How Many Vincente Minnelli Films Have You Seen?

How Many Vincente Minnelli Films Have You Seen?

Overview: Growing up in the era before TCM without a humongous ambition to seek out old films until age 16, my introduction to the classics was mostly guided by my parents’ tastes. My mother loved Gene Kelly and so I watched nearly every musical of his as child. I didn’t even know who Fred Astaire was growing up and when I watched my first Astaire film I was prepared to knock it down as if anyone could dare top Kelly. What I didn’t know growing up was that Kelly was supported by a large studio system with a musical department that was run by producer Arthur Freed (I suspect the R.F.  in “Singin and the Rain”) and an array of directors: George Sidney (Showboat) and Charles Walters (Barkleys of Broadway, Summer Stock) were in the mix and Busby Berkley was hired a little but the three people who really made a mark were Gene Kelly himself, Stanley Donen (first paired with Kelly than achieving some entirely original films on his own), and Vincente Minnelli.

It’s a little difficult to separate Minnelli’s accomplishments from that of the studio but it’s not an exaggeration to say that he bought a strong sense of exoticness to his films. Whether it was the Parisian streetscapes of “An American in Paris”, the luscious Scottish hills of “Brigadoon”, the turn of the century Victorian-style American family home dripping with nostalgia in “Meet me in Saint Louis” or the romance of Arabian Night-era Baghdad in “Kismet”, Vincente Minnelli would take you to enchanted far off worlds. If there was a specific Oscar category that epitomized what Minnelli did best, in my opinion, it would be art direction/set design which makes sense because that’s where he got his start. If his biography was any indication, one of his big regrets was not being able to shoot on location as he wanted to do with Scotland in “Brigadoon” and Paris in “American in Paris.” Of course, some of the most unforgettable musical numbers of the era came through Vincente Minnelli such as Gene Kelly singing “I’ve Got Rhythm” with Parisian school kids, Lena Horne’s “Stormy Weather” or Gene Kelly whisking Cyd Charisse away on the Sottish landscapes to “Almost like Being in Love.” And of course, the decision to end “American in Paris” on a fantasy ballet that was mimicked in “La La Land.”

However, Minnelli’s career expanded beyond musicals. Somewhere in the realm of 14 films towards the back end of his filmography were not musicals, highlighted by “Some Came Running” “The Sandpiper” and “Lust for Life” (which must have been a treat for a man who was an aspiring artist). These films are described by IMDB as melodramas which might make sense that after so many years with musicals, he wanted to explore a darker (at the very least, less fluffy) side of human relationships. Leonard Maltin noted that Minnelli loved dream sequences and flights of fanc such as the berserk carnival in ”Some Came Running”, the “Halloween Sequence” (which, now that I think of it seems like an alligator-lipped moment as TV Tropes calls it) in Meet me in Saint Louis, and the Mythical Boar Hunt in “Home from the Hill” in addition to the ballet sequence mentioned above.

Biography:  Minnellli was born in 1903 (coincidentally, the same year his most famous musical, “Meet me in Saint Louis” begins) in Chicago to a theatrical family. His parents and uncle operated a tent show that toured the Midwest. His first job was painting show-window displays as a kid. He was then a costume director and set designer for the Balaban and Katz theater chain in Chicago. Minnelli then moved to New York in 1935 where he directed three Broadway plays: “At Home Abroad” “The Show is On” and “Hooray for What!”

He was recruited as a producer to Paramount Studios first but was unsuccessful there at advancing up the ranks so went to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer under Arthur Freed. According to his obituary, his contract for MGM was until 1966 so that would (as far as I know) be the dividing line between when he was a studio hand and an independent producer which means that many of his other non-musicals such as “Father of the Bride” and “Lust for Life” were under the studio.

Minnelli directed two Oscar-winning films: “American in Paris” and “Gigi” though he didn’t win the actual Best Director prize for the former and the latter just went to the studio (AFAIK).  Also, does anyone remember “Gigi”?

Minnelli also had a famous wife in Judy Garland who he met on the set of “Meet me in Saint Louis” and the pair produced another famous Hollywood triple threat in Liza Minnelli. In 2007 when AFI did a series of YouTube videos asking stars their favorite films, I thought Minnelli gave the best answer: “Meet me in St Louis because it’s where my mom met my dad so I owe my existence to it.” Minnelli had four marraiges but his three other wives weren’t famous and his other daughter isn’t famous, and I’m too lazy to look them up so we’ll skip that. He was also likely to be bisexual or veering significantly more gay than straight on the Kinsey scale. Lorna Luft (Garland’s daughter) speculated that Judy entered the marriage because “her mother was unable to distinguish between friendship and romantic relationships with her gay companions.” Either way, the marriage took a lot out of Minnelli who was married to Garland while she was going through the worst of her addictions.

