His first job was a window dresser for the Marshall Field’s department store, then as a photographer for the Chicago theater district, then a costume and set designer for Chicago Theatre. All this grand appreciation for art, for the craft, for the aesthetic value and beauty is reflected in his film career. At times, his films can feel like an exercise in fussy scenery and color blocking. At others, like a rapturous emotional and psychological examination of the friction between the surface textures and the interior complexities of the characters.
Born Lester Anthony Minnelli in February 1903, it seemed like a career in the arts was inside his blood. A cosmic inevitability that carried forward in his daughter, Liza Minnelli. His family toured in a small theater, the Minnelli Brothers’ Tent Theater, where his father was the musical conductor and his mother performed. Some people are born into and seemingly bred for a career in the arts, and that would be the case for Vincente Minnelli. He is to have said, “I started out to be a painter and was born into the theater,” which feels like both a summation and a key into his work.
It was also around the time that he started working in Chicago’s theater scene that he adopted his stage name, a variation on his father’s name. By 1932 he was working in Radio City Music Hall as a set designer before becoming a stage director. By 1935 he was directing his own plays, like At Home Abroad, Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, and Very Warm for May – all of them a success and pinging the interest of Hollywood who was in the habit of poaching stage talent to give their budding industry an air of prestige. By 1940, MGM and Arthur Freed had offered him a job directing films.
There is also the curious issue of his sexuality, a subject that reflects itself in a few of his films. It is believed that he lived as an openly gay man during his time in New York and either put himself back into the closet when he came to Hollywood or decided to live as a bisexual. But there is not a clear picture or a reliable biography to provide more exact information. To say the least, his sexuality was complicated, and it reflected itself in how many narratives of his presented self-transformation and anxiety about traditional norms like marriage and gender roles.
Perhaps an entirely queer reading of his work could be possible, but that does not obfuscate the fact that he was married multiple times and had two children. Again, sexuality exists on a spectrum and his was probably more complicated than his era’s understanding of the issue. Of course, being famously married to Judy Garland and fathering Liza Minnelli, two patron saints of gay culture, probably did not help with this particular issue. Yet that doesn’t entirely explain away the way his camera drinks in Gene Kelly’s body during the dream ballet of The Pirate. Again, it’s complicated and reflected in the work.
At any rate, Minnelli worked for MGM for twenty years and was one of their most successful directors. Numerous films did well at the box office, critically, and at the Oscars, often with all three. And six of his films have entered the National Registry: Cabin in the Sky, Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, The Bad and the Beautiful, The Band Wagon, and Gigi. (I will not be surprised if/when Father of the Bride joins them.) A veritable bounty of riches there in just six films with plenty more buried within his body of work to explore and digest.
There will be five films that I am not counting: Panama Hattie, Lovely to Look At, All the Fine Young Cannibals, The Bribe, and The Seventh Sin. Minnelli’s involvement in all of these is not enough to justify including them. He staged the musical numbers in Panama Hattie, in Lovely to Look At he did uncredited work on a fashion segment, he did uncredited work on The Seventh Sin when Ronald Neame left the production (or was fired depending on your source), he allegedly filmed a scene or two for The Bribe, and did a few days’ work on Young Cannibals when original director Michael Anderson was indisposed. Although, these films and their behind-the-scenes factoids illustrate certain things about the studio system and Minnelli’s career: an aesthetic quality that immediately marked his work as his own distinct brand and how, despite that, the studio system still treated its talents as interchangeable cogs in a machine.
And so, we begin in 1943 with the one-two punch of Cabin in the Sky and I Dood It. Cabin in the Sky is a mixed bag, and a bit of a mixed blessing. As a musical, it could have used a few more sequences in which its characters broke out into song and dance. As a film about black culture, it could have used more authentic gospel standards and folk songs. As a film about race, it could have dealt less with stereotypes and broadened a bit more outside of its morality play and fable-like structure.
The film concerns a battle between Lucifer Junior (Rex Ingram) and The General (Kenneth Lee Spencer) for the soul of “Little” Joe (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson). If the good side, symbolized by his long-suffering wife Petunia (Ethel Waters), wins his soul will be redeemed and he will go to heaven. Georgia Brown (Lena Horne, practically igniting the screen with just a swish of her body and a kittenish smile) is the temptress, one of Lucifer Junior’s best weapons against morality and decency.
So, yes, the plot does devolve into virgin/whore simplicity, but that is not what makes the film so unique or interesting. It is one of the few films made in the studio era that uses an all-black cast and showcases many of their talents. Louis Armstrong may not have a musical sequence in the film (which is sin teetering on the forgivable), but his brief part as a devil’s helper shows that he had a real gift for comedy. Ethel Waters is positively delightful, a warm, nurturing, and loving presence throughout the film. She nails her laughs, highlights a lovely singing voice, and during the last musical number shows a talent for dancing. No shock, she was one of the great ladies of the Black theater at the time, but lovely to see it preserved for eternity.
And Minnelli, even in his first feature and in black and white, ably demonstrates his talent for opulent visuals and eye for detail. The carefully composed sequence in the church, which opens the film quickly and through great economy, tells us everything we need to know about our characters and the world that they inhabit. Or the scene which introduces Horne, and through her acting choices tells us that she is a bad girl, a little sex kitten, and, possibly at one point in time, a gangster’s doll.
Like many of Minnelli’s greatest works, there are sequences that introduces darkness, death, and a harrowing sense of terror to the peppy proceedings. Cabin in the Sky saves up most of them for the climax. The various characters meet in a nightclub, and a vicious tornado rips through the town. “Little” Joe and Petunia die in the panic, while Georgia Brown narrowly manages to escape. Horne’s acting in this scene is tremendous, and it shows, if nothing else, that she had the dramatic knowledge to carry off Show Boat’s Julie, her dream role. Everything about the ending comes together beautifully.
Sure, the film may trade in on stereotypes about black culture – gambling, laziness, an almost child-like dependence on and belief in Christianity – but for the time it was made, this was radical stuff. The patronization of the characters is minimal, but it could have been much better. Yet as a showcase for Black entertainment polymaths, it is a charming, wonderful testament to their work and enduring legacy. Perhaps it is cruel of me to be so hard on the film’s slim storyline and racial attitudes as a 21st century viewer?
While in stark contrast there is I Dood It, the film that Minnelli later argued was his weakest effort, and that is an argument I will not be going against. I Dood It mostly spins its wheels around Red Skelton’s mugging for the camera, occasionally pausing from that action to view Eleanor Powell tap dancing up a tornado, before diverting into a third act plot twist that is improbable, unnecessary, and over before it even gets going. To summarize, this film is a huge mess. For a Minnelli film, I Dood It does not contain much of the great director’s typically lavish and grandiose style. Hired as a last-minute replacement to punch up the film, Minnelli’s touch seems entirely devoured apart from two sequences. The first comes from Eleanor Powell in the very beginning of the film and involves her tap dancing and leaping through a succession of more difficult rodeo rope tricks. It is an astonishing feat, and it is a shot of adrenaline that the film quickly loses. The other dance sequences from Powell are entertaining, but many of them are spliced in from one of her older films.
The second noteworthy part is a sequence a little over an hour into the film in which Hazel Scott and Lena Horne show up to tear the roof off the joint. Scott arrives early with a large entourage in tow and performs a fabulous instrumental number for everyone’s enjoyment. She is a sensational, sophisticated vision, revealing an attractive smile as she pounds on the keys with masterful precision and style. In addition, once Horne shows up, in full diva mode complete with fur draped over her shoulders, it’s off and running. “Jericho” proves that Minnelli brought out the best in Horne out of all her film collaborators; making her diamond-in-the-rough qualities displayed in The Duke Is Tops shine their brightest. She looks fabulous, filmed with great tenderness and care, and she and Scott play off each other well. The film gets a massive dose of energy that it desperately needed, but it’s a pity that the moment the song ends they are shoved off and we are back to Red Skelton mugging through a sleepy series of comedic set-ups.
Perhaps the greatest thing about Meet Me in St. Louis is how it forgoes the prior conventions of screen musicals, there is nary a stage performer putting on a show to be found. No hyper-stylized sets, no dream world of the impossibly rich, famous, and glamorous, just an upper-middle class family in realistic settings slowly breaking out into song to express their highs and lows throughout the year.
It opens in an ingenious way, introducing each of the various members of the family as they sing the title song, flowing throughout the house and revealing the entirety of the familial unit. From a younger daughter walking past her mother and the maid cooking ketchup in the kitchen, going upstairs and running into her grandfather, before pulling out and introducing the older siblings coming home from a social outing. It is this combination of leisurely scope and pacing along with ambitious filmmaking that makes the film so unique.
Minnelli’s camera glides like a prima ballerina throughout. A scene in which Judy Garland, tough but tender and free from neurosis, leads Tom Drake through the various rooms in her house after a party, slowly turning down the lights in each, is a quiet bit of eroticism. The way it follows Garland’s slow dance with her grandfather across the ballroom then behind a Christmas tree only to emerge in the arms of Drake is yet another bravura bit of romantic rapture captured by Minnelli’s camera.
Always a daring auteur with his films, Minnelli infuses much of Meet Me in St. Louis with a modern sensibility, like making Garland and Lucille Bremer’s sisters the primary actors in their romantic entanglements and husband hunting. When Bremer warns Garland that men don’t want girls with the bloom taken off, Garland delivers a rejoinder about having too much bloom already. Yet Bremer’s not one for sitting idly waiting for her prince charming. She hits him where it hurts and knows what the ultimate reaction will be.
