Vincente Minnelli Movies
Once assigned by critic Andrew Sarris to the far side of auteur paradise for believing "more in beauty than in art," MGM's Vincente Minnelli was celebrated nonetheless for bringing new levels of sophistication to the movie musical in the 1940s and 1950s. While such musicals as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and An American in Paris (1951) made his name, Minnelli also directed highly regarded dramas, including the Hollywood story The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and frothy comedies. Though his career faltered with the studio system's demise, his distinctive, fever-pitch sensibility endeared him to European and American cinèastes, ensuring his lasting reputation.Born to a Midwestern travelling theater family, Minnelli spent his childhood shuttling between relatives in Delaware and Chicago. After high school, he headed to Chicago to pursue a creative career, landing a job as a window dresser at the Marshall Fields department store. Honing his visual skills in this and subsequent work as a photographer's assistant and costume designer for live shows at premiere Chicago and New York movie houses, Minnelli earned accolades for his 1930s work as a costume/set designer and then as a stage director in New York theater.
After an aborted attempt at movies in 1937, Minnelli finally heeded Hollywood's siren call, via MGM producer Arthur Freed, in 1940. Unimpressed with the state of movie musicals (except for Fred Astaire's work), Minnelli headed West to learn moviemaking as a low-ranking part of MGM's burgeoning Freed Unit. After staging numbers for the Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney vehicles Strike Up the Band (1940) and Babes on Broadway (1941), Minnelli earned his shot at directing with the all-black musical Cabin in the Sky (1943). Stylishly mounted on a low budget, Cabin in the Sky became a modest, critically praised hit. His third directorial try subsequently sealed his reputation as a singularly gifted musical director.
With Freed behind him, Minnelli overcame resistance from the studio and recalcitrant star Garland to craft the musical hit Meet Me in St. Louis. A beautifully Technicolored, lovingly meticulous portrait of intimate Americana, Meet Me in St. Louis gracefully integrated music with the quotidian activities of the Smith family and its romance-minded daughters, reaching a kinetic peak with Garland's rendition of "The Trolley Song." A critical and popular smash, Meet Me in St. Louis established Minnelli as the Freed Unit's maestro and won him his first of four wives in Garland; their collaboration on the lyrical non-musical romance The Clock (1945) confirmed Minnelli's versatility.
While his mobile camera injected life into the revue Ziegfeld Follies (1946), Minnelli's prodigious imagination was given even freer reign in two troubled musicals, Yolanda and the Thief (1945) and The Pirate (1948). Centering on romances between shady men and innocent girls in ornate fantasy settings, Yolanda and The Pirate each suffered from mismatched leads (Astaire and Lucille Bremer in the former, Gene Kelly and an unstable Garland in the latter) and what some considered an excess of art direction at the expense of story. Both failed at the box office. Still, such charged numbers as "Coffee Time" in Yolanda and "Mack the Black" and "Be a Clown" in The Pirate made the films required viewing for musical fans.
Despite the birth of daughter Liza, Minnelli and Garland's marriage fell apart after The Pirate and he took a break from musicals. Rather than harm his career, however, the hiatus made him even more valuable to MGM. Not only was his skill at translating his elaborate imagery to the needs of drama underlined by his version of Madame Bovary (1949), but the deft pacing of his musicals served him well when he turned to comedy with Father of the Bride (1950). Starring Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor as father and bride, Father of the Bride made light of wedding traumas while hinting at Tracy's paternal anguish (akin to Margaret O'Brien's disturbing grief in the otherwise blithe St. Louis). Father became an enormous hit, begetting the sequel Father's Little Dividend (1951).
Minnelli returned to musicals when Freed chose him to helm the ambitious An American in Paris (1951). Starring Gene Kelly and young ballerina Leslie Caron, scored with classic Gershwin songs, An American in Paris merged high art and pop entertainment in the story of an aspiring painter's romantic entanglements with his patroness and a young girl. Inspired by The Red Shoes (1948), the climactic 16-minute "American in Paris Ballet" rapturously soared through tableaux inspired by French paintings, as Minnelli's camera danced with Kelly and Caron. The Oscar for Best Picture capped An American in Paris' resounding artistic and popular success.
