The musical revolves around the antics of Mame Dennis (Lucille Ball), a fun-loving, wealthy eccentric with a flare for life and a razor sharp wit. Her life is suddenly changed when she becomes the guardian of her late brother's only child, Patrick Dennis. Her adventures take us from the speak-easies of the roaring 20's to the depression following the great Stock Market crash. She is rescued by a wealthy Southern plantation owner (Robert Preston), marries and is widowed suddenly, and through it all, manages to keep things under control. With some help from her dearest friend, Vera Charles (Bea Arthur), she helps keep things at 3 Beekman Place a rousing free-for-all.

Wealthy, eccentric Mame Dennis is living it up during the Roaring 20's when she becomes guardian to her late brother's little boy Patrick. She embraces the new role with typical enthusiasm, showing her charge how to live to the fullest, filling his life with culture, adventure, and fun. Mame and Patrick go through good times and bad during his childhood. But when he returns home from college and Mame in introduced to his stuffy fiance and bigoted parents, she faces her greatest challenge.


Madeline Kahn was originally cast as Agnes Gooch but was replaced right after shooting began.
Even though she'd created the character on stage and had won a Tony award for her performance in the Broadway production in 1966, Angela Lansbury was passed over for the role of Mame.

Mame was released on pan-and-scan VHS and pan-and-scan and letterbox laserdisc editions in the 1980-90s. While these official editions have long since been out-of-print, bootleg DVDs taken from the widescreen laserdisc or widescreen TV broadcasts on AMC and TCM have been known to exist.
On June 19, 2007, Mame was officially released on DVD both separately and in a special DVD collection of Lucille Ball's films.[4] 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 Lucky Mame.
Although Warner had intended to give the film a 5.1 stereo remastering, they were unable to do so due to several factors. The main factor was the fact that Ball's vocals in her songs often had to be pieced together line by line in order to get a more pitch-perfect performance (this method is a lot more obvious on the soundtrack CD, where you can often hear a difference in fidelity in each individual line as well as the occasional line that sounds like two Lucys singing.) This and the varying conditions of the original masters caused Warner Bros. to simply restore the original release's mono soundtrack and remaster it in Dolby Digital 1.0 mono and use it for the DVD's audio track.