At times Minnelli’s obsessive attention to detail could tip into strange, hallucinatory textures, proving that darkness was buried beneath these elaborate dioramas. Look no further than one of the odder detours in an MGM musical: the Halloween scene in which the children of the neighborhood gather to “kill” the adults by throwing flour in their face. Margaret O’Brien, death-obsessed and ever so slightly unhinged here, decides to take on the most-feared grown-ups by herself. Up to this point the primary conflict had been a potential move away from St. Louis to New York City, or a missed marriage proposal, yet this scene goes full tilt into the underside of the suburban paradise. After this, Meet Me in St. Louis does not hold back from the various conflicts threatening to erupt the family as though O’Brien’s character walked the chasm between childhood nostalgia and the pains of growing up.
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” has achieved a fame so vast outside of the film that it is easy to forget how ironic the lyrics are. It is an intimate moment between Garland and O’Brien, an older sister trying to comfort the younger one, yet it throbs with the uncertainty of the future, the intangibility of time, how even holiday cheer can evaporate within an instant. In a film packed with knockout musical moments, there are only about seven here but each of them matters, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is the clear standout. That is really saying something considering the jubilance of “The Trolley Song,” the sweet yearning of “The Boy Next Door,” and the energetic “Skip to My Lou.”
Is it any wonder that super-producer Arthur Freed, the man responsible for what we think of as the MGM musical treatment, dubbed Meet Me in St. Louis his personal favorite? While the surfaces are all about a nostalgic bit of Americana that may never have existed outside of the imagination, the film finds numerous ways to appear or speak to a modern audience. This tensions between naivety and maturity make the film great.
Of course, it does not hurt to have Judy Garland, Mary Astor, Leon Ames, Margaret O’Brien, Lucille Bremer, Tom Drake, and Marjorie Main leading your stellar ensemble. Garland and O’Brien are the true co-leads of the film, with the greatest moments and the best performances. Yet Bremer holds her own, a typically wooden actress under other director’s care, she flowers here. Same goes for Drake as the slightly daft but very dreamy boy next door of Garland’s romantic fixation. Main, Astor, and Ames were old pros by this point, and they deliver their typically solid work as the salty maid, supportive mother, and obtuse father.
Meet Me in St. Louis is a perfect movie, and I say this with no hyperbole. Minnelli created quite a few masterpieces in his day (we will talk about them all later so please keep reading) but Meet Me in St. Louis was the first. Only his third film, this was the first glimpse of what Minnelli was truly capable of as a director. Here is a film to truly cherish.
The story is simple: a soldier on leave (Walker) finds himself in New York City, meets cute with a girl (Garland), and they spend the rest of his leave falling in love and exploring the city. Along the way there are appearances by several well-known character actors including a drunk Keenan Wynn, James Gleason and his wife, Lucile Gleason, in small supporting parts that add color and texture to the central romance.
That is the entirety of The Clock, yet it fails to do justice to its emotional majesty and fragility. There is a deep well of insecurity and battered hope, both in the main characters, and in the country at large. The specter of World War II hovers around the edges of their thoughts and actions, including the complicated emotional goodbye as Garland sends Walker off. Tears have been shed along the way, but Garland’s young bride is smiling in a peculiar way as she strides back into the bustle of the city with a sense of…something. Maybe of purpose? Maybe the bloom of new love hasn’t wilted with the cold light of day?
There is a mystery at the heart of the romance, and the petty indifference and cynicism that they encounter that lingers both in the spirit and the imagination. Quickie romances were a common practice in the face of war and potential death, but it feels like these two likeable, sincere people found something special with each other. They possess a level of comfort in their interactions, an uneasy chemistry that seems to shift with the same fast pace as the story’s contours that is quite refreshing.
Minnelli had two lead actors as talented and enthralling to watch as Garland and Walker and was smart enough to get out of their way. Walker was a known quality as a “serious” actor, and he does incredibly well with his green corporal that’s adrift in the big city aside from this girl he found. But it is Garland’s straight dramatic work that’s the real discovery. As if her numerous scenes of quivering need or rejection were not powerful enough, her crying at the wedding reception she has just gone through is a marvel, but it is nowhere near as commanding as the quiet power she brings to their scene in a church or the morning after their wedding night.
The city itself functions as a third character, and one that is ever shifting to its mercurial moods and whims. A frantic search after they have been broken up underscores a big city’s ability to be both massive and small, caring and unfeeling at the same time. In scaling back the ambitions of the narrative, Minnelli once again provides a symphony of emotions, faces, and textures that give a little sting with the sweet. The Clock may be the greatest little movie in all three of their careers.
In a piece of high camp that must be seen to be believed, Follies begins with Fred Astaire, a large ensemble of chorus girls and Cyd Charisse performing to “Here’s to the Girls.” Out of nowhere comes Lucille Ball, looking glamorous and lovely. Ball pulls out a whip, and things only get weirder from there as a group of dancers dressed up as cats are suddenly tamed by Ball cracking the whip and engaging in some minor choreography. Virginia O’Brien gallops in on a white horse and delivers a sarcastic, horny rebuttal called “Bring on Those Wonderful Men.” As a primer to the rest of the proceedings, it is fantastic and overloaded with kitsch and avant-garde stage design.
The two dance numbers from Astaire and Lucille Bremer may have their faults, but there is an elegance and beauty to each of them. The first sees Astaire as a thief trying to con a princess out of her extravagant jewelry. The rotating floors, stylized sets, and romance that Bremer and Astaire can conjure up make up for the lack of a satisfying conclusion. “Limehouse Blues” is more problematic as it gives in to stereotypical iconography about Asians. Yet when the segment takes off into a fantasy world and sees the two stars dancing around with fans in an expressionistic oriental landscape that is pure cinema. The less said about Astaire and Bremer in yellow-face makeup the better.
“The Babbitt and the Bromside” may not live up to the expectations of watching Astaire and Gene Kelly perform together in a scene, but it is the only one in existence. And if it cannot match-up to something we could have imagined, well, nothing ever will, honestly. But Astaire and Kelly give it their all, and it is amusing enough.
“Interview with a great star” sees Judy Garland having some fun with both the nature of studio-crafted dramatic stars and a persona like Greer Garson, someone who only did serious and dramatically important parts/movies. Garland gives in to every diva affectation that she can think of and appears to be having a ball sending up some of her fellow MGM starlets. Those rolling vowels and round tones are bemused potshots that only underscore her versatility as an actress. Few performers could command attention and the screen with the minimalist of movements and flourishes, but Garland was one of them as she effortlessly fixes a wayward strand of hair that looks like it was always meant to be part of the choreography.
Minnelli rounded out 1945 with Yolanda and the Thief, reuniting with Astaire and Bremer. This time the trio is in an MGM Technicolor wonderland version of South America that only existed in the musicals the studios produced during the Good Neighbor policy. The final product feels like a warmup for both The Pirate and An American in Paris but is not without its own charms.
Yes, chief among them is Minnelli’s continually incredible use of color and opulent set design. His make-believe country of Patria is alive with unreal color and expressionistic locations. The whole thing looks and feels like a vibrant painting in perpetual movement. Never staying still long enough to make you really question the absurdity of Bremer’s bathtub setup, for instance, but capturing your attention just long enough to cause a hitch in your breathing.
Yes, it is beauty for beauty’s sake attached to a slim plot, but sometimes that is enough. Here Astaire is a con man who romances a convent-raised heiress (Bremer) by pretending to be her guardian angel made flesh. When he tries to make off with her money, he realizes he loves the girl and shenanigans ensue. Oh, and there is a dream ballet that is one of the most underrated sustained pieces of cinematic wonder in Minnelli’s enviable body of work. One could edit out the dream ballet and insert it into Ziegfeld’s Follies without issue, and it does feel like a continuation, an outgrowth or evolution of the jewel thief sequence in that film.
Sequences like “Coffee Time,” with its wavy black and white flooring offset by the watercolor backgrounds and bright clothing of its leads, paper over some of the weaknesses of the plot and make this worth at least one cursory viewing. Yet it does underscore why Bremer never really took off as a leading lady while demonstrating what a great movie dancer she was at the same time. Her natural poise, grace, and elegance pop when she’s in sweeping, emotionally expressive movement but she stalls a bit as a thespian. The role seems suited to highlight what she can do and never asks too much of what she cannot, but she only holds her own against Astaire, Leon Ames, and Mildred Natwick while spinning like a dervish.
1946’s Undercurrent is one of the strangest entries in Minnelli’s oeuvre. At once a semi-noir and a domestic melodrama that recalls Hitchcock films like Suspicion, Undercurrent feels an ill fit for Minnelli’s brand of overheated romanticism or dark lyricism. The parts are there for something unique, but they never successfully come together. Too many disparate tastes end up leaving the whole thing confusing.
Some of that falls squarely on leading lady Katharine Hepburn who convinces as a woman finding love for the first time but is less successful making us believe her “damsel in distress” act. Hepburn had too outsized a personality to believably portray victimhood like this and she lacked the necessary vulnerability for the part. She seems too smart, too capable to pay such a shrinking violet.
And she is outshone by her two male costars: Robert Taylor and Robert Mitchum. Taylor was an aging romantic hero of films like Waterloo Bridge and Camille, and those matinee idols always had an element of mystery lurking just beneath their handsome surfaces. Minnelli plumbs that mystery and finds something sinister beneath it all. But the film belongs to Mitchum as the soulful, artistic type. A role that on the surface seems an ill-fit for the tough guy, but he surprises with his delicacy and soulfulness. Qualities that were always there in his darker roles but used for different means.
