Throwing back to the week of August 9, 1955, we find Bill Haley & The Comets hanging on to the top spot with ‘Rock Around the Clock.’ This was the sixth of eight consecutive weeks that song held on to the top spot.
In #2 that week was Pat Boone’s recording of the Fats Domino track ‘Ain’t That a Shame.’ Boone recorded and released the song in the same month Domino’s hit radio and ended up climbing the charts faster. Ain’t that a shame, indeed…
With all due respect to the host of talented actors and writers with whom Vincente Minnelli worked, if I had to boil down his greatest strengths to two words they would be composition and color.
Minnelli started as a stage designer and costumer, and he brought that visual flair to the cinema. Even the worst of his movies always look beautiful. If you’re not blown away by the story, just follow the camera and drink in all the glorious reds and yellows.
Though he is best known for his musicals, Vincente Minnelli was quite a successful director of studio comedies. He made seven of them in his career and most were profitable for MGM.
The best-known is 1950’s Father of the Bride, starring Spencer Tracy and an 18-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. That heartwarming family comedy did so well that a sequel was immediately greenlit, shot on the same sets with the same cast, and released to theaters within a year. That one, Father’s Little Dividend, found Tracy and his wife (played by Joan Bennett) becoming grandparents.
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.
Fourteen of Vincente Minnelli’s 33 feature films were musicals, including two Best Picture winners and a bunch that are a lot better than those.
An American in Paris (1951) was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture, and won all but two. Best Director nominee Minnelli was one of the misses. And 1958’s Gigi swept its nine nominations, taking the top prize and earning Minnelli his only directing Oscar.
While those are his best-known and most awarded musicals, I rank them relatively low on my personal list. In both cases, the films are beautifully designed and staged but the scripts are lacking.
Meet Me In Montauk 