Aside from that, Minnelli was known to have a lot of nervous tics and feel more socially awkward outside of his creative collaborators. He was also quite good with Gene Kelley’s psychotic perfectionism.

How Many Films Have I Seen:  7. Meet me in Saint Louis, The Pirate, American in Paris, Brigadoon, Kismet, Band Wagon, The Sandpiper

Favorite: American in Paris If musicals exemplify escapist entertainment, what’s more meta than a character who’s  escaping the aftermath of the war by staying in Paris (the ultimate tourist’s city) on an eternal vacation of sorts. Gene Kelly’s character of Jerry Mulligan is living the most quixotic of existences but American in Paris is a movie about him slowly getting sucked into reality once he gets invested in love with a person. The object of his affections, Leslie Caron’s Lise Bouvier, is on the wrong side of a love triangle. She’s indebted to a man who saved her from the war and it looks on the outside like love but it’s clear she never had much choice in it. There’s a tragedy in it and Mulligan really has no chance so the film ends in a ballet followed by an ending that I’m comfortable considering is just fantasy or possibly real.

Favorite Musical Number: I’ll add this bonus category. The Trolley Song in “Meet me in St Louis.” It’s not just an earworm but it’s got so much going for it. It works actual trolley bells into the music and has so much going for it orchestration-wise with strings and brass doing all sorts of riffs and counter melodies. I also like the interchange between chorus and the lead singer (Judy Garland doesn’t even start singing until 85 seconds into the song). But what I love most about this is that it’s not just singing and dancing but she’s expressing the emotion—in this case the excitement of seeing her crush board the train—of the song as she’s singing. It’s like a sing-acting I haven’t seen.

Underrated:  Brigadoon. Yes, the idea of a town thinking they’ll be safer (rather than run into a nuclear war or encroaching sprawl at the very least) by sleeping every 100 years is one of the most casually absurd movie plots in existence. But it is a very charming film and a sincere love story with a very solid chemistry between Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. There’s also Van Johnson who is such a wonderful deadpan foil, he seems to be five decades ahead of his time (a spiritual godfather to Aubrey Plaza, perhaps). The film is set in Scotland but filmed entirely on sound stages that I personally found quite impressive (especially the musical number through the heathers in “Almost like Being in Love.” There’s also a lot of fun organic songs like “Go Home to Bonnie G.”

Overrated: Band Wagon Movies about show business stars attempting a comeback are part of an overstuffed genre and this seems like an entirely unimaginative entry considering so much of the output. I’m wondering if this film was meant to give Fred Astaire material that was a little more weighty (like, say Billy Crystal in “Mr Saturday Night”) but he doesn’t really treat the material (of a man facing a midlife crisis) any differently so by all standards he fails here. Nothing is particularly memorable about the music either.

Blind Spots: “Lust for Life” sounds like an interesting one. “Cabin in the Sky” the first all-black musical in MGM’s stable also seems interesting.  “Gigi” did win a Best Picture Oscar so that could potentially be worth it?

If the film community selected a top 200 English language films in 2016 (scribble edition)

While working a call center job, I decided to use my free time to make a list of what I would predict would be the top 200 English-language films if a number of expert film critics and consumer revoted in the year 2016. Yes, I'm sure if you were working in a call center you would do a crossword puzzle/word search or your nails but when you're a certified film obsessive this is what you do.

Rather than retype the results, I will repost it in its original chicken scratch form. The cutoff year is 2010.

Some of my points of reference, recent EW polls, Empire Magazine's latest polls and IMDB have placed more of a premium on sci-fi films and downplayed the pervasiveness of musicals. The resurgence of the cerebral sci-fi film w the successes of "Martian" "Gravity" and "Arrival" certainly have helped this trend as well as the receiving of "Star Wars" as not a complete disaster. 

Only the most recognizable musicals like "Sound of Music" "West Side Story" and "Singing in the Rain" make my top 100 with "Meet me in St Louis" clocking in at 102 and that could be wishful thinking on my part. It's a very significant film historically and even "La La Land" takes some cues from it, but for some audiences, it still might be overly quaint. Astaire and Rogers are still relevant but I would imagine significant vote splitting among their eight collaborations together. Similarly, vote splitting would dilute the consistently even filmographies of Preston Surges and Douglas Dirk so that there would be no clear winners. 

Similarly, a new class of Western is more en vogue these days that would align more with Peckinpah, the Coens and Tarantino than the classic Ford prototype. Namely, more violence which is why "Magnificent Seven" "Once Upon a Time in the West" and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" (particularly for the buddy humor angle) would all move up while "Shane" and "Stagecoach" fall out of the top 100.