Another year, another threadbare plot about a beloved deceased composer that was really a flimsy excuse to get some of the best singers of all time together to perform the songbook and film it. This time around it is Jerome Kern. Once again, Minnelli directs just the Garland segments in Till the Clouds Roll By. Arguably these are the best sequences. He brings a real energy and eye for unique details and compositions to the film that the rest of it sorely lacks. Even the best sequences could have been improved tenfold if he had been allowed to take charge of them. The highlight of their joint sequence is the plaintive “Look for the Silver Lining.” “Silver Lining” has Garland playing one of the grand dames of musical theater at the time, a wonderful bit of casting, and focuses in on her washing dishes. It does not sound that enthralling on paper, but Garland was a rare talent who could make the most mundane of actions feel alive onscreen. The combination of the melancholic lyrics and her standing still, focusing in on her repetitive task give the whole song a somber tone that is quite beautiful.
This lopsided effect leaves The Pirate as one of the strangest musicals to come out of the Arthur Freed unit at MGM. After all, Garland does not sing until roughly thirty minutes into the film, Kelly’s extended dance sequences get the lion’s share of time, and the plot is a practically a bitch in heat. Somehow the confluence of Kelly’s peacocking, Garland’s overwhelming neurosis, and Minnelli’s overwrought imagery craft something unique. Indispensable, even. A love-it-or-leave-it cult classic.
Whether that “unique” is a positive or negative depends largely on the viewer. For me, I have long been fascinated and enthralled by The Pirate’s dream space Caribbean and overcharged erotic allure. I am part of the cult that thinks this is a musical underdog just waiting for everyone else to take notice of its brilliance and vault it out of its critical limbo state. Others are not quite as forgiving of the patchwork plot and hyperbolic artistry.
There is Garland’s quivering good girl just aching to go bad at the guiding hand of Macoco, the scourge of the Caribbean seas. Her first meeting with Kelly, a meet-cute flirtation, finds her practically vibrating with repressed sexual desire and Kelly turning up the sleazy charm. Garland’s legs are practically locked together at the vaguest change in vaginal humidity, and one cannot blame her as Kelly’s tanned seducer slides up to her.
Kelly’s a proud cock on display. His performance registers as something of either a parody or homage to John Barrymore and Douglas Fairbanks’ pirate roles and hammy theatrics, and as a grand display of his thick, muscular body. The costumer outfits Kelly in pants and tights that look as if they were painted on, and he has never looked more alluring than he does here. Kelly was never more sexually charged and open a star than he was during the pirate ballet, the masterpiece sequence of the film, where he becomes the object of the camera’s desire in a way that is typically reserved for female stars. Think of it as the camera becoming the gay male gaze.
This ballet sequence highlights his powerful thighs, arm muscles, and athletic dancing just as much as it functions as an elaborate erotic fever dream from Garland’s chaste good girl. He brandishes a sword throughout, and yep, it is completely loaded with Freudian metaphor. Kelly and Garland generate heat in The Pirate, and this fantasy ballet exemplifies that this no sweetly pure romantic story like Kelly and Garland’s other films, such as Summer Stock.
The Pirate is awash in dreamy reds and purples before it propels towards an ending run of sequences that seem at odds with the rest of the film. “Be a Clown,” first performed in a leg destroying routine with Kelly and the Nicholas Brothers then reprised with Garland and Kelly in pure slapstick mode, feels like an imposition from a more routine MGM production. It is a remarkable and strange film nonetheless, one that is psychologically complex in the ways it juxtaposes its characters’ interior realities with the fussily designed exterior. The Pirate is a fascinating, complex film that feels alternately designed for cult worship and begging for rediscovery as a damaged jewel in everyone’s oeuvre.
On the surface there is nothing particularly wrong with 1949’s Madame Bovary, but there is a persistent feeling that something is missing from it. Or that it has several small somethings that are missing or slightly off which distorts the final product into something that is just decent enough. But decent enough isn’t good enough for a film with this pedigree. Or most of Minnelli’s work up to this point.
Chief among the problems is a wraparound segment that finds author Gustave Flaubert (James Mason, bringing gravitas to what is essentially a cameo) on trial for obscenity. It looks and feels like a mandated exercise to the production code, and Madame Bovary’s problems begin to compound from there. It is nearly impossible to tell the story of Bovary with one hand tied behind your back, which is what it looks like here as glossy MGM standards must be met and the thematic material can only go so far.
It is gorgeous to look at, as any film from Minnelli is at least worth a watch for the beautiful images alone, but beautiful images are not the same as emotions. This is Madame Bovary at its most muted, and the main character becomes one we quickly stop caring about and there is still nearly 90 more minutes to spend with her before the end. It is here where the decision to present the film as a dramatic enactment of Flaubert’s oration becomes such a crisis. Emma Bovary’s actions are hard to care about or invest in when they feel removed from a believable world for us to get lost in.
Jennifer Jones’ central performance is also a bit of a curious case. Jones was an actress of tremendous raw potential that some directors could harness and finesse into gloriously pyrotechnic work (Gone to Earth), or touchingly vulnerable and emotionally open (Portrait of Jennie), or a shockingly gifted comedienne (Cluny Brown), or deliciously, dangerous kitsch and carnal (Duel in the Sun). There are numerous gaps in the script and Jones never fills them in with personality or strong choices. She merely plays the scenes as they are with no true artistry that great actors bring to their parts.
Minnelli only gets two great scenes from Jones and the rest is merely treading water. One of them is the justifiably famous ballroom waltz scene. It is a tour-de-force from every angle, but Jones’ transition from head-spinning romanticism to cold and calculating as she glimpses herself in the mirror is a knockout. It is a shame that right after this Jones goes back to merely being serviceable in the role until a late scene where she tries to relive that glorious night by dancing alone in her hotel room. Deliriously lost in a dream before catching a glimpse of herself in a cracked mirror, she breaks down to find the illusion irrevocably shattered. These two moments alone are worth investing in the time and energy to get through the rest.
It is not that Minnelli was incapable of directing a great melodrama, look no further than his passionate work yet to come, but he seems like he is spinning in circles here. Some sequences are alive, many are counting time until the next big sequence, and the entire thing feels curiously hollow. It is worth watching for the waltz scene, for supporting work from Louis Jourdan, Gladys Cooper, Mason, and a few scenes of Van Heflin, and for the gorgeous production design and costumes, but it could have been so much more.
Here is a comedy of life, and an opportunity to watch Tracy deliver one of the best performances of his career. At times, I find Tracy’s stoicism, his everyman naturalism to be lacking in enchantment. He can at times be a technician without personality, but when that hint of bruised ego or darkness is allowed to leak out, as it does in some of his stellar noirs and melodramas, or used to explore the male psyche of the era, as in his Katharine Hepburn comedies, he can be magical.
We meet him in the tattered aftermath of a party, the reception for the happy couple. He breaks the fourth wall and speaks to us in a manner that inhabits his Irish brio and playing with the morbidity lurking just beneath the surface. Several of Minnelli’s films occupy a “keeping up with the Joneses” fantasia, and Father of the Bride explodes that through Tracy’s increasing paranoia and exasperation at the dollar amount of the impending nuptials. We are clued into the fact that we will be in for sourly comic ride.
What follows from there is a flashback that expresses the full-range of parental reactions to one of their children fleeing the nest and starting their own family. From the meet cute with the parents to the awkward first encounters with the prospective in-laws, it all builds and releases tension in ways that recall Minnelli’s musicals. Instead of bursting into song-and-dance, we will instead get a first glimpse of Taylor in her wedding gown (breathtaking) or a punchline (“You don’t have to shout! Nobody’s deaf!”).
It all leads to the film’s highlight, and one of the strangest sequences in a comedic film of its era: a nightmare scenario that evokes German Expressionism and surrealist art. Tracy’s father has spent the better part of the film as a walking/talking ATM and dealing with the anxiety of his only daughter settling down into her adult life. We see his walk down the aisle become a gauntlet of embarrassments and staring eyes.
The floor becomes a sink hole that swallows up his legs and destroys his tailored pants. The attendees take on the visage of the judging priests of The Passion of Joan of Arc as they gossip and laugh at his ineptitude. Taking a toll from Salvador Dali, gigantic disembodied eyes loom over him in the frame and the neatly organized setting starts to swirl or become asymmetrical. The whole thing feels more in common with sequences in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari than it does this slice of life domestic comedy.
These types of sequences reappear routinely in his films. Where we expect them to zip, they zag and provide unique tonal changes that mark them as distinct pieces of artistry. While the studio’s journeyman directing and assembling could create profoundly beautiful and touching works of art (think Casablanca), they also knew when to invest in a unique artist’s voice. MGM provided Minnelli with an ecosystem that allowed a “one for me, one for them” modus operandi to flourish.
1951’s Father's Little Dividend picks up where the story left off. The first film was such a massive success that the studio rushed production of a sequel, and one gets the sense that Minnelli is merely doing his due diligence in order to make his passion project (more on that shortly). It is not that the magic is gone, it is that the rushed nature of the film does show. (It was shot in 20-some days while sets were being constructed for An American in Paris.)
The whole thing created the general concept of a modern sequel: reuniting the principal cast and director for a story that picks up exactly where the first ended. Here, that means that Elizabeth Taylor’s blushing bride is now about to become a new mom. Naturally, the grandparents make the happy occasion more about their wants, needs, and emotional angst than about the expecting couple. It is a diverting little truffle, but it cannot match the dark undercurrents and still potent satire of the original. Still, Tracy, Bennett, and Taylor are comfortable in their roles and make the material work even when its sitcom nature shows.
The eternal comparison is not fair as An American in Paris offers plenty of its own exuberant and giddy thrills. After all, the individual ingredients include the strong songbook by George Gershwin, director Minnelli’s incandescent work, and Kelly’s wonderful choreography throughout culminating in a seventeen-minute ballet sequence that is among the most beautiful things to come out of any American musical. Hell, it is one of the most wondrous sequences to come out of cinema ever, coming damn close to rivaling the ballet in The Red Shoes.
