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.
I like to have a movie watching project in the works at pretty much all times. That might mean diving into a genre (like horror, most recently) or knocking out a curated list (I’m currently working my way through Sight & Sound’s top 100 poll). Or it could take the form of a chronological viewing of a director’s whole filmography (as I’ve done in recent years with Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David Lynch).
My latest challenge was to work my way through the filmography of director Vincente Minnelli, the versatile aesthete best known for his celebrated MGM musicals. Unlike those other directors, Minnelli was largely unknown to me — I believe I had seen only three of his 33 films prior to kicking off the marathon.
Meet Me In Montauk 