Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood's Dark Dreamer and Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment

by Peter Tonguette

The publication of Emanuel Levy’s new biography, Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer, is not quite the momentous occasion it might have been. In his introductory remarks, Levy positions his book as just the fourth written about the director, and the only currently in print. In fact, James Naremore’s “excellent academic study,” The Films of Vincente Minnelli, is very much still in print, from Cambridge University Press, and has been so for some time, as far as I know. What’s more, an extraordinarily diverse collection of twenty-six essays, Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment, edited by Joe McElhaney, has appeared virtually contemporaneously with Levy’s book.

I don’t mean to suggest, of course, that Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer isn’t as worthwhile in this context as it would have been had it arrived on its own. What matters to Minnelli enthusiasts such as myself is that almost 1,000 pages on his life and work have seen publication this year, to say nothing of the continued availability of Naremore’s book.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, two of the first Minnelli films I saw and admired, Meet Me in St. Louis and Some Came Running, pointed to Minnelli’s childhood in the Midwest, which is described in fine detail by Levy. Born in Chicago (where he would return at age sixteen), Minnelli spent several formative years in Delaware, Ohio. The house where Minnelli lived still stands, as The Columbus Dispatch reported in a story last year. Levy writes of the town and its influence on Minnelli, “The houses were furnished with bilious green sofas, tiny rosebuds in the ceilings, wallpaper, and pongee curtains, all of which Minnelli would later re-create in his movies.” He also traces the carnival in Some Came Running to Delaware, writing, “Booths were set up in front of the stores, which were just like those on Sandusky, the main street of Delaware, Ohio, along with a merry-go-round and Ferris wheel.”

Indeed, the chapters on Minnelli’s young adulthood and early career on the stage are some of the book’s richest because Levy is so skillful at spotting kernels of his later film work. One of his first jobs—assisting with the dressing of windows at Marshall Field in Chicago—“taught him how to arrange a scene in three dimensions,” which “would prove useful to a Hollywood director who paid the utmost attention to mise-en-scène, specifically in positioning humans vis-à-vis objects and sets.” Deeming Chicago, like Delaware before it, too “provincial,” Minnelli soon headed to New York, where, as Levy tells it, he met with swift success as a costume and set designer (at Radio City Music Hall and elsewhere) and, eventually, as a director. At the age of thirty-two, as the director and designer of At Home Abroad, he was the subject of a New Yorker profile. Not enough has been written about Minnelli’s stage work, and Levy supplies us with the definitive account.

Levy is the author of, among other books, George Cukor: Master of Elegance, and it was reading that book that prompted Minnelli’s widow, Lee Anderson Minnelli, to write Levy “inquiring whether I would be interested in writing about her late husband.” She is unlikely to be disappointed in the final result; Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer is exceptionally well researched. In addition to the “invaluable information and materials” with which Anderson Minnelli provided him, Levy has drawn prodigiously from the Special Minnelli Collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Center for Motion Picture Study and the AMPAS Library. He has also drawn from interviews he conducted with Betty Comden, Robert Mitchum, Katharine Hepburn, and others; on this front, however, I wish he had done more. Admittedly, the number of those still living who worked with Minnelli is scarce at this juncture, but there are still such people.

Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine explore the seedy underbelly of post-War American complacency in Some Came Running

Since “harmony prevailed from day one” between Barbra Streisand and Minnelli on the set of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, wouldn’t it have made sense to talk with Streisand about their fruitful working relationship? Of his work on the same film, Jack Nicholson comes across as rather mystified by the experience in quotes taken from a 1970 New York Times interview by Rex Reed; perhaps, in hindsight, Nicholson has come to value his encounter with one of the grand masters of Hollywood? Or perhaps not? (The number of actors who found working with Minnelli frustrating—a list that includes, besides Nicholson, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Judy Holliday—is one of the book’s biggest surprises.) In either case, it seems to me that new interviews with these or other Minnelli collaborators, even those who have been interviewed before, would have been a useful addition. In this way, Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer compares unfavorably with Foster Hirsch’s recent Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, for which the author conducted so many interviews (and utilized them so intelligently) that critic Liz Brown, reviewing the book in The Los Angeles Times, noted that it “approaches oral history."

Levy carefully describes the contributions of certain craftspeople on Minnelli’s films (such as production designer Cecil Beaton or costume designer Irene Sharaff), yet some key figures are oddly passed over. A case in point is editor Adrienne Fazan, whose films for the director included Lust for Life, Some Came Running, Bells Are Ringing, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. Levy writes that Fazan was hired to edit An American in Paris because her “sensibility was… in synch with Minnelli’s,” yet we don’t hear of her again until Gigi, with its problematical postproduction. Given the length of their collaboration, and the brilliance of the resulting films, surely Fazan’s contributions to other films are worthy of examination.

How many films would cinematographer Milton R. Krasner have had to shoot for Minnelli to warrant attention from Levy? As it stands, Krasner photographed seven Minnelli films in the 1960s (beginning with Home from the Hill and including many of those edited by Fazan), but receives only two brief mentions. Cinematographer John Alton is discussed more often; Levy’s analysis of the “symbolic coloring” in Tea and Sympathy, which Alton shot, is superb. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that Krasner worked as often as he did with the director. Levy at times stresses how Minnelli “surround[ed] himself with longtime colleagues” (on Goodbye Charlie) and “relied on a top-notch crew of longtime colleagues” (on The Sandpiper). The trouble is, there isn’t enough here about what those colleagues contributed and how they collaborated with Minnelli.