I suppose it is easier to admire An American in Paris than warmly embrace it because it gives us a complicated ending. Yes, the lovers come together, but there are still several plot strands that are left open-ended. This is not typical of a big-budget musical of the era, which usually wrapped everything up by the final frame, sending our characters off to a happily-ever-after with a song-and-dance. No such satisfaction awaits us here, and I love it even more for it.
Not to say that An American in Paris is a complex narrative, it is not, it just does not play by the formula entirely. There are plenty of songbook musicals from the era, but they typically drape the songs across a thinly plotted, largely phony biography of the composer(s). There is also not a hint of a farm in need of saving, or a backstage drama. No “let’s put on a show” enthusiasm. Just a tortured love quadrant in which heartbreak abounds and reunions feel bittersweet.
Post-WWII ennui has never looked so handsome as it does in the visage of Gene Kelly’s expat former veteran who now works as a painter on the Parisian streets. Normally Kelly was something of a glistening ham in scenes that asked him to play straight drama, but he is wonderful here. He believably sells his character’s conflicts, and he makes increasingly taxing and athletic dance moves appear as simple as breathing.
The two women in his life are an interesting contrast. Nina Foch’s older, wealthy woman could be easily reduced to a possessive sugar-mama, but there is something sympathetic about her. A desperation to be loved, and a tendency towards looking for it in all the wrong places. Leslie Caron is a little hit-and-miss as an actress here, but her dancing easily places her in the upper pantheon of great cinematic ballerinas, standing easily alongside Cyd Charisse and Vera-Ellen. Caron’s introductory dance is a wonder of versatility as an artist. Watch as she uses her body to express carnality, domesticity, smarts, and playfulness, projecting any of these emotions with just a swivel of the hips or an extension of her leg.
Everything eventually builds up to the extended ballet, which rehashes the central love story as a trip through various art styles and famous French paintings. Minnelli gave the world many glorious Technicolor musical sequences, but this may be the apex of his work. The colors leap out at you, the costumes are flawless, and the production design necessary to recreate these famous works is untouchable. This scene alone is enough to place An American in Paris within the canon of great movies.
As entertaining as it is challenging, An American in Paris finds the Freed unit working at its optimal level. Minnelli and Kelly would make better films, or ones more beloved than this one, but that does not diminish the astounding artistry on display here. In fact, there is a reason this film won Kelly his Honorary Oscar, it has the audacity to dare greatly. And it makes the film that Minnelli would eventually win his directing Oscar for even more anemic in comparison.
We begin at the end as wunderkind filmmaker Jonathan Shields (Douglas, in one of his greatest, most nuanced performances) is on the outs with the industry that previously embraced him. Through a trilogy of flashbacks, we learn just how he crawled from the trenches of the industry to producer on poverty row to Academy darling. We see him through the prism of the three major figures whose careers he both broke into the mainstream and betrayed personally – director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), star Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), and writer James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell). Shields needs them to get his new project financed as his name alone is no longer has any cachet, but they understandably have trepidations about working again with this complicated figure in their past.
Appearing as it does in-between towering peaks of Technicolor majesty, The Bad and the Beautiful is proof that even in black-and-white Minnelli was capable of crafting film images of exquisite emotional precision and power. Even drained of their primal colors, and the colors in a Minnelli film are often vibrant to the point of eye searing, there are scenes of aesthetic pleasure and emotional power that rival anything in his bright musicals. I am thinking of a tearful Lana Turner driving her car in the rain and losing control as she hysterically cries, or Douglas and company sneaking into a Hollywood party that clearly points towards the likes of Robert Altman’s The Player in the ways it layers audio and a snaking camera through the various rooms capturing the glitterati at play.
While Minnelli is eternally known for his musical films, and he truly was a master of the form, his melodramas were no less dynamic, and often more personal. Under another director, Shields’ vainglorious journey and eventual expulsion would tend towards a moralistic screed, but not here. Instead, it plays out as a psychological examination of a certain breed losing it all as quickly as they gain it, layer by layer. If Singin’ in the Rain, also released in 1952, was the giddy, kitschy, least neurotic film Hollywood ever made about itself, then The Bad and the Beautiful was Citizen Kane by way of The Hollywood Reporter.
Some of the stories and figureheads are glaringly obvious – Turner’s daughter of a respected by self-destructive alcoholic acting legend is clearly pointing towards the likes of the Barrymores (with her father even being renowned for his profile and way with Shakespeare to really hammer home the comparison to John), while Shields is clearly some kind of amalgamation of David O. Selznick, Val Lewton, and Orson Welles, and James Lee Bartlow is heavily inspired by the likes of William Faulker (who also had a southern belle wife that was difficult) and Paul Elliot Green. There are even cute blink-and-miss-it jokes about the likes of Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville and a Germanic director with clear references to Erich von Stroheim and Josef von Sternberg. These various garnishes only add to the overall impression that Minnelli is both sending love and hate to the studio system and the industry at large.
As he did under the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Kirk Douglas blossoms under the guiding hand of Minnelli. Douglas had a tendency at times to go too big, too broad in his emotional execution of a scene, especially in old age in supporting parts that left too much room for it. In very different ways, Kubrick and Minnelli both knew how to funnel that vast intensity and help shape it into something more nuanced and layered. Sure, Douglas is again playing a bit of a bastard, a type he did excel at, but it is how he does it that is so surprising.
Through clenched teeth and closed off body language Douglas paints a portrait of an incredibly charismatic morally bankrupt artist. His view of his writers, directors, and stars as mere pawns and toys to produce what he envisions is all too real. But he is never less than self-aware of his methodology and intentions as in a late scene where he tells Powell’s writer that some of the greatest films were made by people who could barely tolerate each other. It is a line that is written with punch, delivered with ease, and filled with more truth than several people watching the film in 1952 probably knew. Or maybe they did.
Yet the real surprise here is just how good the likes of Dick Powell and Lana Turner are here. I like Powell a lot in Murder, My Sweet, but found his chipper singer roles in the likes of Footlight Parade grating and him woefully miscast in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Color me shocked every single time I watch this movie to see him deliver a performance that taps into melancholic emotions and intellectually fussiness that seemed outside of his skills. While Lana Turner was to my mind one of the glamorous movie stars, a clotheshorse who often gave perfectly serviceable work in most of her films with occasional glimpses of untapped greatness in the likes of Zeigfeld Girl or Imitation of Life. She is superb in this. Perhaps her best scene is when she overhears everyone claiming she’s a nothing, a talentless beauty in reaction to her screen test and silently accepts the drink offered by her agent. She is a vision of wounded pride quickly medicating itself, and she does it all without uttering a single word.
In the end this trenchant portrait of, yes, the bad and the beautiful of Hollywood resembles what several other of Minnelli’s most personal works do: the choice between love and art. This one takes it a step further to examine the ways in which love and art are the same thing, or in conflict or communion with each other, depending. Yes, this man hurt them, but he also elevated their careers, and the ending does not go out with a bang but with a question mark. Are they truly walking out the door and away from him after eavesdropping on the call where he explains his latest, greatest movie idea? Or is that interest and curiosity spreading across their faces?
That curious push-and-pull between ecstasy and despair is what makes Minnelli films so engaging and often surprising. It is what also makes this lushy orchestrated piece of insider gossip one of his greatest masterworks. If Minnelli is an acknowledged master of the movie musical, then we must also acknowledge him as a master of the melodrama.
1953’s The Story of Three Loves is like all package films: peaks and valleys. Minnelli directs the middle segment, “Mademoiselle,” which reunites him with Leslie Caron. She plays a French governess to Ricky Nelson’s bratty pupil who goes to see Ethel Barrymore’s magical expat. By wrapping a ribbon around his finger, Nelson transforms into Farley Granger for a few hours. Granger and Caron take a romantic excursion with Rome before the strike of midnight causes the magic spell to end.
Minnelli’s work stands in stark contrast to the flat visual style of Gottfried Reinhardt, who directs the other two sections. Part of me wishes Minnelli had directed the entire film as the promise of him directing Moira Shearer as a doomed ballerina engaging in a tragic romance with James Mason seemed tailor made for his directorial vision. The third, with Kirk Douglas and Pier Angeli, combines escaping Nazis, a suicide attempt, and circus performing into the only segment with a happy ending.
The whole thing longs for the romanticism Minnelli brings to “Mademoiselle.” Having said that, the cast is obviously top notch, the three segments are individually entertaining, and it goes down smooth. Maybe not a necessary watch but if you’re a completist it is not anywhere near the worst film in anyone’s filmography. But oh, what could have been with Shearer and Minnelli.
The Band Wagon concerns a fallen movie star (Fred Astaire), displaced by changing tastes/times, looking for a career rebound and finding it in the ramshackle Broadway show presented to him by his two friends (Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray as an in-joke Betty Comden and Adolph Green). What follows is a behind-the-scenes glimpse of putting on a show – the writing process, assembling the creative talent, out-of-town tryouts, and finally, the big opening night. A persistent tone of wistfulness, if not downright melancholia, pervades over the whole enterprise as the ephemeral nature of “putting on a show” is highlighted again and again and again.
It makes sense that Astaire would take the lead in a film like this as contemporaries like Gene Kelly were too proletariat in comparison. The film needed a star who seemed self-possessed, and Astaire’s commitment to perfectionism was well-known at the time. Co-star Fabray said, “Fred rehearsed until he drove you crazy.” The results show as Astaire’s penchant for being a one-man spinning top is only underscored by the likes of “By Myself,” “Shine on Your Shoes,” and nearly stealing the show from his partners in “That’s Entertainment,” where the four performers practically show you their bruised, bloodied, and exhaustively rehearsed bodies and demand for our applause and love. They get them, oh boy do they get them.