Minnelli's remarkable run continued with The Bad and the Beautiful. A sharp black and white Hollywood exposé about a producer and the people he betrayed, The Bad and the Beautiful's chiaroscuro photography, emotive camera work, and intense performances by Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, and Oscar-winner Gloria Grahame revealed the dark side of an industry driven by artifice. Minnelli made show business his subject once again in his next musical, The Band Wagon (1953). An astute, funny parody of the desire to turn entertainment into art, as well as a gorgeous merging of the two in the Astaire/Cyd Charisse set pieces "Dancing in the Dark" and "The Girl Hunt," The Band Wagon joyously celebrated the musical form and is considered Minnelli's greatest work in the genre.
Working constantly throughout the 1950s, Minnelli churned out such sleek comedies as The Long, Long Trailer (1954), Designing Woman (1957), The Reluctant Debutante (1958), and the lavishly conceived -- if uninspired -- musicals Brigadoon (1954) and Kismet (1955). Irving Stone's biography of Vincent Van Gogh, though, recharged Minnelli's creative powers. Enlivened by Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh and Anthony Quinn as Gauguin, Lust for Life (1956) vividly recreated the colorful world of Van Gogh's paintings and the traumatic incidents of his life, earning several Oscar nods.
Minnelli finally won his own Oscar with the musical of Colette's story Gigi (1958). Filmed on location in Paris and featuring an excellent score by Lerner & Loewe (including Maurice Chevalier's "Thank Heaven for Little Girls"), Gigi made exquisite blockbuster entertainment out of a potentially sordid story about a courtesan. Also scoring a critical hit with his adaptation of James Jones' chronicle of small town despair Some Came Running (1958), featuring Rat Packers Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and rising star Shirley MacLaine. Minnelli's two films earned a total of 13 Oscar nominations; Gigi went nine for nine, including Best Picture.
Though the vivacious Judy Holliday musical Bells Are Ringing (1960) and Home From the Hill's (1960) operatic widescreen angst seemed to bode well for Minnelli's continuing creativity, changes in Hollywood and the audience precipitated a career decline. The ill-conceived, big-budget remake of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962) was a disastrous flop; Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) was perhaps worse. An artistically adventurous companion piece to The Bad and the Beautiful, Two Weeks signaled classical Hollywood's decline, both in its story and reception. Recut by MGM against Minnelli's wishes, it was slammed by critics and shunned by audiences. His final films for MGM, The Courtship of Eddie's Father (1963) and The Sandpiper (1965), were commercially safe fodder. Despite the presence of new musical stars Barbra Streisand in On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) and daughter Liza Minnelli in A Matter of Time (1976), Minnelli's old-school version of musical fantasy failed to cross over to the youthful 1970s audience, ending his directorial career.
Hating idleness, Minnelli published his memoir I Remember It Well in 1974; once he stopped directing, he retired from all work. His daughters, film scholars, European honors, and the work of such film school grads as Martin Scorsese, though, confirmed his legacy before and after Minnelli passed away in 1986. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
MGM circumvented the censorship that would otherwise have prevented a film version of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary by adding a prologue and epilogue that assured any and all bluenoses that the story was strictly a work of fiction. James Mason appears as Flaubert, defending his inflammatory novel before a French jury. Thus, the tragedy of Emma Bovary (Jennifer Jones) is offered as a product of Flaubert's imagination, rather than a real-life story. The body of the film concerns Emma's attempt to escape the boredom of her bourgeois existence by marrying a wealthy doctor (Van Heflin). She finds life with the physician even more tiresome than her previous experiences, thus begins taking a series of wealthy lovers-all of whom prove to be two-dimensional cads. Unable to tolerate a lifetime of dead-end affairs, Emma eventually commits suicide. The best sequence-indeed, one of the finest set pieces ever directed by Vincente Minnelli-is the "Emma Bovary Waltz" sequence, a dazzling experience in dizzying camera movements. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jennifer Jones, James Mason, (more)
When Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne appeared in S. N. Behrmann's The Pirate on Broadway, there were no musical numbers whatsoever. But with Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in the leading roles of the 1948 filmization of The Pirate, the MGM production staff would have been drawn and quartered had there not been song after song. The story is merely serviceable: on a Caribbean isle in the early 19th century, sheltered young Garland comes to believe that travelling troubadour Kelly is in reality "Mack the Black," a notorious pirate. Kelly realizes that the surest way to win Garland's heart is to impersonate the romantic buccaneer, and this is what he does--nearly getting himself hanged in the process. Cole Porter's marvelous score yielded only one bona-fide hit: "Be a Clown", which has practically nothing to do with the storyline, but do you care? Highlights include the magnificently staged "Mack the Black," a heady combination of Broadway glitz and Caligariesque nightmare. Seven MGM screenwriters toiled away on The Pirate, though only the team of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich were credited. While The Pirate was not a huge moneymaker on its first release, it has since been embraced by the cultists, who apparently can never get enough of Judy Garland. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Lester Allen, Judy Garland, (more)
A change of pace for both director Vincente Minnelli and star Katharine Hepburn, this taut drama features the latter as Ann Hamilton, the daughter of a scientist (Edmund Gwenn), who after a whirlwind romance marries handsome but slightly mysterious inventor turned businessman Alan Garroway (Robert Taylor). But wedded bliss proves short-lived when Garroway refuses to discuss his brother Michael, whose presence is felt constantly despite the mystery surrounding his whereabouts. The missing Michael becomes an obsession for Ann, whose curiosity is piqued even more after a chance encounter with Sylvia Burton (Jayne Meadows), a young woman who figures in the lives of both brothers and who displays a strange resemblance to Ann herself. Despite Alan's dire misgivings, Ann feels compelled to solve the mystery of Michael, until, that is, she discovers that Alan may very well have murdered his own brother. Undercurrent marked the screen debut of Jayne Meadows and a breakthrough of sorts for Robert Mitchum, whom M-G-M borrowed from David O. Selznick for a reputed $25,000. ~ Hans J. Wollstein, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Katharine Hepburn, Robert Taylor, (more)
The presence of William Powell as legendary showman Flo Ziegfeld at the beginning of Ziegfeld Follies might lead an impressionable viewer from thinking that this 1946 film is a Technicolor sequel to the 1936 Oscar-winning The Great Ziegfeld. Not so: this is more in the line of an all-star revue, much like such early talkies as Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Paramount on Parade. We meet a grayed, immaculately garbed Ziegfeld in Paradise (his daily diary entry reads "Another heavenly day"), where he looks down upon the world and muses over the sort of show he'd be putting on were he still alive. Evidently Ziegfeld's shade has something of a celestial conduit to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, since his "dream" show is populated almost exclusively by MGM stars. Vincente Minnelli is given sole directorial credit at the beginning of the film, though many of the individual "acts" were helmed by other hands. The Bunin puppets offer a tableau depicting anxious theatregoers piling into a Broadway theatre, as well as caricatures of Ziegfeld's greatest stars. The opening number, "Meet the Ladies", spotlights a whip-wielding (!) Lucille Ball, a bevy of chorus girls dressed as panthers, and, briefly, Margaret O'Brien. Kathryn Grayson and "The Ziegfeld Girls" perform "There's Beauty Everywhere." Victor Moore and Edward Arnold show up in an impressionistically staged adaptation of the comedy chestnut "Pay the Two Dollars". Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer (a teaming which evidently held high hopes for MGM) dance to the tune of "This Heart is Mine." "Number Please" features Keenan Wynn in an appallingly unfunny rendition of an old comedy sketch (performed far better as "Alexander 2222" in Abbott and Costello's Who Done It?) Lena Horne, strategically placed in the film at a juncture that could be edited out in certain racist communities, sings "Love". Red Skelton stars in the film's comedy highlight, "When Television Comes"-which is actually Skelton's classic "Guzzler's Gin" routine (this sequence was filmed late in 1944, just before Red's entry into the armed services). Astaire and Bremer return for a lively rendition of "Limehouse Blues". Judy Garland, lampooning every Hollywood glamour queen known to man, stops the show with "The Interview". Even better is the the historical one-time-only teaming of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in "The Babbitt and the Bromide". The excellence of these sequence compensate for the mediocrity of "The Sweepstakes Ticket", wherein Fanny Brice screams her way through a dull comedy sketch with Hume Cronyn (originally removed from the US prints of Ziegfeld Follies, this sequence was restored for television). Excised from the final release print (pared down to 110 minutes, from a monumental 273 minutes!) was Judy Garland's rendition of "Liza", a duet featuring Garland and Mickey Rooney, and a "Baby Snooks" sketch featuring Fanny Brice, Hanley Stafford and B. S. Pully. A troubled and attenuated production, Ziegfeld Follies proved worth the effort when the film rang up a $2 million profit. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Fred Astaire, Lucille Ball, (more)
