Vincent Minnelli: underrated?

Beyond description.

http://www.zianet.com/jjohnson/pirate7a.jpg

An American in Paris is one the greaatest musicals. Madame Bovary is purty good, too, surprisingly.

has anyone else seen the clock? not a musical, but a very tender and moving romance also with garland. there is one moment in particular--of judy crying--that comapres in its devastating punch to the reverse shot of tom drake reacting to judy's rejection in meet me in st louis.

love you too!

wtf does that mean? do you mean to suggest that neither character nor plot are integral elements of a narrative film?

perhaps you should lock yourself in a room with the collected works of bill viola and not bother with hollywood films

the story of meet me in st louis is very powerful and (for me at least) resonant in its evocation of HOME... even more so if you appreciate the wartime context

"someday soon we all will be together / if the fates allow / until then we'll have to muddle through somehow"

this is true -- are you writing in the states btw? i like it, but obv these tings never entirely translate IMHO but terence davies wd disagree.

davies would disagree yes!

Anthology Film Archives in NYC is showing 4 of his melodramas, and Armond White is gaga:

http://www.nypress.com/20/33/film/ArmondWhite2.cfm

I've seen and liked The Bad and the Beautiful and Some Came Running, so I'm going to try hard to make The Cobweb and Two Weeks in Another Town as they aren't on disc.

The Clock is wondrous -- the least affected Judy Garland perf ever. Has an Ophuls-esque air.

re Armond: The Sandpiper is a camp "treasure" at best, with Eva Marie Saint gamely trying to avoid staring at Liz's rack.

well, hell, I want to see it for that!

whoa, i was going to start a thread just like this (i still get anthology updates in my inbox so minnelli's been on my brain).

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/04/minnelli.html

Oscar Levant is one of the patients in The Cobweb, and he apparently told VM "Don't try to tell me how to play crazy! I'm crazier than you could ever hope to be!"

Vince Minelli

Two Weeks in Another Town is very watchable, whether the performances are fine (Edw G Robinson), better than expected (Kirk D, Geo Hamilton), or rivetingly proto-Waters screechy (Claire Trevor) or horny (Cyd Charisse).

The Clock is like the vastly superior original version of Before Sunrise.

Robert Walker's best.

I need to see Lust For Life again. The ham wasn't overcooked.

The Clock is like the vastly superior original version of Before Sunrise.

"action-free" rite?

I like Before Sunrise fine. At least the characters don't natter about TV culture like Morbs' favorite Apatowians.

Irving Brecher, Marx Bros gagman and Meet Me in St. Louis screenwriter, dies at 94.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/movies/19brecher.html

Garland had been afraid her co-star, Margaret O’Brien, was going to upstage her, Mr. Brecher explained to Hank Rosenfeld, his collaborator on a forthcoming autobiography.

“When I got to O’Brien’s lines, I would kind of throw them away,” he said. “Then I would emphasize what Judy’s character was doing.”

God bless his instincts.

I recently watched The Pirate; I would call it unwatchable but I somehow managed to make it to the end. Really atrocious performances from both Judy and Gene Kelly, and the two have the chemistry of salted slugs. Even the Cole Porter tunes were third-rate. Not worth wasting your time - watch any of the movies cited above for the umpteenth time before seeing Gene Kelly's rub-on tan.

TOO FAR! It's just second-rate, plus Kelly's musculature is nicely displayed.

http://16.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kveimqyLjO1qac3hjo1_500.png

love Dino and Shirley in that, but Frank strains credulity as a literary type.

Martha Hyer is way more loathsome.

frank is great, he's so... hateful. so is martha hyer. the disgust she has for him and his crowd really kind of surprised me.

i want to see the clock now. is it on dvd?

'some came running' is a classic

I can't separate Hyer's performance from the way the character's written, which is too say she's overexplicit.

An evaluation from the most recent VV.

I think what you mean is there's a retro in Brooklyn.

http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/film/1974851/%E2%80%9Cthe-complete-minnelli%E2%80%9D-at-bam

Armond on the comedic VM:

http://cityarts.info/2011/10/06/father-of-comedy/

Hazel Scott in the Red Skelton vehicle I Dood It:

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-camera-moves-4

just saw Gigi again, in beautiful 35mm at MoMA; oh, how the ILX PC patrol would love it.

The thing that makes it is that Leslie Caron is really funny in the nonmusical scenes, Louis Jourdan mostly is too.

finally saw the bandwagon - its actually quite dissapointing. doesnt really sparkle, lacks drama/emotion, and has none of that confection you expect from musicals. no sense of delight. expected more satire/humour after that opening scene, but it didnt really seem to get going until the show theyre working on gets revamped. all that stuff with the orson welles-ish director ruining the musical with faust etc wasnt funny enough. but the routines near the end are worth it (the mickey spillane one is great, obv). its basically a bit too baggy. id have liked to see more of the actual show rather than the build up to the failed one.

has none of that confection you expect from musicals. no sense of delight.

well, this is daft to me; it begins with "Shine on Your Shoes."