Without a comparable leading lady, think the likes of Rita Hayworth, Ginger Rogers, or Judy Garland, Astaire would come across as a strangely sexless, nearly asexual screen presence for a dancer. He was not a generous movie dancer, and he needed a strong partner to shore up his weakness or match his intensity. Cyd Charisse matches him when it comes to dancing but is inert at this point in her acting career. She is only halfway there as a sparring partner for Astaire, but a lot of the blame for that goes to MGM’s insistence on polishing out the native accent and charm of Charisse and making her into another transatlantic bombshell.
Forgiveness for her lack of sexual chemistry and inert acting abilities aside, she is a stellar dance partner for him. “Dancing in the Dark” is a romantic ballet between the two that finds Charisse throwing her body around in ways that merge the transcendent, the euphoric, and the erotic in mystical ways. This was the power of her as a dancer. We see the two of them matching in technical skill and expanding into something more and greater than their individual talents.
Then comes “Girl Hunt Ballet,” a bit of a goof on Gene Kelly’s dream ballets in his films. It is also one of the greatest pieces of musical filmmaking that Minnelli ever created. Charisse and Astaire roll through a staggering number of emotions through their bodily pantomimes, and the only comparable acting equivalent would be the torrent of verbiage that comes from performing Shakespeare. It is a highpoint for all involved with Astaire as film noir antihero, Charisse as the femme fatale, and some of the jazziest choreography I’ve ever seen. Charisse’s reveal of her red tasseled dress is filled with a carnality and grace that makes going to the movies a perfect excuse to watch beautiful people doing interesting things with their bodies.
Although, if you’re anything like me, you will have noticed that the various scenes for the Broadway show make absolutely no sense when strung together. (Yes, even factoring in the revue makeover.) They are merely a body of work that exists independently from each other to entertain us. (Seriously, what the hell is that “Triplets” number? I’ve seen the film twice and still am flabbergasted by it.) The connecting tissue is shambolic, but the final results, the stuff that lingers longest in the mind, is some the purest, best musical ephemera of the decade. That’s entertainment? Yeah, that’s entertainment. (La la la la la la.)
The first of his two films in 1954, The Long, Long Trailer does play more than a little bit like a Technicolor riff of I Love Lucy. What is zany and (still) incredibly funny in 30 minutes becomes a bit shrill as its frenzy feels bloated. While technically not I Love Lucy: The Movie (and that does exist), The Long, Long Trailer does exemplify the problem of turning a TV show into a movie – dead weight, the feeling of a premise being bloated, what works in bite-sized chunks becoming difficult to swallow for 90+ minutes. Still, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s palpable chemistry, both romantic and comedic, is more than enough to sit through this.
Tacy (Ball) and Nicky (Arnaz) are newlyweds who decide to buy a trailer and tour the country for their honeymoon. A perfectly fine premise for hijinks to ensue, and boy do they. Between nosey neighbors, Ball’s patented physical humor, and the unwieldly trailer providing situations to continually arise that either cause destruction or provide an excuse for the characters to argue. The whole thing eventually feels episodic in structure as Tacy and Nicky move from one location to another and meet various eccentrics along the way. Marjorie Main and Keenan Wynn are two of the colorful supporting players that zip in during these various set pieces, and despite being billed just under the marquee stars, they only have a few minutes of screentime between them.
The whole thing feels an odd fit for Minnelli’s sense of sophistication and obsession with luxurious décor, but a few sequences pop along the way. One of them, a minor musical interlude where they cuddle while singing “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze,” is a sweetly tender moment between the two. A reminder that even in a minor moment such as this Minnelli could make movie musical magic. But even better is the climatic sequence where Nicky tries driving the behemoth vehicle over rough terrain and Tacy futilely makes dinner. This sequence, heightened by Minnelli’s near musical composition and framing of it, allows for Ball to unleash her manic comedic energies at their full force.
The story concerns a magical Scottish town that only manifests and reawakens once every 100 years and the two vacationing Americans (Gene Kelly and Van Johnson) who accidentally discover it. Kelly falls in love with Cyd Charisse’s Fiona, and much of the plot involves Kelly and Johnson getting to know the denizens/customs of the town, and whether Kelly will forsake his modern life to live forever with Charisse. Sure, that plot doesn’t sound like much, but between the dancing, the beauty of the scenery, and Minnelli’s commitment to enabling your mainlining of cinematic unreality tremendous life in breathed into the material.
“Heather on the Hill” aches with swooning romance as Kelly and Charisse flirtatiously dance through the Scottish countryside. The sexual innuendo of the material is hinted at through the subdued fire of their choreographic chemistry. In much the same way that “The Chase” elevates the danger of the material by providing Minnelli a chance to go crazy with the shadows, color, and busyness within the frame. “Waiting for My Dearie” has Charisse and her sisters/friends dancing around in celebration of the upcoming wedding. It was this scene that had me buying exactly what Brigadoon was selling, and everything else was extra.
If there is any weak point in Brigadoon it is Van Johnson’s comedic sidekick. He grumbles around the periphery in a permanently drunken stupor and adds a bit too much sourness. A little bit is good, but he’s a mean drunk with no payoff or charm.
This is not a Scottish highland that has much to do with reality and one that has everything to do with dreams and imagination. Leave it to Minnelli to explore the ways in which escapist fantasy lures and attracts us away from the real world. I would argue that Brigadoon is one of several misunderstood or undervalued minor works in Minnelli’s oeuvre, like The Pirate or Cabin in the Sky.
No film is a better argument against Minnelli's excessive style than 1955's The Cobweb, a story where the barely concealed hostilities of a psychiatric clinic's staff, and their families, is routinely exploded by a change in drapery. The film plays like a musical without the payoff of pressure releasing numbers and performances largely pitched too broadly, such as Gloria Grahame's frustrated wife and Lillian Gish's cloistered spinster.
While Minnelli was typically a master of exposing and framing volatile claustrophobic situations, The Cobweb seems to elude his grasp as the whole thing feels thinly written and like an exercise in style and form over content. Still, there is a certain something, a hard to quantify or explain quality, the darkness underneath the beautiful surfaces that makes it worth watching at least once. Even Minnelli’s boldest failures possess qualities that make them worth the effort.
1955’s Kismet was made as a “for hire” favor, but more on that later, and the fact that Minnelli’s heart was not in it is evident. It also does not help matters much that Kismet is an Orientalist fantasia, an Arabian Nights story set to song-and-dance. An oft filmed tale, this version is the fifth adaptation of the property but the first to be based on the stage musical, I found it hard to grasp onto anything in Kismet to maintain my interest.
Sure, Howard Keel with his barrel chest and deep voice was one of the handsomest musical performers of the era, but he seems slightly wrong as the father of a fully grown daughter and a fast-talking con artist. He is too masculinely virile and stolid for that, and the part needed someone more like Don Ameche who played likeable rogues with aplomb. Ann Blyth makes a nice impression and demonstrates her lovely singing voice throughout. It’s a shame that Vic Damone resembles more an elf than a romantic hero and so his love story with Blyth never comes off despite his crisp singing voice.
Minnelli fills the screen with pastels and golds, with exotic choreography, and grandiose design but it smothers everything else. Perhaps part of the problem is that the score does not include any song that lingers in the mind. Kismet becomes an exercise in aesthetics for the sake of aesthetics with nothing tethering the audience’s engagement beyond that. While not the worst musical he made, that title still belongs to I Dood It, it is undoubtedly the weakest of the ones he made in the 1950s, his uniformly strongest decade as an artist.
Minnelli’s films are suffused with their creator’s obsessive devotion to beauty, harmony, and color as mode of expression/language, and that kind of kinship is reflected in the works of Van Gogh. A cursory glance through various biographical tidbits reveal that this was indeed a passion project for the great director, and he only agreed to make the likes of Kismet and Brigadoon to get permissions to make this one. That type of near religious zealotry for artistic creation is reflected within every frame of the film. Not only is it fussily decorated and adorned, but Minnelli frequently taps into the darkness of Van Gogh’s life and films the eruptions with the same eye as he did Gene Kelly’s choreographic wonders.
It helps that he has an actor as known for volcanic emotional displays as Kirk Douglas in the lead. Especially in his later years, Douglas’ volatile acting style and emotive capabilities could easily tip into hammy mugging and grandiose reaching, like in The Man from Snowy River. Here, as he did with his prior Minnelli collaboration and his future one, Douglas’ seismic intensity is funneled into a character and surrounding film that can shape, form, and use it into something purposeful.
Douglas’ rendering of Vincent Van Gogh is a man driven by a mania that is looking for an outlet. We first meet him as he tries to use religion to express it, but quickly runs afoul of the church as an institution. He soon discovers painting, and the rest is a series of historical incidents and encroaching mental illness that bide their time. Along the way we watch as Van Gogh becomes friends/enemies with Paul Gauguin (Anthony Quinn, earthy, lusty, and grand in equal measure), becomes institutionalized, cuts his ear off, and commits suicide before his genius is fully appreciated.
Douglas builds his performance through gritted teeth, intense gazes, and hurling his body across the frame. One shocking scene finds Van Gogh painting in nature before a seizure causes him to contort his body. It is a moment of the artist in sublime synchronicity with his muse, his spirituality being violently interrupted by the demons perpetually lurking just outside the frame. For all the gorgeous location photography and color blocking to reproduce the real world as Van Gogh’s artistic one even this cinematic creation cannot escape the depression and eventual self-destruction that doomed the artist’s life.
