Travels with My Aunt
While attending the cremation of his mother's remains, London bank manager Henry Pulling (Alec McCowen) meets eccentric Augusta Bertram (Maggie Smith), a flaming redhead who claims to be his aunt and announces that the woman who raised him was not his biological mother. She invites him back to her apartment, where her lover, an African fortune teller named Zachary Wordsworth (Louis Gossett Jr.), is waiting for her. Shortly after she receives a package allegedly containing the severed finger of her true love, Ercole Visconti (Robert Stephens), with a note promising the two will be reunited upon payment of $100,000 ($433,000 in 2013 dollars).
Augusta asks Henry to accompany her to Paris and he agrees, unaware she actually is smuggling £50,000 out of England and transporting it to Turkey for a gangster named Crowder (Robert Flemyng) in exchange for a £10,000 fee she can put toward the ransom. The two board the Orient Express, where Henry meets Tooley (Cindy Williams), a young American hippie who takes a liking to him and gets him to smoke "French cigarettes" (marijuana) with her. When the train reaches Milan, Augusta is greeted by her illegitimate son Mario (Raymond Gérôme), who presents her with a bouquet of flowers and an ear that supposedly belongs to Ercole.
When they arrive at the Turkish border, Augusta's plot is uncovered by officials who send her and Henry back to Paris. There Augusta attempts to secure the money she needs from her former lover Achille Dambreuse (José Luis López Vázquez), but the wealthy Frenchman dies of a heart attack in her hotel suite before she achieves her goal. Efforts to extort $100,000 from Achille's widow in return for their silence about the adulterous circumstances of his death fail, and Augusta decides to sell a valuable portrait of herself she claims was painted by Amedeo Modigliani to raise the money.
After an argument with Henry, Augusta lets it slip that he is Ercole's "other son". Once the painting is sold, they join Zachary on a fishing boat to North Africa, where they pay the ransom and are reunited with Ercole. He removes his bandages, revealing ear and finger intact, indicating he has been the mastermind of a plot to separate Augusta from her money. Henry, who was suspicious from the start, reveals not only that he has deduced Augusta is his biological mother, but that he exchanged "neatly cut pages of the Barcelona telephone directory" for the money in the package they delivered. He wants to use the cash he kept to purchase the portrait Augusta sold, but she tells him she would prefer to use it to finance further travels. Henry decides the matter should be decided with the toss of a coin and chooses 'Heads'. Wordsworth tosses the coin and the film ends on a freeze frame shot of Augusta, Henry and Wordsworth as they await the fall of the coin.
flashback