henry’s eyes, introducing an underlying pathos to her scheming. Smith rewards this shift of focus with a nuanced and magnetic performance.