Minnelli was born in 1903 to a family of touring entertainers. At age 3, he joined the "Minnelli Brothers Dramatic Tent Show."
Minnelli, was like an expressionist artist who used celluloid as his canvas, creating his own vision in musicals, melodramas and comedies. Minnelli used the decor, the lighting and the camera — the mise-en-scène — as a way of defining and giving depth to the characters living in his unique, operatic, colorful but often bleak universe.
In any given span of years he was working
in musicals and then working in melodramas and straight dramas and comedies,".
"So many of the films are sort of underappreciated considering how deftly
he handles these other kind of genres."
Vincente was, in a way, the most visionary
director of that era, in terms of just doing extraordinary things with
the camera, the color and the expressionistic statement on film," and "In
a funny way, he was almost too radical for the era.
==========================================================
Legends of HollywoodTHE
DARK SIDE OF A TECHNICOLOR ARTIST
The Los Angeles Times
By Susan King, Times Staff Writer
April 29, 2003
Vincente Minnelli, auteur?
The director best known for his Technicolor MGM musicals — and, of course, the Judy and Liza connection — is in for an ambitious appraisal and appreciation of his work beginning this week.
No fewer than three tributes are planned to commemorate the late director's centennial, a homage that will go beyond the musical genre and into Minnelli's underrated work in dramas and melodramas.
"I think Vincente was maybe, of his era, a truly great American director," says film historian and critic Richard Schickel. "A lot of his films just hold up wonderfully well today."
Minnelli, who died in 1986, was like an expressionist artist who used celluloid as his canvas, creating his own vision in musicals, melodramas and comedies. Minnelli used the decor, the lighting and the camera — the mise-en-scène — as a way of defining and giving depth to the characters living in his unique, operatic, colorful but often bleak universe.
In Minnelli's 1952 melodrama, "The Bad and the Beautiful," the real world is just as artificial as the reel world, most memorably in the scene in which an alcoholic film star played by Lana Turner goes crazy while driving a car down a hill at night.
"You can't tell the worlds apart," says film historian Jan-Christopher Horak. "He is consciously fooling with you in that way."
In Minnelli's 1962 companion piece, "Two Weeks in Another Town," washed-up film star Kirk Douglas takes a wild ride in a sports car with his ex-wife (Cyd Charisse) while on the verge of a mental collapse. The scene is artificial and operatic, and would have seemed foolish in a lesser director's hands. But under Minnelli's guidance, the baroque sequence vividly depicts Douglas' mental anguish.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is kicking off the retrospectives Wednesday night with a tribute hosted by Schickel and featuring 19 clips from such Minnelli favorites as "Cabin in the Sky," "Meet Me in St. Louis," "The Clock," "Madame Bovary" (the 1949 version), "Father of the Bride," "The Bad and the Beautiful," "An American in Paris, "Tea and Sympathy," "Lust for Life," "Gigi," "Some Came Running" and "The Courtship of Eddie's Father."
The following evening, UCLA Film and Television Archive begins its monthlong festival "M Is for Minnelli: The Melodramas" with the touching 1945 romantic drama "The Clock," starring his then-wife Judy Garland and Robert Walker, and 1958's "Some Came Running," a drama for which Shirley MacLaine received her first best actress Oscar nomination, for her role as a hooker with a heart of gold.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art kicks off its "M Is for Minnelli: The Musicals" festival Friday evening with "Gigi," the enchanting 1958 musical that swept the Oscars that year, winning nine statuettes including best film and director, and the 1954 musical fantasy "Brigadoon," starring Gene Kelly, Charisse and Van Johnson.
Ellen Harrington, the academy's exhibitions curator and special events programmer, says that Minnelli is generally identified with his Technicolor movie musicals. Even that achievement has been overshadowed by the fact that he was married to Garland and was the father of Liza Minnelli. "But when you look at the chronology of the films that he did, in any given span of years he was working in musicals and then working in melodramas and straight dramas and comedies," she says. "So many of the films are sort of underappreciated considering how deftly he handles these other kind of genres."
Horak believes contemporary historians and critics underrate Minnelli because he was a studio contract director at MGM. "He worked in a lot of different genres and stayed at one studio basically his whole career," he says. "He was the kind of director the brass at MGM loved. He really never turned down a project. They were used to the Erich von Stroheims and John Fords who were difficult. He would do what needed to be done — some projects he would throw his heart into and others he would do more or less by rote."
"You don't on the whole look for auteurs out of MGM because it was such a factory," Schickel adds. "They certainly de-emphasized directorial tour de forces. It is something they didn't publicize or take a lot of pride in in a way it was kind of an advantage for Vincente. He would just go ahead and do whatever he wanted to."
Minnelli, Horak says, was also an obsessed workaholic. "His productivity is nothing short of amazing, especially when you look at his work from the late '40s through the 1950s. At a time when the studio system is really breaking down and where other directors had slowed down to one project a year, he is still banging them out."
