![]() Schickel, who made a documentary on the director, says Minnelli was a modest man. And Leslie Caron in ‘An American in Paris’ is a kept woman of a gangster.” It is a film about a woman who is being groomed to be a prostitute. There is this really dark side to Minnelli that keeps pushing through in these films like ‘The Pirate,’ ‘Lust for Life’ or a film like ‘Gigi.’. Minnelli’s vision often ran counter to MGM’s, which, says Horak, “had this total optimistic, rose-colored-glasses point of view of life. “But because he is so successful at using decor, using sets, using color, people think of him as a frilly stylist, but people forget how much primal drama they are in the films.” ![]() ![]() Even in a romantic film like “The Clock,” the fear of death is always hanging over a young married couple. ![]() Pendleton says the melodramas have a lot of sex and violence. At age 3, he joined the “Minnelli Brothers Dramatic Tent Show.” He came to fame in the 1930s not as a performer, but as a costume and set designer for Radio City Music Hall revues, eventually turning his talents to Broadway as a designer and, by 1935, a director. Minnelli was born in 1903 to a family of touring entertainers. At a time when the studio system is really breaking down and where other directors had slowed down to one project a year, he is still banging them out.” “His productivity is nothing short of amazing, especially when you look at his work from the late ‘40s through the 1950s. Minnelli, Horak says, was also an obsessed workaholic. He would just go ahead and do whatever he wanted to.” in a way it was kind of an advantage for Vincente. It is something they didn’t publicize or take a lot of pride in. “They certainly de-emphasized directorial tour de forces. “You don’t on the whole look for auteurs out of MGM because it was such a factory,” Schickel adds. He would do what needed to be done - some projects he would throw his heart into and others he would do more or less by rote.” They were used to the Erich von Stroheims and John Fords who were difficult. “He was the kind of director the brass at MGM loved. “He worked in a lot of different genres and stayed at one studio basically his whole career,” he says. Horak believes contemporary historians and critics underrate Minnelli because he was a studio contract director at MGM. “So many of the films are sort of underappreciated considering how deftly he handles these other kind of genres.” “But when you look at the chronology of the films that he did, in any given span of years he was working in musicals and then working in melodramas and straight dramas and comedies,” she says. Even that achievement has been overshadowed by the fact that he was married to Garland and was the father of Liza Minnelli. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art kicks off its “M Is for Minnelli: The Musicals” festival Friday evening with “Gigi,” the enchanting 1958 musical that swept the Oscars that year, winning nine statuettes including best film and director, and the 1954 musical fantasy “Brigadoon,” starring Gene Kelly, Charisse and Van Johnson.Įllen Harrington, the academy’s exhibitions curator and special events programmer, says that Minnelli is generally identified with his Technicolor movie musicals. The following evening, UCLA Film and Television Archive begins its monthlong festival “M Is for Minnelli: The Melodramas” with the touching 1945 romantic drama “The Clock,” starring his then-wife Judy Garland and Robert Walker, and 1958’s “Some Came Running,” a drama for which Shirley MacLaine received her first best actress Oscar nomination, for her role as a hooker with a heart of gold. Louis,” “The Clock,” “Madame Bovary” (the 1949 version), “Father of the Bride,” “The Bad and the Beautiful,” “An American in Paris, “Tea and Sympathy,” “Lust for Life,” “Gigi,” “Some Came Running” and “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is kicking off the retrospectives Wednesday night with a tribute hosted by Schickel and featuring 19 clips from such Minnelli favorites as “Cabin in the Sky,” “Meet Me in St. But under Minnelli’s guidance, the baroque sequence vividly depicts Douglas’ mental anguish. The scene is artificial and operatic, and would have seemed foolish in a lesser director’s hands. In Minnelli’s 1962 companion piece, “Two Weeks in Another Town,” washed-up film star Kirk Douglas takes a wild ride in a sports car with his ex-wife (Cyd Charisse) while on the verge of a mental collapse. ![]()
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