Vincente Minnelli’s Films (1946-1955)

Posted on September 25, 2023 by 4 Star Films

Undercurrent (1946)

Undercurrent hardly holds a substantial place in any noir conversations partially because Vincente Minnelli’s reputation in part seems antithetical to the dark style born out of chiaroscuro and German Expressionism. His background was squarely in luscious art design and stage productions.

Likewise, the combo of Katharine Hepburn and the two Roberts: Taylor and Mitchum, is not one that quickly springs to mind. However, there are some merits to it simply for the sake of it being different; not dramatically, these types of psychological women’s pictures were very much en vogue during the ’40s.

It’s the pieces assembled that feel unique if somewhat ill-suited. Still, the curious hybrid of tones and talents certainly is a historical curio more than intriguing to the invested party.

I almost have trouble buying Hepburn as a reticent, uncomfortable outsider among the D.C. elite her new husband Alan (Taylor) knows, a woman holding drinks in hand just waiting for someone to talk to. But if I don’t completely believe it, she does earn my empathy.

Mitchum, the legendary mule of RKO was simultaneously earmarked for 3 or 4 pictures at the time, and so he doesn’t show up in Undercurrent until much later. Still, he has the benefit of casting a Rebecca-like influence over the picture.

After an hour of building him up, we finally get sight of Mitchum, and we know where this story is going. Because he’s a real human being and fairly innocuous to the eye. As the presence of Mitchum begins to exert itself on the picture, the marital bliss of newlyweds grows more and more harrowing by the minute. We have a picture in the same vein as Suspicion and House on Telegraph Hill.

Despite choosing the part, the constraints of the role don’t feel totally in line with Hepburn’s talents. She isn’t a shrinking violet or the kind of timorous beauty befitting Joan Fontaine or even Ingrid Bergman. Robert Taylor is mostly adequate in the vengeful husband part. He flip-flops efficiently between these stints of gracious charm — a perfect husband and lover — then, becomes clouded by these perverse streaks of jealousy and rage.

3/5 Stars

The Pirate (1948)

It’s plain that The Pirate is born out of the traditions of the 1940s Hollywood lineage like Blood and Sand or Black Swan, even Gene Kelly’s own Three Musketeers. However, between the bright evocative staging of Vicente Minnelli and the instant performance-driven rapport of Garland and Kelly, it works quite splendidly with what it has to offer.

Today it doesn’t hold much of a reputation, and I would stop short of saying it’s a minor masterpiece. What we do have is a picture banking on the charisma of its leads and a certain pictorial opulence supplied by its primary mastermind.

Kelly, taking all the niñas of the town by storm, is full of allure and his usual magnetism as he twirls, leaps, and bounds between all the pretty girls. It’s all about the patter between the stars as he plays the foxy street performer, and Garland is the put-upon maiden who is betrothed to another man. His vocation gives the director license to use these elements of theatricality and faux drama to tell the story.

What do I mean? It could be a story of tragic, unrequited love. It might just as well be a tale of marauding pirates, and yet somehow, between the song and dance, it becomes a kind of tongue-in-cheek comedy of two lovers perfectly suited for one another being thrown together.

There are moments where Garland and Kelly seem to be playing in a separate movie, or at least they are in on the joke with the rest of us, even as they mess with each other. Trashing his apartment feels like the highest form of romantic tension only for the drama to become slightly heady again: Kelly is set to be hung as the dreaded pirate Macoco. Is it a first to have a musical number performed under a hangman’s noose? I’m not sure.

Thankfully, he gets some stellar support. While I’ll be the first to admit “Be a Clown” feels like a less funny prototype for “Make em Laugh,” if you’ve never seen the Nicholas Brothers, it’s a small recompense to see them join Gene Kelly and get some commendation in the spotlight as his momentary equals. It feels like a flawed but heartfelt apex to a picture that could be described in much the same terms.

3/5 Stars

Madame Bovary (1949)

Madame Bovary is the kind of trenchant literary work the Production Codes would go to all costs to declaw. In one manner, it’s somewhat remedied by James Mason’s framing by providing a mostly blase narrative device to enter the story.

Even as something leaner in budgeted black & white (one could hardly confuse The Pirate with Madame Bovary), it’s still the same Minnelli. The ball sequence spelling the ascension of Emma (Jennifer Jones) as a society darling, while somewhat compact, exudes an impressive opulence.

The director makes sure to follow Jones’s incandescent form as she prances and waltzes her way across the dance floor with great distinction. Her gown alone is enough to make the upper classes stand up and take note. The dashing Louis Jourdan is certainly more than aware of her. It’s totally taken up by the kind of swirling euphoria also holding a place in the oeuvre of Marcel Ophuls — Letter from an Unknown Woman and Earrings of Madame De…spring instantly to mind.

It becomes more and more of a gothic drama as things progress, overtaken by gales of wind, thunder, lightning, and an incessant downpour of rains to go with the equally tumultuous score of Miklos Roza.