Jack Buchanan's director seems inspired equally by Welles and Jose Ferrer, who was a big deal on Broadway at the time.

Might watch Brigadoon tonight...

hey guys, they're bringing Gigi to Broadway w/ this Vanessa Hudgens person. Heavy censorious rewrite?

http://www.theatermania.com/broadway/gigi_307347/

RIP Louis Jourdan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbE9N6LRpG0

he had a long pretty active life... was married for 60 yrs. had a good run.

nobody left from letter from an unknown woman, now.

well hell, it's 67 years old.

anyone know The Story of Three Loves? VM's contribution is one of three episodes, of course the one with Farley Granger, Leslie Caron and Ricky Nelson. What a supergay writeup.

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/film_screenings/23991

along with that film, MoMA is showing the notorious Yolanda and the Thief tom'w. so here's what Dave Kehr (now a MoMA curator) and Rosenbaum had to say:

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-story-of-three-loves/Film?oid=1050368

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/yolanda-and-the-thief/Film?oid=1057677

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq73SnWShxE

The cast looks ace.

yes, The Story of Three Loves episode is good! esp the Ethel Barrymore/Ricky Nelson scene.

If you people thing Gigi is weird (it's not, it just carries the sexism of another era; big whoop), you should see The Cobweb, in which the entire staff of a psychiatric hospital is obsessed with what drapes should be put up.

http://selfstyledsiren.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-cobweb-1955.html

and Oscar Levant sings!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uQBExnJbU4

Gigi isn't weird -- it's boring.

no, that's Miguel.

Miguel Ortiz.

he was a utility infielder for Montreal in the '80s, right?

i thought the cobweb was really weird and not very good when i saw it like, seven years ago at anthology

my problem is that i don't like soap operas, and this one i presume is based on lesser material than Some Came Running (Wm Gibson vs James Jones). Although it's beautifully designed, and has compelling actors (Widmark, Gish, Bacall, Levant) so i didn't mind it.

saw A Matter of Time (his last, 1976) tonight... Ingrid Bergman is rather amazing in it, Liza all over the place. Mutilated perhaps -- V.M. was losing his mental acuity, it seems -- but no disaster. It's mostly a goth movie.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/movie-of-the-week-a-matter-of-time

I've a memory, I think, of watching it on public TV 30 years ago.

Kael: "The result exposes Liza Minnelli, in particular, to ridicule; however, though Ingrid Bergman's performance has no rhythm left, Bergman herself is assured enough to do much of the role in statuesque repose, and she has a glamour beyond anything she's had before onscreen." Sounds delish, just right for the gay thread.

Ingrid Bergman's performance has no rhythm left

no idea wtf she's on about there

Isabella Rossellini's debut as a nun, v witty

ok i guess Kael meant the hackwork by AIP destroyed the performance. Not quite!

does Meet Me in St Louis "belong" to Arthur Freed?

http://reverseshot.org/archive/entry/2126/meet_me_freed

sure, and minnelli, and garland, and sally benson, and roger edens...

that author seems to think--sel-importantly--that crediting arthur freed is some kind of radical heresy against auteurism but auteurism is just one lens through which hollywood cinema has been understood. there are tons of books on the hollywood musical that give freed pride of place.

auteurism was the best and the worst thing to happen to film criticism, really.

Home from the Hill, Texas family melodrama with Mitchum as the randy patriarch, George Hamilton (at 20!) in the mama's-boy Tony Perkins role, Eleanor Parker as the frigid mom, George Peppard (better than expected) as... At least it's considerably better than The Cobweb. Didn't need to run 150 mins tho.

Peppard, who had studied at the Actor's Studio in New York, was rather shocked, however, when he asked Mitchum if he had studied the Stanislavsky Method, and the star replied, "No, but I've studied the Smirnoff Method."

R Brody is wild for it (slightly spoileriffic):

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/home-with-minnelli-home-from-the-hill

had a good scene in a bar iirc

man, Lana Turner's meltdown in the car in the rain in The Bad and the Beautiful is some wild unbroken scene. Totally forgot about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gokr3j4HCKM

i finally saw Tea and Sympathy

spoilers:

http://the-toast.net/2016/05/02/tea-and-sympathy/

Caught The Sandpiper on a big screen. This is either a guilty pleasure or actually not as bad as its reputation. Plenty of deliciously pointed lines (presumably by Dalton Trumbo) even while the dialogue is consistently pitched at too high a tone. Plot concerns are very of their time, but it's engaging if you suspend a lot of disbelief. Charles Bronson's kind of miscast in a role Sammy Davis Jr. claims he was up for (!). Very hard to believe Richard Burton could get in a fistfight with Bronson and survive, so maybe Sammy would've been better. Big Sur scenery + Liz's high end beatnik fashion go a long way.

it's bad but amusing