Director: Vincente Minnelli
Judy Holliday’s star persona was as unique as any of her peers in the 1950s—with her breakout role in Born Yesterday, she showed both a fieriness and a palpable sense of vulnerability, thanks in large part to her extraordinary control of her vocal inflections. Bells Are Ringing gives her the role that brought her her most lasting success (she played the role on the stage in over 900 performances), but ironically the film version stifles her talents as a star, with both the stagebound direction and the uninspired performance by Dean Martin transforming Holliday’s energy into something more resembling desperation. Vincente Minnelli stages the material largely in wide or two shots, and the sets neither convince nor delight in the way that the typical MGM musical would in its blatant affectations. Holliday is fun to watch, but her best moments only make one mourn for what could have been.
Director: Vincente Minnelli
That The Pirate plays as so desperate and unhinged might have something to do with the fact that its production was troubled with Judy Garland’s ongoing prescription drug addition and her failing relationship with director Vincente Minnelli. But it is also the terrific combination of a flamboyant plot and Gene Kelly’s apparent need to overcompensate—with his showboating and ceaseless flirtation, Kelly gets to play Serafin as something akin to a role that Douglas Fairbanks might have played. It’s both suggestion and even explicit luridness, as with the early “Nina” number that finds Kelly making love with every woman in sight. The film works best when Serafin is backed into a corner by the sexually frustrated Manuela (Judy Garland), whose rambunctious “Mack the Black” has a wild vivacity that one wouldn’t normally associate with Garland (at least not in its sexuality). A later scene wherein Manuela hurls everything she can get her hands on at Serafin goes on a little too long, but summarizes the film’s pleasures as an oddity—it is a spectacle with flashes of truly magnificent brilliance, heightened by the tangible sensation that it can all come crumbling apart at any moment.
Director: Vincente Minnelli
Some critics have lauded The Band Wagon as the true highpoint of the American musical, a finer success than the previous year’s Singin’ in the Rain. No doubt this appraisal has much to do with its self conscious play with performance–in the film, it is made evident that the great power of the theater involves making “real life” theatrical, but director Vincente Minnelli is just as keen at showing the reverse. In The Band Wagon, the line between the stage and the world is not just a blurred one, but Minnelli argues that they are inextricably linked. Minnelli’s championing of the musical is also distinguished further by his love of entertainment and spectacle–this is a film of pop culture pastiche, weaving together set pieces in the vein of a typical revue show. In scoffing at more “elitist” forms of stage plays, the film becomes Minnelli’s Sullivan’s Travels. Like Preston Sturges in that film, Minnelli uses The Band Wagon as an artistic statement of purpose, remarking on his love for entertainment and suggesting the transcendent potential of the musical genre (as Sturges did with comedy). Ultimately, the picture’s set pieces are the real show, and the linking material doesn’t ascend far above the usual backstage comedy. But the “Shine on Your Shoes” piece, in particular, is one of the most visually thrilling sequences of its era, an even greater accomplishment than the famous “Girl Hunt” ballet.
Director: Vincente Minnelli
Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary has been celebrated for the certain detachment with which it approaches the eponymous Emma Bovary. The effect of Flaubert’s style is fairly distancing and obscure–audiences read Emma’s fall from grace as an outsider, not entirely aligned with her decision-making because no attempt at that particular kind of identification is attempted. Vincente Minnelli, an enormously sensitive romantic, thus adapted the material as a means of probing deeper into Emma’s passion and shattered dreams. As Robin Wood articulates, “Flaubertian assumption of clinical objectivity gives way to an all-pervasive, precariously controlled hysteria.” The film’s central setpiece is its most rightly celebrated achievement–the finest and most daring of Minnelli’s parties, a “neurotic waltz” (the director’s words) in which Emma (Jennifer Jones) actualizes her ideal self-image before spinning in an out of control frenzy, the world whirling around her as drinking goblets are smashed and windows shattered. It plays as a romantic nightmare–when Minnelli utilizes a first-person point-of-view, the effect is disorienting, balancing precariously between pleasure and horror. What makes the scene even more memorable is Van Heflin’s Charles (much more sympathetic in the filmed version than in the novel), who drunkenly chases after his wife and calls desperately as she twirls around him on the dance floor. The framing device that follows Flaubert’s obscenity trial reeks of hypocrisy and doesn’t work dramatically, and the film is overlong by about twenty minutes (typical of MGM), but the ballroom sequence is sublime enough to make up for the shortcomings.
Director: Vincente Minnelli
For a picture so regrettably miscast and directed by a man not particularly well suited for the job, Undercurrent manages to provide some pleasures, even if it is a considerable step below George Cukor’s similar gothic romance, Gaslight. Katharine Hepburn plays a timid woman who, shortly after marrying her wealthy husband, finds that he has a dark history that might threaten not only the relationship, but her life. Cast as the husband is Robert Taylor, who was more typically seen in generic hero roles, and as his brother is Robert Mitchum, playing sensitive rather than the expected brooding and blunt. Strangest of all is Vincente Minelli as director, an unusual choice for a film noir, but one that isn’t a total failure – the way that he and famed cinematographer Karl Freund manipulate light in the husband-wife confrontations is suitably menacing. The backdrop of World War II provides some intrigue – Mitchum is a veteran, and Taylor is revealed to have stolen the plans for an explosive device that a Nazi-hating German worker had been developing. These allegiances not only serve to create a greater contrast between the brothers, but it puts an emphasis on the importance of its setting – like so many post-war films, Minnelli deals with domestic instability and homes wrecked by men with haunted pasts, which were fairly new trends to American cinema in the 1940s.
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