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24-549: In 2018 it was announced that the company would be moving to the railway museum , near the centre of Madrid. This ballet -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Railway Museum (Madrid) The Museo del Ferrocarril (Railway Museum) in Madrid , Spain, is one of the largest historic railroad collections in Europe. It is housed in a redundant railway station called Madrid-Delicias in

48-504: A bouquet of flowers and an ear that supposedly belongs to Visconti. When they arrive at the Turkish border, officials confiscate the money Augusta is carrying and send her and Henry back to Paris. Augusta attempts to secure the money she needs from her former lover Achille Dambreuse, but the wealthy Frenchman dies of a heart attack in her hotel suite. Efforts to extort 1 million francs from Dambreuse's widow in return for their silence about

72-551: A single-span roof. The building was designed by a French engineer, Émile Cachelièvre. It has been suggested that he was influenced by Henri de Dion 's Galerie des Machines , one of the metal-framed buildings erected for the Exposition Universelle (1878) in Paris. The Franco-Belgian Fives group provided metal for both projects. The train shed of the former station now houses historic rolling stock . Steam

96-470: A third company, the Compañía de los Ferrocarriles de Madrid a Cáceres y Portugal . An international service to Portugal was developed, but the station never achieved a high volume of passengers, and it closed to passenger traffic in 1969. As a terminus , the station had separate facilities for arriving and departing passengers. However, the most impressive feature is the iron-framed train shed covered by

120-413: A workable screenplay was not entirely successful. Some moments are glossed over; others fly by all too rapidly in a valiant attempt to cram in as much of the book as possible within the 109-minute running time. Though it doesn't always succeed, the spirit is there often enough to cover the rapid-fire plot development. Cukor gives this a sort of tongue-in-cheek direction; at this point in his career his heyday

144-447: Is a 1972 American comedy film directed by George Cukor , written by Jay Presson Allen and Hugh Wheeler , and starring Maggie Smith . The film is loosely based on the 1969 novel of the same name by Graham Greene . The film's plot retains the book's central theme of the adventurous, amoral aunt and her respectable middle class nephew drawn in to share her life, and also features her various past and present lovers who were introduced in

168-401: Is energetic enough for any five ordinary performers. But it is the energy of caricature rather than personality, and Aunt Augusta is sufficiently an original not to need any eccentricities added on. But the film is full of privileged moments, lucid, controlled and graceful, and any of them might serve to epitomize the style and the meaning of the valuable cinema of George Cukor. Roger Ebert of

192-464: Is not to be confused with the station opened in 1996 by Cercanías Madrid called Delicias . The station was opened in March 1880 by King Alfonso XII and Queen Maria Cristina . It was commissioned by a short-lived railway company, the Compañía de los Caminos de Hierro de Ciudad Real a Badajoz , which had recently opened a line from Ciudad Real to the capital. One reason for the choice of Delicias as

216-502: Is smuggling £50,000 out of England and transporting it to Turkey for a gangster named Crowder in exchange for a £10,000 fee she can put toward the ransom. The two board the Orient Express , where Henry meets Tooley, a young American hippie who takes a liking to him and gets him to smoke marijuana with her in her compartment. When the train reaches Milan, Augusta is greeted at the station by Visconti's son Mario, who presents her with

240-535: The Chicago Sun-Times called the film "a whimsical romantic fantasy that works; which is to say, if you are not a fan of whimsical romantic fantasy, it's going to be too much for you." He added "It was nearly too much for me – I found myself wincing from time to time when one of the movie's ornate props seemed about to bean me – but in the end I was won over, I guess." TV Guide rated it three out of four stars and wrote: Condensing Greene's novel into

264-587: The barrio of Delicias. The location is near the centre of Madrid. The railway museum opened in the Palacio de Fernán Núñez, which is now the seat of the Fundación de los Ferrocarriles Españoles . After an agreement between RENFE and the Ministry of Culture regarding the future of Las Delicias station, the collections were transferred to Las Delicias which opened as a railway museum in 1984. The building

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288-975: The " strawberry train ", it uses vintage rolling stock. The station has been used as a location in numerous films and television series. Several films set in Russia, but shot mostly in Spain, used the station as location: Dr Zhivago (1965) by David Lean , Nicholas and Alexandra (1971) by Franklin J. Schaffner and Reds (1981) by Warren Beatty . Other films filmed there include The Violet Seller (1958) by Luis César Amadori , Travels with My Aunt (1972) by George Cukor , March or Die (1977) by Dick Richards and Lovers (1991) by Vicente Aranda . Television series include Televisión Española 's Cuéntame cómo pasó , Netflix 's Cable Girls and Antena 3 's The Time in Between and Velvet . Travels with My Aunt (film) Travels with My Aunt