Such is Levy’s sympathy for Minnelli’s films that he offers compelling defenses even of such minor works as Designing Woman, which he sees as “a logical follow-up to Tea and Sympathy” in its study of “the meanings of manhood and styles of masculinity.” At the same time, I think Levy judges several of Minnelli’s later films far too severely. Of The Courtship of Eddie’s Father—an authentically great film that is the subject of a brilliant reading by critic Carlos Losilla in Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment—he writes that it “does not even qualify as a stylish exercise; it’s just a shallow and forgettable picture.” But it’s impossible to deny that the last years of Minnelli’s career, in Levy’s telling, have much to be sorry about. There are the films he wasn’t able to make (imagine a Minnelli version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), and one that he did (A Matter of Time) that was “butchered” by producer Samuel Z. Arkoff.

Levy states at the outset that his “main goal is to demonstrate that Minnelli was much more than a stylist, that he was a genuine auteur in both the thematic and visual senses of this term.” (As critic Stuart Byron—and more about him in a moment—observed, when Minnelli’s films were lauded by Cahiers du cinéma and Godard, “they weren’t acknowledging demonstrations of interior design.”) By giving Minnelli’s life and work the comprehensive treatment he does here, Levy answers those who diminish his accomplishments; if the director is important enough to merit a biography as commanding as this one, he is surely no mere “stylist.”

Joe McElhaney would agree, as he argues in the introduction to Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment “that what we have in Minnelli’s films is not simply a style,” but “rather, we find in Minnelli a vision, if not a philosophy, of (and for) cinema.” McElhaney regards him as “one of the most important directors in American cinema. Consequently, the essays… have been designed to, in various ways, confirm this importance even if the approaches taken and the conclusions drawn often differ.” One glance at the list of this essential collection’s contributors (which include Naremore, Jean Douchet, Bill Krohn, Robin Wood, Serge Daney, Emmanuel Burdeau, and Raymond Bellour) is sufficient evidence that he has succeeded in his aim.

The book is divided into four sections, gathering five decades of Minnelli criticism and scholarship (among them pieces written just for this volume). All of the essays are, at least, interesting, though I found (due to my own biases) those with a broadly auteurist viewpoint the most rewarding, such as Douchet’s “The Red and the Green: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” Krohn’s “Specters at the Feast: French Viewpoints on Minnelli’s Comedies,” and Adrian Martin’s “The Impossible Musical: On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” Even so, David A. Gerstner’s investigation of Tea and Sympathy is indispensable, as are Daney’s succinct meditations on viewing Minnelli’s films on television (one beginning as a dialog between Daney and the film he is watching, The Cobweb.)

McElhaney accounts for the omission of early (pre-1960s) Minnelli criticism in the introduction, but I very much regret the absence of two later pieces, which I consider among the best ever written on the director. I first learned of Stuart Byron’s review of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, “On a Clear Day You Can See Minnelli,” published in December in 1973, from critic Fred Camper. Byron’s insights go far beyond the 1970 Streisand musical. He identifies The Cobweb as the film on which Minnelli “found his Theme,” namely “the central protagonist progress[ing] from a state of slavery to one of liberation.” Camper’s own Chicago Reader review, “Depth Perception,” centering on The Pirate, Some Came Running, and Home from the Hill, contains some of the most perceptive descriptions of Minnelli’s visual style I’ve encountered. As full as the book is, it would only have been enhanced by the inclusion of these pieces.

“Meet Me in St. Louis: Smith; or The Ambiguities,” by Andrew Britton, is in many ways one of the most formidable essays in the collection, but also one of the most baffling. At one point, Britton unaccountably (and laughably) invokes The Exorcist in discussing a scene in the film. Likewise, he sees “being together” (as in “some day soon we all will be together” from “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”) as the source of Tootie’s tantrum in the famous scene in which she attacks the snow people. But this, too, seems counterintuitive. Isn’t the source of her angst plainly the family’s still-pending move to New York from their beloved home of St. Louis? Is “being together” really what “perpetuates the misery,” even as Britton concedes sentences earlier that her “impulse is conservative: she dreads the prospective disruption of the status quo and, in particular, the absence of the Father”?

Minelli's wife, Judy Garland, in Meet Me in St. Louis

For all its strengths as a work of biography, is there anything in the way of criticism in Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer to match what is offered in The Art of Entertainment? It might come as a surprise to some that there is. Levy’s critical remarks on Minnelli’s films, throughout the book, but particularly in a concluding chapter, “Minnelli’s Legacy,” are often as fine as the best proffered in McElhaney’s volume. Some of Levy’s insights echo those sprinkled throughout The Art of Entertainment; his argument that “there is a misconception that Minnelli did not place emphasis on acting,” and “that he did care about acting,” parallels the concerns of McElhaney’s own admirable essay, “Medium-Shot Gestures: Vincente Minnelli and Some Came Running.”

In the end, these two books are complementary in their sincere appreciation of Minnelli’s art, befitting their almost simultaneous arrivals.

Peter Tonguette is currently at work on a book on the films of James Bridges to be published by McFarland and Company.

To buy Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer click here.

Cineaste,Vol.XXXV No.1 2009

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