The Minnelli Legacy

Italian-American filmmaker remembered by Cinematheque

Although he was considered a Hollywood giant, Vincente Minnelli is mostly associated today among youth as Liza Minnelli's father rather than the great filmmaker whose work spans four decades.
As a tribute to this prolific Italian-American director, Cinematheque Ontario is presenting Vincent Minnelli: Technicolor Dreamer, a retrospective of the filmmaker's most influential and important films.
Born in Chicago in 1903 to a family of touring entertainers, Vincente began performing at the age of three with the Minnelli Brothers Dramatic Tent Show. At age eight, he quit and took up the life of a "normal" student where he excelled in drawing and painting. After quitting school at age 16, he joined Chicago's Balaban and Katia motion picture theatre chain where he designed the sets and costumes for their pre-feature programmes. This led to a job at the Paramount Theatre in New York City and in 1933 was hired as the art director for Radio City Music Hall.
After staging several successful Broadway musicals, MGM producer Arthur Freed invited Minnelli to join him in Hollywood where he was trained in film technique. His musical numbers quickly earned him the reputation for lavish visual style and sweeping scope. His first film, 1943's Cabin in the Sky (Feb. 3), is a black-and-white classic about a man (Eddie Anderson) tempted to betray his pious wife (Ethel Waters) with a singer (Lena Horne).
Particularly successful during this period were three musical films starring his first wife Judy Garland: The Clock (Feb. 4), about a love affair between an office girl and soldier (Robert Walker who died of an overdose a few years later); Meet Me in St. Louis (Feb. 21), about a family who must move to New York City; and The Pirate (March 3), about a Caribbean beauty who falls in love with a roaming singer (Gene Kelly) pretending to be a pirate.
Also from that period was Yolanda and the Thief (Jan. 31), which centres on an orphaned heiress (Lucille Bremer) who believes a gambler (Fred Astaire) is her guardian angel; Madame Bovary (Feb. 28), Flaubert's tale about a married woman (Jennifer Jones) who embarks on disastrous affairs; and the non-musical Father of the Bride (Feb. 13), starring Spencer Tracy as the nervous father preparing for his daughter's (Elizabeth Taylor) wedding.
Minnelli and Garland married in 1945, Liza was born a year later, and in 1951 the couple divorced. This was also the period in which Minnelli made some of the finest productions in the history of the genre, including An American in Paris (Jan. 30 & Feb. 7), about a former soldier (Gene Kelly) who dances his way through post-war Paris (the picture won seven Oscars); The Band Wagon (Feb. 1), about a down-and-out performer (Fred Astaire) who attempts to revive his sagging career by doing a Broadway musical; Gigi (Feb. 17), another Oscar-winner, about a waif (Leslie Caron) pressured into becoming the mistress to a wealthy heir (Louis Jourdan); and Brigadoon (Mar. 4), a fairy tale starring Gene Kelly and Van Johnson who stumble upon a mythical village.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Minnelli also directed some of Hollywood's most explosive melodramas, including The Bad and the Beautiful (Jan. 31), about a producer (Kirk Douglas) who is betrayed by the woman (Lana Turner) he helped make a star; The Cobweb (Jan. 30), where staff members of a psychiatric clinic (Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, Lillian Gish) engage in destructive relationships; Home from the Hill (Feb. 5), about a dysfunctional Texan family (Robert Mitchum, Eleanor Parker, George Hamilton, George Peppard); Tea and Sympathy (Feb. 17), about a teenage boy (John Kerr) who experiences a sexual awakening thanks to his housemaster's wife (Deborah Kerr); Two Weeks in Another Town (Feb. 19), about an actor (Kirk Douglas) who takes a role in a Rome shoot only to see his career plummet; Some Came Running (Feb. 20), starring Frank Sinatra as an alcoholic writer who revisits his home town and gets involved with a local girl (Shirley MacLaine); and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (March 2), a troubled production about an Argentine family surviving in World War II.
But Minnelli's most famous dramatic movie was 1956's Lust For Life (Feb. 7), starring Kirk Douglas as tragic painter Vincent Van Gogh and Anthony Quinn as his best friend, artist Paul Gauguin.
Minnelli's output in the late 1960s was sporadic, churning out his last film in 1970, the Italian-American co-production A Matter of Time.
Before his death from Alzheimer's in 1986, Minnelli married three more times and fathered a second child. Director Martin Scorsese, who frequently cites Minnelli as a major influence, was once quoted as saying: "Vincente Minnelli is one of the few directors, if not the only one, whom colour seems to have been invented for."

Vincent Minnelli: Technicolor Dreamer screens at AGO's Jackman Hall, 317 Dundas St. W., from January 30 to March 4. For more details call 416.968.FILM.

Publication Date: 2004-01-25
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