312-433: The book, basically a collection of anecdotes, she felt it could not be adapted into a viable screenplay, but after reading it several more times she agreed to make the film. She was ultimately unhappy with the completed script, and Jay Presson Allen finally suggested she rewrite the screenplay herself. After working on it for months, Hepburn submitted it to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer , but studio head James T. Aubrey Jr. felt it

336-424: The book, while providing this cast of characters with different adventures to the ones thought up by Greene, in different locales (North Africa rather than the book's South America). It was released on December 17, 1972. After his mother's funeral at Islington Cemetery , while waiting for her ashes, London bank manager Henry Pulling meets eccentric Augusta Bertram, a woman who claims to be his aunt and announces that

360-569: The circumstances of his death fail. Augusta takes a portrait of herself she claims was painted by Amedeo Modigliani from Dambreuse's home, which she plans to sell to raise the money. After a furious argument with Henry, Augusta lets slip that he is Visconti's "other son". Once the painting is sold to Crowder, they join Wordsworth on a fishing boat to North Africa, where they pay the ransom and are reunited with Visconti. He removes his bandages, revealing ear and finger intact, indicating he has been

384-520: The film's theme song, was written by Jackie Trent and Tony Hatch and recorded by Petula Clark . Costume designer Anthony Powell became a close friend of Maggie Smith and dressed her for her later films Death on the Nile , Evil Under the Sun , and Hook as well as the plays Private Lives and Lettice and Lovage . Roger Greenspun of The New York Times said the film's "great charm" lies in

408-470: The mastermind of a plot to separate Augusta from her money. After Visconti and his collaborators take the boat and leave, Henry reveals that he deduced Augusta is his biological mother and that, suspicious of Visconti from the start, he and Wordsworth 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 back

432-535: The portrait of Augusta, but she tells him she would prefer to use it to finance more 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. George Cukor initially gave Katharine Hepburn a copy of the Graham Greene novel and told her he wanted to cast her as Augusta. Upon first reading

456-563: The screenplay, but finally decided against taking legal action. Allen later said only one speech of hers remained in the completed film, but Hepburn was denied screen credit because she was not a member of the Screen Writers Guild . The film was shot on location in England, France, Italy, Morocco, Spain, Turkey and Yugoslavia, with the final scenes shot at Cabo de Gata natural park and Los Genoveses Beach. "Serenade of Love,"

480-465: The site of the terminus was the proximity of an existing line, the Ferrocarril de contorno de Madrid , which served industrial areas of Madrid. In the year the station was opened, the railway company was absorbed by a larger rival, Compañía de los Ferrocarriles de Madrid a Zaragoza y Alicante (MZA). MZA had the use of Atocha station , and did not need Delicias station, which it transferred to

504-476: The surprising emotional complexity it manages in terms of its light tone and its nutty, endlessly involved plotting. Such emotional complexity depends a good deal on richness of characterization and delicacy of human contact, and in this the film sometimes succeeds and sometimes doesn't. Alec McCowen does marvelous things as Henry ... Maggie Smith, playing a woman twice her age, seems to have surrounded her character rather than to have inhabited it ... and she

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528-453: 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, is waiting for her. Shortly after, she receives a package allegedly containing the severed finger of her true love, Ercole Visconti, with a note promising the two will be reunited upon payment of $ 100,000. Augusta asks Henry to accompany her to Paris, and he agrees, unaware she actually

552-427: Was missing the charm of the book. Additionally, he wanted Augusta to be seen as a younger woman in flashbacks , and he felt Hepburn was too old to do so convincingly. In a phone call to the actress, he told her the project was being postponed, but the next day, her agent was advised she was being given notice for refusing to report to work. Hepburn was outraged and considered suing MGM for payment for her contributions to

576-527: Was used on the Spanish railways in the period 1848–1975, although the earliest locomotive in the museum dates from the 1860s. Locomotives in the collection include: The museum has preserved part of a hydraulic system, developed by the Italian firm Bianchi and Servettaz, which was used to control points switching and signalling at Algodor . The museum runs a heritage train service to Aranjuez . Known as

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