The early 1950s saw the rise of the Hollywood anthology film, collections of shorter films linked together with a unifying theme. The popularity of anthology films was based in part on European trends, as well as a desire to provide a cinematic experience that would bring television viewers back to the theaters. In 1952, producer-director Gottfried Reinhardt approached Vincente Minnelli …

When Vincente Minnelli stumbled across the screenplay that eventually became The Bad and the Beautiful, he knew at once, despite the studio’s reticence, that he had to make the film. “It was a harsh and cynical story, yet strangely romantic,” he once said in an interview. “All that one loved and hated about Hollywood was distilled in the screenplay.” The …

Along with The Band Wagon, An American in Paris may be the quintessential Minnelli movie, providing ammunition for supporters and detractors alike to frame their arguments about the filmmaker. Transparently written around its dance numbers, An American in Paris favors its performers’ movements and its director’s exacting visual precision over a cohesive plot or fleshed-out characters. Numerous discussions of the …

The hurried, cash-in sequel is no newcomer to Hollywood. As long as there have been financially successful hit films, there’ve been people behind the scenes shouting “do it again! The same, but more of it!” While in recent years, this kind of money grubbing has led to The Last Exorcism Part II and the even more frightening The Hangover 2, …

Spencer Tracy was the great movie Everyman of the 1940s and ‘50s . He was normal-looking but charming, an impressive (and heavily-awarded) actor who never showboated, and one of the biggest box-office draws of his period. You think of Gene Hackman and John C. Reilly as his heirs, average Joes who could (and can) convey immense presence and power, even …

Twice in his career, Vincente Minnelli, America’s firmest believer in the magic and transformative power of cinema, treated us to the world of filmmaking: The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) and Two Weeks in Another Town (1962), the latter of which Jean-Luc Godard paid homage to in his Contempt (1963) and compared to the structuralist wizardry of Dziga Vertov’s Man …

Everything in Vincente Minnelli’s The Pirate is just this side of ridiculous. The dress sleeves are too puffy, the hats are too plaid, the moustaches too waxed, the plot suspiciously thin and the actors’ skin almost cracking under a dozen layers of bronzer. Ostensibly a fable set in the mid-1800s concerning a young Caribbean girl and her dreams of adventure …

Vincente Minnelli was an unorthodox choice to direct Undercurrent. Still relatively early in his career, he’d only directed one film that could charitably be called a drama, and that effort—The Clock, released in 1945—was frothy and light, a spin on wartime America that played with the concepts of love and fate as a salve for the uncertainty of a cold, …

Fans of the George and Ira Gershwin songbook may not be familiar with the song “The Babbitt and the Bromide.” The forgotten number was originally a Broadway showcase for Fred Astaire and the woman considered his best dancing partner, his sister Adele. The song was revived, if that’s the word, for the MGM spectacular Ziegfeld Follies, begun in 1944 but …

The billing is all wrong in the term “show business.” No matter how reverential critics and cineastes might get when writing about art over commerce in the great films of the past, the overwhelmingly predominant concern among movie makers has always been the eventual report from the box office. That was especially true back in the days of the studio …