It's also worth noting that films that champion political truth of satirize the falsity of our medical government landscape such as "All the President's Men", "Network", "Reds" (commonly regarded as the directorial masterwork of the overtly political Warren Beatty) and "The Conversation."

Feel free to comment on my list if you can make out the handwriting.

FAQ: Do musicals today follow the same conventions as they used to?

I had a friend who asked me yesterday if musicals followed the same conventions as they used to.

First, a brief history:

Musicals are a genre which means there are certain stylistic conventions that have been cemented over time. In contrast, political films are not a film genre. There might be a number of films that have appeared over history about politics, but they have nothing in common with each other. Part of the reason that musicals are a genre with consistent patterns is because the vast majority of the successful musicals since the dawn of the sound era were all produced under one roof: MGM Studios. From the late '30s to the '50s, the genre's top directors-- Charles Arthur, Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, and Vincente Minnelli-- all worked under a branch of production at MGM under producer Arthur Freed and they likely had the same loose guidelines to follow. Additionally, many musicals that made their mark in the movies (i.e. Brigadoon, Kismet, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Funny Girl, Hello Dolly, Oklahoma, The Music Man) made their way from Broadway so those Broadway conventions filtered in to most adaptations. Even when conventions weren't borrowed, the directors faced the same challenges in bringing a Broadway production to the silver screen and deciding which versions to keep.

One of the primary conventions of a musical film is the idea of integration (remember folks, you'll have a quiz on those bold words) which is when characters would spontaneously erupt in song and dance as if it was as natural to them as speaking. It's a somewhat silly concept and one that sometimes gets parodied.

Audiences would have found it equally absurd if not for the fact that audiences were gradually weaned off earlier versions of the musical in which the characters were singing in situations that made sense. This is called the backstage musical. In MGM's early Broadway Melody series, and the Busby Berkley productions at Warner Brothers, the plot centered around performers on a stage, so that whenever their characters were singing, it would make sense within the confines of the plot.

One could see evidence of the gradual transition in a film like "Meet me in St. Louis" in which some of the musical numbers make sense within the context of the plot (Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien singing "Under the Bamboo Tree" to entertain house guests) and some don't ("The Boy Next Door" or "The Trolley Song" are completely unnatural). More interestingly, "Meet me in Saint Louis" has numbers which fall into grey area: In the opening of the film, Judy Garland strolls in singing "Meet me in Saint Louis" and she is joined by her older sister on the piano, before their father storms in and tells them to "turn off that racket." This scene could be taking place outside the context of reality, but when we see the dad (a character who sings no musical numbers over the course of the production) interrupting them, we see the scene differently: it's just two girls getting carried away as they are humming a tune.

Now, the question about whether musicals follow the same conventions as they did before:

The question might have less to do about whether directors have a need to follow conventions as whether or not the makers of modern-day musicals face the same challenges of getting audiences on board as filmmakers did back then (which they did).

The fact that Hollywood didn't really make any musicals for most of the '70s, '80s or '90s is pretty good evidence that modern-day audiences were clearly not familiar and eagerly accepting of musicals at the time. West Side Story, for example, is appreciated by a lot of people, but at the same time, the idea of gangsters being proficient in ballet has been parodied on Family Guy, SNL, and pretty much everywhere else. In order to bring back the musical, Hollywood has had to gradually revert from the integrated musical to the backstage musical. High School Musical and Dreamgirls have had backstage plots, and some of the Broadway-to-movie films that have recently come out on this latest wave (e.g. Rent, The Producers) might have been more acceptable as integrated films because they were integrated musicals on Broadway and didn't tamper too much with the source material. It's also telling that neither of those two films got great reviews anyway.

When a musical does fully embrace an integrated formula like Moulan Rouge, in 2001, it does tend to come out as over the top. Although the sheer ambition of the film was enough to get the film an Oscar nomination and there's a certain class of people who hail the film as genius, the critical reaction and reaction from many moviegoers at the time was fairly polarized (short of going back in time and asking people what they thought of the film right as they walked out of the first screening, I know it's hard to prove that, but that's very much the way I remember it) .

Chicago was able to win an Oscar for best picture as a musical and the unofficial headline in Hollywood was "The musical has officially been revived" (Read the first paragraph of Roger Ebert's 2003 Oscar predictions for supporting evidence: http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20030316/OSCARS/33010302/1023). Perhaps, Chicago is credited with reinventing the musical because it was able to find a way to make a convincing musical that would go over with audiences while preserving the fun of the integrated musical: Setting the musical numbers in the mind of a character.

Recently, because more musicals have been released in the last few years and the average American moviegoer might be more movie-literate, integrated musicals have done a little better. This past year, Across the Universe and Hairspray (another Broadway holdover) were both greeted fairly well. It could be that filmmakers are gradually learning what works and what doesn't from the few musicals to be released before they started directing their projects.