- 1945
Yolanda and the Thief has long been considered the nadir of Arthur Freed's years as an MGM musical producer. Unappreciated at the time of its release, the film was a huge financial and critical failure. It has since become a cult film and cinematic cause celebre, revered by its adherents and condemned by its detractors. For the record, Fred Astaire stars as a suave but strangely unsympathetic con arstist Johnny Parkson Riggs, who convince sheltered South American heiress Yolanda (Lucille Bremer) that he's her guardian angel. Naturally, Johnny falls in love with Yolanda and tries to find a way to put an end to the scam job cooked up by himself and his partner-in-crime Victor Budlow Trout (Frank Morgan). Meanwhile, a mysterious character named Mr. Candle (Leon Ames) watches the proceedings with seemingly detached amusement (guess who he turns out to be!) With the exception of "Coffee Time", most of the film's musical numbers are forgettable; Astaire and Lucille Bremer dance well together, but generate none of the charisma necessary to sustain a whimsical tale of this nature. As for Bremer alone, her biggest scene takes place in an artfully arranged bubble bath; undeniably gorgeous, she frankly isn't much of an actress. It is difficult to assess Yolanda and the Thief pro or con; this is one film that is guaranteed to either delight or aggravate the viewer, with no "middle ground." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Fred Astaire, Lucille Bremer, (more)
The Clock was designed by MGM as a "small" picture--though characteristically, it was a bigger production than most "A" efforts from any other studio. Paul Gallico's simple story involves a girl (Judy Garland) and a GI (Robert Walker), who meet under the huge clock at New York's Pennsylvania Station. Over the next 48 hours, the girl and the soldier fall in love, make the acquaintance of such lovable gotham types as cabbie James Gleason and inebriate Keenan Wynn, and decide to get married before the GI is shipped out again. The enormous Pennsylvania Station set, combined with some unusually convincing back projection (MGM was hitherto notorious for the worst back projection in the business) has convinced even lifelong New Yorkers that The Clock was actually lensed in Manhattan rather than Hollywood. Director Vincente Minnelli injected further visual dynamism in The Clock by seldom repeating the same camera angle twice. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Judy Garland, Robert Walker, (more)
Sally Benson's short stories about the turn-of-the-century Smith family of St. Louis were tackled by a battalion of MGM screenwriters, who hoped to find a throughline to connect the anecdotal tales. After several false starts (one of which proposed that the eldest Smith daughter be kidnapped and held for ransom), the result was the charming valentine-card musical Meet Me in St. Louis. The plot hinges on the possibility that Alonzo Smith (Leon Ames), the family's banker father, might uproot the Smiths to New York, scuttling his daughter Esther (Judy Garland)'s romance with boy-next-door John Truett (Tom Drake) and causing similar emotional trauma for the rest of the household. In a cast that includes Mary Astor as Ames' wife, Lucille Bremer as another Ames daughter, and Marjorie Main as the housekeeper, the most fascinating character is played by 6-year-old Margaret O'Brien. As kid sister Tootie, O'Brien seems morbidly obsessed with death and murder, burying her dolls, "killing" a neighbor at Halloween (she throws flour in the flustered man's face on a dare), and maniacally bludgeoning her snowmen when Papa announces his plans to move to New York. Margaret O'Brien won a special Oscar for her remarkable performance, prompting Lionel Barrymore to grumble "Two hundred years ago, she would have been burned at the stake!" The songs are a heady combination of period tunes and newly minted numbers by Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin, the best of which are The Boy Next Door, The Trolley Song, and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. As a bonus, Meet Me in St. Louis is lensed in rich Technicolor, shown to best advantage in the climactic scenes at the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Judy Garland, Margaret O'Brien, (more)
MGM knew it would take a bath on its all-black musical Cabin in the Sky (few Southern theaters of 1943 would touch the film), but the studio still provided its standard A-plus production values to the film; besides, it served as a training ground for up-and-coming director Vincente Minnelli. Based on the Broadway musical by Lynn Root, John LaTouche, and Vernon Duke, the film tells the story of Joe (Eddie "Rochester" Anderson), a shantytown denizen torn between the affections of faithful wife Petunia (Ethel Waters) and slinky seductress Georgia (Lena Horne). Seriously injured in a barroom brawl, Joe dreams that he is the centerpiece of a celestial power struggle between a heavenly emissary (Kenneth Spencer) and Lucifer Jr. (Rex Ingram, who ironically had played "De Lawd" in The Green Pastures). Joe is given another chance to redeem himself on Earth, lest he fall into the clutches of the Devil's little boy. Louis Armstrong briefly shows up, appropriately cast as "The Trumpeter." Song highlights include "Taking a Chance on Love," "Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe," "Life's Full of Consequences," and the title song. A troubled production thanks to the on-set rivalry between Ethel Waters and Lena Horne, Cabin in the Sky is nonetheless an excellent first feature effort from Vincente Minnelli. Thanks to his careful treatment of the material, the expected patronization of the black characters does not impede latter-day enjoyment of the film as much as it might have. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ethel Waters, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, (more)