But we get plenty of small grace notes and images of overpowering beauty leading up and surrounding these systemic recalibrations. In his musical films these sequences found the characters seeking release by breaking into song, think Judy Garland’s yearning “The Boy Next Door.” In his melodramas, they get release in acts of violence, often perpetuated against the self, or arguments that turn into volleys of repressed urges and feelings finally being expressed. The characters will always find their artistic voice and means of self-expression, as it were.
The 50s saw a trend in Minnelli’s films being reflective of the makers. The Bad and the Beautiful and The Band Wagon both contained tortured artists struggling to survive, create, and express in their central roles. If auteurism is a popular film theory, and it is, then this is the decade that Minnelli came the closest to drafting a series of films that expressed and explained his inner mental workings with a sharpness and clarity that is nakedly candid and brusquely honest.
Sure, The Pirate and Tea and Sympathy expressed a queerness that was notable in his personal being expressed in his work, and Meet Me in St. Louis was a passion project, but they pale in comparison to Lust for Life’s simpatico essay of art, beauty, and expressing yourself as means of achieving transcendence. This was perhaps the most personal and revealing moment of his career. The Bad and the Beautiful, The Band Wagon, and Lust for Life make for a possibly unintended triptych, a trilogy of films concerning and detailing many of the same themes made in rapid succession that only revealed themselves as such in the intervening decades.
After all, it is much easier to notice these patterns when taking a long view of a career from someone entrenched in the studio system than it would possibly be in the moment of their creation. Maybe it was completely intentional. Maybe it was completely accidental and became a strange kismet knowing that Minnelli was largely handed projects by producers at MGM rather than fighting for them. Lust for Life, of course, being one of the few notable exceptions.
Kerr seems right at home in the cinematic world of Minnelli given how subtextual their sensuality could be. Tea and Sympathy leans into that with its story about a sensitive loner (John Kerr, no relation) who prefers to spend his time with the wives of the instructors at his all-male boarding school than he does conforming to preconceived notions of masculinity. Minnelli’s camera has often been used to depict the sutures keeping the American family together, the darkness and malaise lurking under the surface, and, on rarer occasions, to express his own latent queerness. The Pirate was probably the first time his camera so readily expressed it as it bathed in Gene Kelly’s muscular thighs and taunt arms in a skimpy black outfit, but Tea and Sympathy allusively expresses it in its main character.
Not even a code mandated change to the ending can entirely diminish the power here as Kerr’s frustrated housewife takes back her life and expresses the “problem without a name,” as Betty Friedan called it in The Feminine Mystique. The twin frustrations and outsider status of the two main characters expresses itself through Minnelli’s framing, often leaving Kerr displaced from the male characters, bold use of color, and evasive dialog that talks around a lot but says even more when you crack the code. If Kerr is only good enough for tea and sympathy as the den mother to these boys, a sexless surrogate that must always stand in contrast to their gender performance, then it is no wonder she gravitates towards this wounded soul who reminds her of her dead first husband.
John Kerr’s homosexual, the film all but declares his status through choices of hobby and his wan body language, is a bit dated but bold for its time. His eternally bubbling frustration with never being seen or good enough for those around him turns into constant eruptions and incomplete attempts to prove his masculinity. The most obvious of these is a late-night visit to a brothel where the prostitute cruelly recognizes him as “sister boy,” the mocking nickname from his dormmates, and he immediately breaks down and tries to harm himself. Yet this is not the only time as another standout moment is one where his sympathetic roommate (Darryl Hickman) tries to help butch him up in a lesson in walking and body posture.
Yes, Tea and Sympathy is a bit shy, if not muzzled, about its subject matter, even if it is shocking how much social criticism it does sneak in, but it manages to make something artful and fascinating through these strict guidelines. In an era where Minnelli was moving further and further away from the musical and using his vast aesthetic abilities to make some of the darkest, most visually appealing dramatic works of the decade. We already got The Bad and the Beautiful, Lust for Life, and acidic comedy Father of the Bride with further great works like Some Came Running and Home from the Hill still to come.
I wish I liked 1957’s Designing Woman more than I do. After all, here is a film with Minnelli, Gregory Peck, and Lauren Bacall coming together for a battle of the sexes martial comedy. And its screenplay won an Oscar! (Inexplicably, as it turns out.) So why do I find the whole thing so turgid?
Designing Woman is clearly a means to ape the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn formula in which a blue-collar man meets and marries a more refined woman, their opposite lifestyles clash, then harmony is restored by the final reel. Peck and Bacall have pleasing chemistry, and it is a shame they didn’t go on to become a beloved staple of rom-com coupledom, but they are underserved by the story. It is a lot of fun watching Peck play hardboiled and Bacall play demure and hyper-feminine, and the film gets a lot of goodwill and mileage out of that alone.
But then you must deal with the grossly, uh, unsympathetic depiction of a former boxer (Mickey Shaughnessy), the omnipresent narration from a quartet of characters, and the weakness of Dolores Grey’s character (another Dinah Shore goof, or a self-parody as her film career was essentially over after this) eats away at your enjoyment. If you walk away thinking you’ve seen this thing before, then maybe go back and revisit 1942’s Woman of the Year. The similarities are enough to cause one to raise an eyebrow.
1958 was quite the banner year for Minnelli as he released three films and finally won that coveted directing Oscar. In fact, the entire decade was a grand time for the maestro as they began and ended with his films triumphant at the Academy Awards. An American in Paris won for Best Picture, even if Minnelli was overlooked that year, and launched the acting career of star Leslie Caron. Several years later they reunited for Gigi, the musical adaptation of the Colette novella, and went on to sweep the Oscars.
There is plenty to work with in the material, to be sure. Here is the story of a young girl struggling to overcome the patriarchal structures bearing down on her social order and keeping her in place. But it is also a love story, one with a vaguely creepy veneer, populated by a largely unmemorable film score. Minnelli’s elegant camerawork and borderline overbearing mise-en-scène and use of color prove exquisite distractions. Although, the film’s most memorable song, “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” sounds borderline disturbing as sung by Maurice Chevalier’s aging lecher.
Gigi needed something darker, vulgar, something more beyond the frou-frou. The basic outline is that of My Fair Lady, but minus all the grittier aspects and social critique, and the plot essentially reveals itself within the first 15 minutes. We know Caron’s courtesan-in-training will steal the heart of Louis Jourdan’s playboy and domesticate him at the same time, so we are only left with artifice and waiting for the inevitable happily ever after to play out.
As is, the film is a pastry that leaves you gagging and never gives you a moment’s pause to deal with that. It just keeps shoving down your throat. But it is all so lovely to look at. Every frame is a stylish painting that is like mainlining cinematic unreality. We shall soon return to the story of a young girl’s forceful entrance into high society while navigating the conscripted avenues available to her.
The only 1958 release from Minnelli that did not have a presence at the Academy Awards was The Reluctant Debutante. It is a piffle, a featherweight comedy about an American girl visiting her British father and new stepmother who reluctantly goes through the debutante process and falls in love with a sexy naughty-adjacent boy. If that plot description sounds incredibly familiar it is because this was loosely remade as 2003’s What a Girl Wants with Amanda Bynes.
Minnelli’s aesthetic eye seems half-asleep here throughout as the film is populated by lovely gowns but interiors that feel too stage bound. In fact, The Reluctant Debutante’s stage play origins are entirely too obvious throughout as the whole thing never expands the play’s dimensions and remains sequestered to handsome parlors, drawing rooms, and ballrooms that do not possess the same magnetic pulse and enthralling bit of sociological observation as the ones found in Madame Bovary.
He largely fares much better with his actors, such as then-married couple Rex Harrison (bemused and inebriated) and Kay Kendall (flighty and glamorous) and Angela Lansbury (fast-talking busybody). If the charms of Sandra Dee as an actress escape me, and they do, she was at least a very lovely girl full of youthful charm, a delicate beauty, and an All-American playfulness that provides a snappy banter to the stodgy Brits. She does get one potent and wonderful reaction shot after John Gavin, handsome with a hint of darkness, recalls a (largely fictional) description the elaborate mating ritual of an indigenous tribe. The adults at the table quickly down their drinks as if in recognition that the whole scheme of these balls is a glossily dressed-up mating ritual to secure “proper” matches for their nubile daughters while Dee gives a look that can only be described as a teenager’s lustful arousal for a renegade suitor. Quick, someone cue the Crystals’ “He’s a Rebel.”
The surface decorum is always counting down to an explosion throughout Some Came Running as this cast of outsiders meet, reconfigure, and fall apart. We are reintroduced to this midwestern burb through Frank Sinatra’s ex-GI-turned-frustrate writer Dave Hirsch. Following him is Ginny (Shirley MacLaine, in a role that still shines brightly as one of her best) as he meets Bama (Dean Martin, drunk and corrosive), reunites with his sleazy brother (Arthur Kennedy), romances the schoolteacher (Martha Hyer), and gambles and drinks his way towards the inevitably tragic finale.
Between 1953’s From Here to Eternity and 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, Frank Sinatra turned in a series of performances that reevaluated his abilities as an actor and elevated him to a consummate screen artist of the craft. Here is one of his greatest, quietest performances that slowly pulls back the layers to reveal the coiled tension and psychological dislocation. Between blackout drunk binges and romantically weary interactions with MacLaine and Hyer, Sinatra essays one of his bleakest characters during a period not lacking with them (The Man with the Golden Arm, Suddenly, Pal Joey).