However, more importantly, Emma becomes possessed by all of her own ambitions and preoccupations. She is emotionally distant from her husband (Van Heflin), absent from her child, and totally involved with other men. She entreats them to take her away from such a dreary life, constantly prone to these histrionic gestures of love and loss at the hands of her suitors and husband. They hardly know how to respond to her.

If the terminology was present at the time, she is cut out of the cloth of some kind of femme fatale, albeit born out of the annals of classic literature. Moreover, she is a woman who never seems to know what she truly wants. She sends out an array of mixed signals — living a life made up of so many contours and emotions — and never settling on anything honest.

It’s as if she’s fashioned a kind of fantasy life for herself woven out of her own personal whims though she remains self-destructive to the very last iota of her being. There’s something unnerving about her and Jones plays her as such; it’s easy to understand how society was scandalized by her because she does not live by societal norms. Mason’s concessions for her character aren’t enough to totally wipe out the harrowing impact of the performance.

3.5/5 Stars

The Cobweb (1955)

“What happens if you go into town to the movies? You start screaming or something? They’d think you’re a critic, that’s all.” – John Kerr as Steven

If it’s true you can make a screwball comedy like Easy Living (1937) about a fur coat falling from the sky, then it’s equally possible to make a portrait of psychological horror about drapes. The Cobweb busies itself with the vast array of interpersonal relationships taking place on the grounds of a psych ward. Richard Widmark does his best to aid his patients in their recoveries as he juggles familial and boardroom responsibilities. It’s no easy balancing act.

For a film that is mostly disregarded, it’s easy to clump it together with something like Executive Suite (also produced by John Houseman) with one of the most phenomenal assortments of players one could hope to cobble together during the golden era of Hollywood.

Lilian Gish is at her most ornery but lest we forget, she truly is the queen of the movies. Charles Boyer and Lauren Bacall are equally crucial touchstones of film history, playing two respective love interests as Widmark struggles to connect with his wife, Gloria Grahame. Even ’30s scream queen, Fay Wray, has a brief appearance in a picture that boasts Oscar Levant and then the up-and-coming talents of John Kerr and Susan Strasberg.

In one scene with all the various folks blocked throughout the room, it’s almost difficult to distinguish who’s a patient and who’s not, but if we are to appreciate this drama, it doesn’t half matter. Widmark falls for another woman. Grahame flaunts her charms and goes looking for love from Boyer, who is now mentally compromised. Gish is incensed about having her opinions disregarded. Some of them are petty and others are stricken with loneliness and actual psychoses.

The palette becomes such an evocative way to color the emotional undercurrent and elements of suburban life, not unlike some of Nicholas Ray‘s work or something like Strangers When We Meet. The visual world is beautiful; still, it lets loose an environment full of pain and inner turmoil. Although Minnelli handles his characters deftly, there’s no place for the film to go but toward a hysterical fever pitch.

3.5/5 Stars

Cluny Brown (1946): Nuts to The Squirrels

Posted on July 6, 2021 by 4 Star Films

cluny brown

The title card introduces our time and place. It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon in England. The year: 1938. Nothing particularly important is going on except a cocktail party and that’s only important to the host, one Mr. Hilary Ames (Reginald Gardiner).

You wouldn’t call this much of a dramatic situation aside from the minor detail: his stopped sink is about to put a catastrophic wrench into his fast-approaching party. The guests will be coming soon! What will they say?

If this feels like an inane dilemma, then you already have a heart and pulse for what Ernst Lubitsch will be doing over the next hour and a half. Because this is his brand of continental comedy of manners, taking particular aim at the British classes.

However, he’s in need of some conduits and they arrive at Mr. Ames’s door in the form of Adam Belinski (Charles Boyer) and Cluny Brown (Jennifer Jones). They couldn’t be more disparate figures.

He is an esteemed professor wanted by Hitler for some abstruse reason that’s never explained. Nevertheless, all the social elites pay him the highest amount of deference. Cluny is one of the lower classes — a chipper young lass — with an affinity for plumbing. Fixing pipes that is. She comes to repair the sink of Mr. Ames on behalf of her surly uncle. Although a crisis is averted, the bubbly girl is soon sent off to the country to be a housemaid — a position of propriety for a girl as herself.

Meanwhile, the party finally commences, and it’s what we expect, full of pretentious, huffy party guests. A trio of stultified mischief seekers, Peter Lawford, Helen Walker, and Michael Dyne are on the hunt for something to bring them out of the doldrums. They finally happen upon something arcane enough to pique their interests — a man sleeping on a bed tucked away in a back room.

What’s hilarious about Boyer is how he’s quite literally an anti-scandal maker. Lawford recognizes him as the esteemed thinker and immediately extends him the highest degree of repute. He’s falling over backward to take him wherever he needs to go and shoveling out pound notes to support his cause against the miserable Nazis.

Boyer doesn’t take advantage of these good graces as he meekly deflects most and then folds to a few. The biggest offer is a place to stay at Andrew’s parents — a lovely estate out in the countryside: Friars Carmel Manor. The very same place our plumbing prodigy is taking up residence.