Path to Hollywood
Minnelli was born in 1903 to a family of touring entertainers. At age 3, he joined the "Minnelli Brothers Dramatic Tent Show." He came to fame in the 1930s not as a performer, but as a costume and set designer for Radio City Music Hall revues, eventually turning his talents to Broadway as a designer and, by 1935, a director.
In 1940, Hollywood beckoned and producer Arthur Freed brought Minnelli out to MGM. For the next three years, he was groomed and nurtured at the studio before getting his big break directing the all-African American musical "Cabin in the Sky," with Lena Horne. The following year, Minnelli became a major Hollywood player when he teamed with Garland for the first time in the musical "Meet Me in St. Louis," considered a masterpiece of the genre.
His later melodramas aren't shown that often and, as UCLA programmer David Pendleton notes, "the use of color in his melodramas is as stunning as the use of color in his musicals. The décor and the use of sets and space in the melodramas are as important and as provocative as it is in the musicals."
Minnelli's melodramas, he says, feature characters who are dreamers, misfits and outsiders "sort of striving to create their own world. All of his films, as disparate as they are, bear some sort of stamp, a sense of unified vision."
Pendleton says the melodramas have a lot of sex and violence. Even in a romantic film like "The Clock," the fear of death is always hanging over a young married couple. "But because he is so successful at using decor, using sets, using color, people think of him as a frilly stylist, but people forget how much primal drama they are in the films."
Minnelli's vision often ran counter to MGM's, which, says Horak, "had this total optimistic, rose-colored-glasses point of view of life. There is this really dark side to Minnelli that keeps pushing through in these films like 'The Pirate,' 'Lust for Life' or a film like 'Gigi.' It is a film about a woman who is being groomed to be a prostitute. And Leslie Caron in 'An American in Paris' is a kept woman of a gangster."
Schickel, who made a documentary on the director, says Minnelli was a modest man. Schickel remembers interviewing Minnelli, and the director "was very sweet and utterly unable to recall how he did anything. He was sort of strangely inarticulate when it came to recollecting what he had done. He was not a guy who made particularly vivid appearances at retrospectives. Yet, he must have been a tiger. There are wonderful things in those movies that could have only stemmed from the director's vision."
Some of the best moments in his movies are the simplest, Schickel says, like the "Dancing in the Dark" duet between Fred Astaire and Charisse in "The Band Wagon."
"I think Vincente was, in a way, the most visionary director of that era, in terms of just doing extraordinary things with the camera, the color and the expressionistic statement on film," Schickel says.
"In a funny way, I think he was almost
too radical for the era. But as the years go on, you come to appreciate
his visual radicalism more and more. Nobody's movies looked quite like
Vincente Minnelli's."
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MINELLI HOMAGES: A TRIO OF TRIBUTES
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"M" is for Minelli
ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURE ARTS &
SCIENCES TRIBUTE
A RETROSPECTIVE
Wednesday, 8 p.m., the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts & Sciences, Samuel Goldwyn Theater, 8949 Wilshire Blvd.,
Beverly Hills. Admission is $5 for nonmembers; $3 for academy members.
For information: call (310) 2470-3600 or go to http://www.oscars.org
.
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"M Is for Minnelli:
"THE MELODRAMAS"- UCLA FILM AND TELEVISION
ARCHIVE
James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA. Admission is $7, general admission; $5, students, seniors and UCLA Alumni Assn. members. For information: call (310) 206-8013 or go to http://www.cinema.ucla.edu .
Thursday, 7:30 p.m.: "The Clock,"
"Some Came Running"
Saturday, 7:30 p.m.: "Home
From the Hill"
May 8, 7:30 p.m.: "Lust for
Life," "Madame Bovary"
May 10, 7:30 p.m.: "Tea and
Sympathy," "The Courtship of Eddie's Father"
May 11, 7 p.m.: "Two Weeks
in Another Town," "The Bad and the Beautiful"
May 13, 7:30 p.m.: "The Cobweb,"
"Undercurrent"
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M" is for Minnelli
"THE MUSICALS"- LOS ANGELES COUTY
MUSEUM of ART
Leo S. Bing Theater, LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. $8, general; $6, museum members, seniors and students. For information: call (323) 857-6010 or go to http://www.lacma.org .
Friday, 7:30 p.m.: "Gigi," "Brigadoon"
May 9, 7:30 p.m.: "An American
in Paris," "Yolanda and the Thief"
May 16, 7:30 p.m.: "Cabin in
the Sky," "Meet Me in St. Louis"
May 23, 7:30 p.m.: "The Band
Wagon," "Bells Are Ringing"
May 30, 7:30 p.m. "The Pirate,"
"On a Clear Day You Can See Forever"
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MINNELLI ANTEDOTE:
Eloise
Kay Thompson's famously mischievous goddaughter provided the inspiration for her books about Eloise, the mischievous little girl who lived in New York's Plaza Hotel. The name of Thompson's goddaughter? Liza Minelli.
[Liza spent her
sixth birthday with her father (Vincente Minelli) at George Gershwin's
home. When Vincente paid too much attention to another little girl, Liza
walked over - and promplty socked him in the nose.]