Even darker is what Martin is doing with Bama Dilbert, the source of much of the film’s questionable gender politics who maybe learns a lesson by the final scene. If all you know about Martin is his partnership with Jerry Lewis or comedic bits as the lush-with-barbs in the Rat Pack, then prepare to witness as complete a shock of a performance as his ego-destroying work in Kiss Me, Stupid. But it is MacLaine as “floozy with a heart of gold” Ginny that makes the biggest splash in the film. She takes a stock character and breathes an honesty and emotional openness that feels aggressively modern into the part. A scene where she sits listening to Sinatra reading a piece he wrote and explains that while she may not understand it but she still loves him breaks your heart with the need that comes rushing out of her and drowns the frame.
The only problem with the film is not its length, which is justified by the ensemble of characters, but the thinness of some of the characters who feel less like people than they do walking/talking symbols. The worst offenders of this are the female characters who can feel like the virgin/whore dichotomy and only salvaged by the performances who never condescend or play down to the material but do their best to upend the cliches or bring interesting choices to the soapy elements. At least the film has ideas, and emerges as one of Minnelli’s greatest non-musical films because of the ways this consummate artist elevates the material above and beyond its limitations.
As searing indictments of small-town hypocrisy go, Some Came Running remains one of the best examples of that subgenre. Minnelli’s sober and penetrating melodramas were at their best when the ornate surfaces stood in marked contrast with the ugliness of character and emotion, and this one offers several prime opportunities for that to happen. MacLaine’s vibrant pinks make her pop against the earth-tones of her surroundings, as though her very presence is a total disruption to the thinly held equilibrium of the place.
It all comes to a head at a carnival. Honestly, where else would a Minnelli film climax? Minnelli’s camera snakes around the performers as they move through the frame in a way that recalls his intelligence and mastery of filming choreographed dancers in motion. Like obvious cinematic progeny, Wes Anderson, Minnelli was masterful at establishing his dioramas and then obsessively bullying to blow it all up with the intensity of feeling struggling to get out.
This is why Minnelli’s eventual casting choices, Robert Mitchum and Eleanor Parker, are so genius. Parker was a chameleonic actress with an impressive range, and she does her reliably solid work here as a woman treated as an object, left to fester, and gone sour. But the movie belongs to Mitchum through and through in a performance that uses the full scope of his considerable talents. If the cinematic portrait of Mitchum as laconic and indifferent as an actor is all you have, then you have not actually watched him close enough.
Home from the Hill is a Texas set familial melodrama and oater that perhaps meanders too much for its own good but provides Mitchum with one of the plum roles of his career. As the manly sexuality he projected in some of his best-known roles like Cape Fear and The Night of the Hunter, intoxicating and dangerous, is used here to interesting means as it suffocates his overly sensitive son. When the film focuses in on Mitchum, it soars as the actor slowly emotionally disrobes to reveal the nastiest motivations going on just beneath the surface with his body position or the fluctuations in his voice. His heavily lidded eyes become steely as he makes demands of his son to become the person that his bastard son already is. Mitchum won the National Board of Review for Best Actor for his work in both this and in The Sundowners), the lone major acting award of his career, and deserved recognition from the Academy.
The problems arise in centering George Hamilton as the queer coded son. By his own admission, Hamilton was a third-rate actor, and he is out of his depth surrounded by Mitchum, Parker, and George Peppard as his half-brother. The part needed a tortured soul, a Montgomery Clift, James Dean, or his co-star Peppard for instance, but Hamilton plays the part as a sensitive mama’s boy who is too wrapped up in his own privilege. He is better here than in his next collaboration with Minnelli, Two Weeks in Another Town, where he is playing a volatile Method actor, but that is not saying too much. Hamilton is a noticeable weak link, and the film suffers by extension. Peppard is quite strong as an illegitimate son capable of taking care of himself and jealous of the attention lavished on Hamilton. He manages quiet moments of near poetry as the outsider looking in and longing for legitimacy.
Home from the Hill is of a piece with Minnelli’s behind-the-scenes Hollywood films and other small-town melodramas in that it exposes the institutions for their foundational cracks and mythologizing. Here that dark eye is turned towards a family and its own obsessions with legacy and power. There is a Shakespearean tragedy of a king falling from the throne and the disarray it causes his warring relatives, but Home from the Hill is too long, too meandering to truly absorb like it should. It remains one of his more successful later works and straight dramatic films, but a tighter edit and a change in actor could have made it an unabashed classic.
Minnelli turns in oddly subdued work his other 1960 release, Bells Are Ringing. The sets look a bit stagey, some of the sequences could have been better and they never really breathe the way that other stage-to-screen adaptations he directed were allowed to. His other classics burst with verve, energy, wit, and color, so why not this one?
Maybe it is the songbook. It is not exactly full of memorable tunes, no matter how well-sung and acted they are. The plot largely concerns Judy Holliday’s switchboard operator who is overly invested in the personal lives of her various clients, including Dean Martin’s dramatist. There is also a subplot about a bookie disguising his horse bets with mail-order classical records as an elaborate code. It is thanks to Holliday that we buy into these wacky situations. If the movie is a perfectly serviceable musical, then she manages to elevate it through sheer force of personality.
Holliday seemed like a natural fit for MGM and the Arthur Freed unit. While prior films had given her minor chances to sing and dance, this is the only film that exhibited the full range of her musical-comedy talents. She is at her perkiest, sweetest, nakedly vulnerable best throughout even when everything else around her sags or drags.
Dean Martin makes for a nice partner for her as his laconic breeziness is tethered by her empathy. Minnelli managed to plumb the depths of Martin’s star persona in surprising ways in the films they made together, and he trusts Holliday enough to be true scene partner to ease Martin’s anxiety about going solo. (He had recently separated from long-time partner Jerry Lewis.) Their romance is a believable outgrowth of their contrasting performing styles meeting in the middle. They also make for aurally pleasing duet partners on songs like “Better Than a Dream” and “Just in Time.”
Bells Are Ringing being undoubtedly too long and episodic means it was never going to be anything more than a minor work. The swan song of the Arthur Freed unit, the powerhouse section of MGM’s musical output where Minnelli had made his name, and star Holliday’s final film before her early death, it is loaded with a strange poignancy that is not there on the screen. It is the ghosts orbiting and haunting it that colors our view of the film in the present.
We begin 1962 with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a loose adaptation of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez novel that was previously filmed with Rudolph Valentino in 1921. Widely (and rightly) considered one of Minnelli’s weaker efforts, Four Horseman finds an international cast struggling to make sense of his lack of interest in the material. Or clearly demonstrating that they were all wrong for their various parts.
Work on the remake began in 1946 as a vehicle for Ricardo Montalbán, who would have been a much better choice for the part, and languished until it picked back up after the success of 1959’s Ben-Hur. Since that old property had proven dynamite at the box office, then another old property would surely do the same business, right? Well, that should tell you how often and for how long the studios have been shy about investing in new properties and chasing potential trends in lieu of supporting original work because this did not do that type of business.
Minnelli wanted to leave the book’s WWI time period intact but the studio denied his request and updated the material to WWII, and Minnelli never felt an ease with the finished script. He is alleged to have written, “I began to believe I was the victim of a studio set up.” This general malaise carried over when his choice for the lead, Alain Delon, was rejected in favor of Glenn Ford, who had just resigned with the studio.
At least Minnelli’s commitment to stunning visuals manages to keep the eye engaged throughout, and he does manage to pull off an ending that nearly salvages the entire overly long thing into passable territory. Ford and Karl Boehm, having spent the entirety of the film fighting on opposite sides of the conflict, are trapped together as Allied bombs rain down. The film ends with the four horsemen riding off to cause further destruction. The whole thing aches with a poetic tension that much of the rest of the film lacks but reminds us of how startling a dramatist Minnelli could be when his heart and mind were with the material.
Instead of being a revelation of an egomaniacal producer/auteur, this one is about an embittered actor returning to the business after taking an extended break due to personal troubles. Star (Douglas) and director (Edward G. Robinson) are crumbling figureheads of a former glory and type of film that is swiftly eroding away in favor of new voices and styles. The dreamscapes of Minnelli’s films because something of a metatextual reference and refraction as The Bad and the Beautiful exists as a film within this world starring Douglas’ Jack Andrus and directed by Robinson’s Maurice Kruger.
Two Weeks in Another Town is clearly indebted to the lives of Tyrone Power, his complicated relationship with Linda Christian, and studio impresario Darryl Zanuck with references to the likes of James Dean and Hollywood’s European dalliance, including the influx of Italian beauty queens like Sophia Loren and the rise of costume epics like El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire. The whole thing flirts with a Fellini-esque sense of place and time as fantasy and reality often merge, blur, and comment upon each other. Is Minnelli talking through Robinson as the ailing director looks upon his 50s masterpiece and sighs about how good he once was? It is hard not to read into it as a company man like Minnelli seemed completely unmoored and displaced as New Hollywood slowly took over as the decade rolled along.
Always flamboyant, Minnelli makes grand poetry out of his portraiture of artists struggling to survive in a changing industry. Whereas other melodramatic films of his could veer too far and too wide (The Cobweb), Two Weeks in Another Town lends itself well and seems to be touching some soulful, yearning side of Minnelli as both artist and man. He gets another strong performance from Douglas. While other frequent directors like Stanley Kubrick could tap in Douglas’ virile masculinity and aggressive physicality, Minnelli could find the sensitivity and demons that propelled him to keep going and engage in those hypermasculine performances.
Equally great and credible are Robinson and Claire Trevor reuniting after 1948’s Key Largo to recapture that flinty chemistry. Their married couple dance dangerously close to George and Martha territory and one wonders what plucking these two into those roles would conjure up. Trevor reminds us of how great she is at playing drunk and gets a plum scene where she dressed down Robinson for his various infidelities and betrayals while paying lip service to their romantic and personal partnership. Hell, even Cyd Charisse, normally a very fine dancer and a limp actress, displays some fine emoting as the femme fatale actress.
