Vincente Minnelli was a peerless director of musicals but he also had a flair for melodrama. Of his 33 feature films, 12 were soapy dramas about doomed lovers, family tensions, or tortured artists. He brought the same technical flair to these passion plays as he did to his song-and-dance routines.

The best known of these dramas is likely 1952’s The Bad and the Beautiful, about a movie producer (Kirk Douglas) and a trio of artists who are simultaneously repelled by and drawn to him. A decade later, Kirk Douglas played a struggling actor in Two Weeks in Another Town, a spiritual sequel to the earlier film.

Douglas was one of Minnelli’s favorite collaborators. He won a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Vincent Van Gogh in the 1956 biopic Lust For Life. Elizabeth Taylor played a much less famous painter in 1965’s The Sandpiper, while Frank Sinatra played a frustrated novelist in 1958’s noir-ish Some Came Running. Minnelli loved his artists.

Almost all of his dramas were based on novels or plays, some more high-profile than others. Tea and Sympathy (1956) looked at the tensions caused by an effeminate lad at an all-boys’ school (the censors wouldn’t allow him to be gay). Home from the Hill (1960) tackles similar subject matter, with a stern father (Robert Mitchum) determined to make a man of his sensitive son. Madame Bovary (1949) is a rich telling of the famous novel.

Katharine Hepburn stars in an early Minnelli drama, 1946’s Undercurrent, while Lauren Bacall has a key role in 1955’s The Cobweb. One of Minnelli’s biggest bombs, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, portrayed the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Paris. And finally, 1945’s The Clock is a romantic drama starring Judy Garland that shares some DNA with Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy. Not surprisingly, that’s my favorite of the bunch.

As for today’s clip, it’s from the 1970 musical On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, a Broadway adaptation that gives a juicily comic role to an amazing Barbra Streisand. As a woman who seeks hypnosis to quit smoking, only to uncover a series of past lives, Streisand is hilarious, sweet, and sexy as hell. I fully developed a crush on Babs while watching this movie.