- 1943
In later years, director Vincente Minnelli would dismiss I Dood It as his worst picture, though a more deserving candidate for that "honor" would be Minnelli's valedictory film A Matter of Time. In this remake of Buster Keaton's Spite Marriage, Red Skelton plays pants-presser Joseph Rivington Reynolds, who develops a crush on glamorous stage star Constance Shaw (Eleanor Powell). "Borrowing" a tuxedo from one of his customers, Joe courts Constance backstage and at a fancy nightclub. Jilted by her fiance, the temperamental Constance marries Joe out of spite, leading to a series of silly situations. In the original Spite Marriage, Buster Keaton proved his worth to the heroine by rescuing her from bootleggers: in the remake, Joe saves Constance from a nest of Nazi spies. Some of the routines-notably a scene in which Joe makes a shambles of a Civil War play, and a lengthy bit in which he puts his drunken bride to bed-were lifted directly from Spite Marriage, no surprise considering that Buster Keaton was one of the I Dood It gag writers. Musical highlights are provided by Lena Horne, Hazel Scott and Jimmy Dorsey, while the film's finale is lifted bodily from the 1936 Eleanor Powell musical Born to Dance. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Red Skelton, Eleanor Powell, (more)
- 1942
Cole Porter's musical hit Panama Hattie originally starred Ethel Merman on Broadway. But Merman was not a proven movie commodity, thus it was Ann Sothern who appeared in the film version as Hattie, brassy but golden-hearted proprietress of a Canal Zone hotel. Accustomed to dealing with such raucous cohorts as she-sick sailors Red (Red Skelton), Rags (Rags Ragland) and Rowdy (Ben Blue), Hattie isn't quite certain how to handle herself when she falls in love with wealthy and cultured Dick Bulliett (Dan Dailey Jr.) Socialite Leila Tree (Marsha Hunt), who'd previously set her cap for Dick, does her best to break up the romance, but Hattie is championed by Dick's kid sister Geraldine (Jackie Horner) and family butler Jenkins (Alan Mowbray). The play's original storyline, which shifted into gear when Hattie began picking up Nazi shortwave radio broadcast in the fillings of her teeth, is virtually nonexistent here, as is Porter's score, save for "I've Still Got My Health" and "Let's be Buddies" (Lena Horne does, however, show up to sing "Just One of Those Things", a carryover from an earlier Porter musical). A notoriously troubled production, Panama Hattie was completely refilmed after a disastrous preview, delaying its scheduled release by nearly a year. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Red Skelton, Ann Sothern, (more)
- 1941
The 1924 George Gershwin stage hit Lady Be Good was brought to the screen by MGM; any resemblance (beyond the Gershwin score) to the original play is purely accidental. The MGM scriveners came up with a new story concerning married songwriters Ann Sothern and Robert Young, who can't live with each other and can't live without each other. Top billing goes to dancing star Eleanor Powell, who certainly deserves it. Red Skelton is around and about as well, inserting a few much-needed laughs. While such Gershwin songs as "So Am I", "Fascinating Rhythm" and "Hang on Me" are well showcased, the hit of the evening is a new song by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, the Oscar-winning "The Last Time I Saw Paris". Our favorite scene: Ann Sothern and Robert Young composing "Lady be Good" out of thin air in two minutes flat! ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Eleanor Powell, Ann Sothern, (more)
- 1937
Jack Benny had one of his first starring film roles in this breezy comedy with plenty of music. Benny plays Mac Brewster, an advertising man trying to hold on to his biggest client, a silver company run by Alan Townshend (Richard Arlen). Elsewhere in the office, Paula Sewell (Ida Lupino) longs to compete in the Artists and Models Ball and win the title of Queen. However, professional models are frowned upon at the Ball, and all entrants must be debutantes, which is two strikes against Paula; besides, snooty Cynthia Wentworth (Gail Patrick) looks to be a shoo-in to win. But Paula has a plan, and if it works she'll have won more than a crown at the end of the night. Comedy stars Ben Blue and Judy Canova highlight the supporting cast; the great Louis Armstrong performs a tune with Martha Raye. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jack Benny, Ida Lupino, (more)