The artistic outsider struggling for their place in the world is a common thread throughout Minnelli’s works, and Two Weeks is perhaps the darkest portrait of the will to create withering in the face of oppressive forces. The film may ostensibly be about one actor’s two-week stay in Rome and reunion with his longtime collaborators, but it is really a trenchant examination of the various schisms that go into making art and the terror of being replaced. It may be Minnelli’s most personal, self-reflective work. Nothing else he made in the subsequent years captures its potency and power.
We quickly meet Eddie (Ron Howard) and his father (Ford), a recently widowed man trying to balance his grief, career, and son’s needs all at once, and the various women that come into their orbit. Howard’s performance as Eddie is free from the typical child actor wooden quality of the era and reminds us of how delicate a touch Minnelli had with child actors throughout his career. He makes Eddie a believable and recognizable kid, at once precocious, tender, and naughty. His bond with Ford is both tough and tender, and one that had me tearing up and crying by the end.
What is most startling about the entire film is the ways in which it openly expresses and processes complicated emotions like grief and trying to move on with your life. Sure, it does not have the same emotional intensity that a similar film would have a mere decade later, but for 1963 this is uncommonly honest. At times the emotional intensity plays discordantly against the broad humor of certain set pieces. Yet the overall effect is one of the melancholies of life. You must take the bitter with the sweet.
The comedic elements of the film are hit-and-miss. Stella Stevens as a sweet but naïve woman from Montana plays like a sitcom character who wandered in while Dina Merrill as the icy working woman is an atypical Minnelli character. He normally does not view these types of women with suspicion as she is viewed here. Shirley Jones is charming as the neighbor who is clearly in love with Ford and a surrogate mother for Howard. Jones’ character is so clearly the right woman that it taking nearly two hours for Ford to reach the same conclusion that is immediately evident is baffling to the point of incomprehensibility.
I never thought a Minnelli film would out awful I Dood It, but 1964’s Goodbye Charlie manages to do just that. The whole thing, based on a play by George Axelrod, needed a more subversive tone and/or director. Billy Wilder’s jaundice was an appropriate fit for The Seven Year Itch while Frank Tashlin’s anarchic spirit led Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? to comedic heights, Minnelli was too much of an aesthete for this gender-bending comedy. The kinkiness of the material – philanderer gets reincarnated as a beautiful woman – is essentially a vaudevillian sketch ballooned to feature length.
It needed creatives who could subvert things like gender and sexuality. Instead, it is Minnelli, Debbie Reynolds, and Pat Boone adapting the material with only Walter Matthau’s burlesque performance, completely with cartoonish Hungarian accent, managing to make a way with the material and generate laughs. Reynolds is fine doing tomboy posturing but cannot do the gender performance elements. Knowing this was originally intended for Marilyn Monroe gives greater clarity for the kind of sly fox knowing winks the material required. Here we have a queer comedy that feels free of sex leaving the whole enterprise deflated from the start.
Like many of their collaborations, 1965’s The Sandpiper blurs the line between Hollywood gossip and fact between Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in ways that undergird the narrative’s themes and sudsy melodrama. This was just a short period of time after the Cleopatra kerfuffle that found Taylor and Burton abandoning their spouses for each other, a plot point that defines much of The Sandpiper’s narrative. By no stretch of the imagination is this the greatest of their costarring ventures, that title will forever belong to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but it is by no means the worst either. (Personally, I loathe The Comedians.)
Taylor is a bohemian single mother whose precocious son is sent off to an Episcopalian boarding school run by Burton and his wife, Eva Marie Saint. Burton is enchanted by Taylor’s voluptuous charms and her circle of artistic friends, including a very young Charles Bronson. She represents the escalating women’s liberation movement buttressing against the stifling conservatism of a patriarchal society. Art and poetry are the lifeblood of these characters. Their own personal forms of religious fervor and prayer in a way.
The Sandpiper has echoes of numerous other Minnelli works: the talk about life and relationships of Some Came Running; the lonely life of an artist of Lust for Life; the sensitive boy navigating masculinity and growing up of Tea and Sympathy; and the destabilization caused by an outsider of The Cobweb. The script is pure soap opera to the bone, though. Perhaps with a better script, one less purplish in prose and obvious in its symbolism, would have made both time and critics easier on the material. It has its charms and positive attributes, but it is largely a middle-of-the-road affair. Like a prelude to the one-two punch of Virginia Woolf and Taming of the Shrew to come.
It helps that Minnelli has Barbra Streisand in the lead role. She gets to display nearly the entire range of her talents, leaning heavily on singing and comedy, obviously. Granted, getting the chance to watch Streisand deliver reams of dialogue in a way that feels both like stream of consciousness and rapid-fire is a cinematic wonder to behold. She would feel right at home in the screwball comedy genre and gets the chance to play a loopy British accent that is as polished as her natural one is colorful.
What is fascinating is how Yves Montand meets her energy but in a diametrically different way. His performing style is old school, his singing voice less concerned with fully enunciated syllables and more with French stylization, and he plays the frustrated straight man to her screwball heroine. Montand as a psychiatrist is such an odd sight after watching him pick up the “French cinematic lover” persona in Hollywood in the wake of Maurice Chevalier and Charles Boyer, and I am not entirely sure it comes across. But I still found his outbursts of frustration and bemused interactions with Streisand charming in their offbeat way.
On a Clear Day does manage to fold itself nicely into Minnelli’s cinematic world – a quirky individual struggling against pressures to tame down their eccentricities, adultery (boy, did he have a lot of films about that), and the slipperiness of identity and its malleability. If not everything holds up or fires off as well as it should, it still feels like a grand penultimate work that manages to absorb a lifetime of work and spit it back out in vibrant color with a grand star. It makes sense in some strange cosmic way that he would work with Streisand towards the end of his career and the supernova ascent of hers given what he did with Judy Garland, one of her clearest predecessors.
Minnelli’s cinematic swan song, the flawed and compromised A Matter of Time arrived in 1976. Based upon Maurice Druon’s The Film of Memory, a novel loosely based on the life of Marchesa Luisa Casati, A Matter of Time is eccentric, to be sure, but also indecipherable at points. The plot, as far as one can state that this thing has a plot, concerns the budding friendship between an aging countess (Ingrid Bergman) and a young chambermaid (Liza Minnelli).
The original cut was over three hours before it was wrestled away from Minnelli by the studio, American International Pictures. Fearing the high costs of the behind schedule production and behemoth running time, they took control away from the legendary filmmaker and released a butchered 97-minute cut. Martin Scorsese, a film aficionado and preeminent cinephile, took out advertisements in the trades lambasting the studio for their treatment of Minnelli and decrying the whole scenario.
What remains in this gutted, highly compromised vision is a strange thing indeed. Liza Minnelli’s chambermaid will eventually become a great screen star, but first she must go into tutelage from Bergman’s imperious, questionably sane fallen aristocrat. Numerous scenes find Minnelli recreating the memories and fantasies of Bergman’s youthful countess in prolonged… dream sequences?
It is opaque what exactly these are. Is the younger woman slowly becoming possessed by the older one? Is her imagination just this fertile and active? Removing half of the film’s original running time leaves behind numerous clipped threads with no way to pull them and see.
But there does remain the weirdly poetic sight of how interconnected everyone behind and in front of the camera remains. Vincente directs his daughter Liza, while Ingrid Bergman’s final moments are spent under the care of her daughter Isabella Rossellini (appearing as a nun in her first movie), while Charles Boyer makes a quick appearance as Bergman’s estranged husband. The film offers teasing bits of trivia and connections between its various players as though the whole of the film’s universe was a mere game of six degrees of separation. The “family affair” quality adds an air of poignancy that makes even the most obtuse and indecipherable passages strangely engrossing.
Bergman looms large throughout the film, not only in her striking visual appearances (haute couture, white marcelled waves, kohl eyes) but in her ability to locate the precise emotional life of this woman. She enters the film with a grandeur and gravity that director Minnelli plumbs routinely as a treatise on aging and refusing to go gentle into the dark. Yes, this woman is constantly teetering on the verge, living in the past and incapable of accepting the present, but there is also a charismatic magic to her. When she finally exits the film it all feels rushed as though her final descent into madness and Liza’s ascent to stardom and glamour needed to happen by X minute, so they choppily made it so. If nothing else, the ruined visage of Bergman’s countess, still enthralling and sophisticated despite it all, is perhaps the perfect symbolism for this film.
His camera will always lovingly frame Judy Garland, soak in Gene Kelly, catch Kirk Douglas in clenched thought, or witness Cyd Charisse’s physical prowess. We will remember Spencer Tracy’s somber introduction in Father of the Bride just as much as we will Deborah Kerr’s solemn request in Tea and Sympathy far more than the bitter end. He created marvelous jewels that continue to sparkle as brightly as they did 60+ years ago.
The MGM greatest hits film That’s Entertainment essentially removed Minnelli’s finest musical numbers from the surrounding films giving them a music video-like quality. Even removed from the wider context of his films, these sequences are magnetic, poetic, beautiful. They are pieces that thrill with vibrancy and a wide range of emotional textures.
He would live for another ten years before passing away at age 83 in July 1986. He lived long enough to see his reputation fluctuate between praise (Cahiers du Cinéma adored him) and criticism (Andrew Sarris was dismissive), but the work continues to endure. Yes, as Alan Jay Lerner stated, Minnelli was “the greatest director of motion picture musicals the screen has ever seen,” but there was so much more going on underneath the immaculate surfaces of his art. One need only peak beneath them to see a whole kaleidoscope of dreams.
(Clearly, I am a huge fan of Minnelli’s and if you were wondering how I would rank his work then please look no further than this Letterboxd list where I did just that.)
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