Vincente Minnelli’s final film, the stilted and ill-fated musical A Matter of Time (1976), is an homage to the bygone era of golden Hollywood and a star vehicle for his daughter Liza, whose Oscar win for Cabaret permitted her a certain amount of clout in selecting roles. With her father’s health dwindling, Liza jumped at the chance to star in …

After the fiasco known as The Sandpiper (1965) came and went, stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton moved on to the sure-fire reputation-restorer Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Director Vincente Minnelli was not so lucky; MGM let their contract with him lapse without so much as a shrug. He drifted for a few years, though was still remembered as the …

There is a wonderful scene in the 1956 B-movie shlockfest The She-Creature where Ted Erickson first meets the lovely Dorothy Chappel, a dark-haired beauty who filled a sweater like no other before or since. Mesmerized, Erickson stares directly at the woman’s breasts, unblinking and hypnotized, as she cooly excuses herself and walks away. In The Sandpiper, Richard Burton can be …

In 1962, Warner Brothers outbid all other studios for the rights to a movie that would cost a then-staggering 17 million dollars to make. And they wanted Vincente Minnelli to direct. It never happened. Minnelli had just wrapped The Courtship of Eddie’s Father when Warner asked if he’d take on the film version of the Broadway smash My Fair Lady. …

Having somewhat anticipated pop art with his career of elevated kitsch, Vincente Minnelli demonstrates with The Courtship of Eddie’s Father how easily his old-fashioned style fits into a contemporary context. Its opening shots are of wipe transitions darting through images of New York’s skyline as an off-screen voice delivers ad copy that syncs with the visuals, before the camera finds …

Vincente Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) makes no secret that it’s essentially a sequel to his classic 1952 The Bad and the Beautiful. Kirk Douglas all but reprises his role from the 1952 film, only as an actor by the name of Jack Andrus rather than a producer. He’s still reeling from a life of bad choices and …

The best Vincente Minnelli movies are about movement. Sometimes this occurs in an active sense: Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dancing on the banks of the Seine, Spencer Tracy holding down his kitchen bar against an army of drink seekers, characters ping-ponging across crowded frames whose fluid density takes on its own seething character. But even in quieter scenes, in …

Bells Are Ringing is right along the lines of Kismet, a lark of a Broadway adaptation crammed with clever lines and subtle jabs at censorship but ultimately not much more than a bunch of talented overactors singing in well-lit sets. After a massive winning streak which included his previous two serious dramas, the still highly-regarded Some Came Running and Home …

While Vincente Minnelli’s previous film showed a more nuanced style from the director of The Band Wagon and Gigi, Home from the Hill pulls even further back, making a film nowhere near as florid nor visually dense as the director’s musicals and melodramas. Muted color palettes and unfussy production design are compounded by the practical limitations of shooting in ‘Scope …

Today, Some Came Running is recognized by many as Vincente Minnelli’s most lavish melodrama, an emotional epic punctuated by a penultimate sequence famously conceived by the director to resemble the inside of a jukebox. Newlyweds Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) and Ginny Moorehead (Shirley MacLaine) are stalked by her drunk, enraged ex-lover through the most phantasmagoric carnival this side of Cirque …