However, the vivacious Cluny starts off her first day on the job on a dubious foot. She actually makes small-talk with the Lord and Mistress of the manor going so far as to drink tea and eat crumpets in their company! This will never do as far as the other staff is concerned. Her catchphrase of choice, “nuts to the squirrels” is tantamount to public indecency.

The key observation is how she never intends to bawdy; she never is. Her spirit simply sparkles brighter than any of them dare to. Because there is an intrinsic bounce in her step and a winsome demeanor burgeoning with innocence and goodwill. It feels totally at odds with the world she’s gone and got herself immersed in. But she makes a bright-eyed go of it all the same. She knows no other way to tackle life.

It’s easy to view this as a riff off the upstairs-downstairs dramas of Jean Renoir — Diary of a Chambermaid for instance — though this does have a Lubitsch twist. He, like the eminent Frenchmen, is readily poking a wry bit of fun at the lunacy of rigid class structures.

In other words, once it becomes evident who you are, people start treating you with respect or lack thereof. The good professor gets royal treatment. Cluny Brown receives the cold shoulder. And of course, they are the most crucial figures as two people totally out of place in the prim and proper hierarchy of the English countryside.

On her day off, Cluny goes prancing off to the chemist, swinging her purse, and wearing a garden on her head. She shares tea with the punctilious Mr. Wilson (Richard Haydn) and his grunting mother, then treated to harmonium music as the man of the house proudly acknowledges his position in the volunteer fire brigade. A walk in the countryside afterward sounds more rewarding. Mostly because they bump into Mr. Belinski; his candor can more than break up the turgidness of the bespectacled chemist.

On another evening, it’s the birthday celebration for Mrs. Wilson, which becomes a telling proofing ground for why this romance of opposites was destined for failure. As the candles are lit and snooty-voiced Mr. Wilson pontificates once more, the plumbing goes haywire. Cluny Brown does what comes naturally to her; she jumps into action, banging away at the pipes right then and there! It’s immaterial whether she succeeds or not. She has trampled over what is considered sacrosanct in these circles. A female plumber! It just isn’t done, and the party dissolves unceremoniously.

Thankfully, there is more to the story. The movie is blessed by these immaculately arranged character parts placed throughout for the likes of Reginald Gardiner, C. Aubrey Smith, Una O’Connor, and still others.

But the most sublime of the surprises, aside from Jones’s sheer ebullience, is how Boyer constantly feints away from his dashing leading man persona. I’m not sure if other moviegoers assumed the same, but one cannot help think that Boyer hearkens back to Maurice Chevalier in all those saucy operettas from the 20s and 30s. For many, Boyer was heir apparent as the only other cinematic Frenchmen they might have known and a dashing one at that.

In other words, we think he’ll do something — act the rapscallion in such a prim society — but this is never his flaw (or his charm). Instead, he takes a genuine interest in others. He feels more like a matchmaker and a fix-it-man making his way through the story with a perceptive eye. And yet Lubitsch is good enough to give him a moment of romance for the sake of the audience since he sees the light in Cluny no one else appreciates.

Likewise, I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated him a role so much, for the very reason he was allowed to be far more than the stereotypical reputation that proceeds him. This extends to him a power — a new kind of novel flexibility — to be something he was rarely granted the opportunity to be before.

He and Cluny make a fine pair of kindred spirits and resident outsiders. In fact, they take to English society like squirrels take to nuts — a bit baffled but good-willed — adding a strain of much-needed gaiety to otherwise stuffy lives. Bless them.

3.5/5 Stars

Portrait of Jennie (1948)

Posted on July 2, 2017 by 4 Star Films

The strands of our lives are woven together and neither time nor the world can break them.

From the outset, you get a sense from the grand philosophical dialogue and imagery that we are being treated to a classical Hollywood precursor to Terence Malick’s Tree of Life. Quotes from Euripides and Keats flash over the screen. Profound questions are brought to the fore. What is time? What is space? What is life? What is death?

And it is somehow a spiritual film and not because of convents or biblical references. It’s a different type of spirituality — more elusive than a simple description. It’s summarized by the early supposition that each person must find their own faith. You must learn how to care deeply about something. And these initial suggestions give a hint to the film’s intention although the rest rolls out in more typical Hollywood fashion courtesy of David O. Selznick.

Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) is one of those starving artists types who gets very little monetary value out of his creative vocation as a painter. Although initially brusque, he does receive some encouragement from a pair of veteran art dealers (Ethel Barrymore and Cecil Kellaway) and for the majority of the film, they remain buttresses to his career.

They see a spark of talent in this man — though not fully realized — there’s something there that can develop into something beautiful. Perhaps they see the landscapes like he does, where the images of the world are literally on canvass (Director William Dieterle denotes this phenomenon well).

portrait-of-jennie-2 But it’s a chance encounter with a young girl named Jennie (Jennifer Jones) that gives Eben the type of inspiration that every artist dreams of because it’s precisely this spontaneous spark of joyous energy he needs to add something vibrant to his own life. In her constantly evolving role, Jennifer Jones exudes an effervescence, a certain radiance in body and spirit that lights up the screen in embodying this apparition of a girl.

She meets Adams first near a park bench, then doing whirly-birds on the ice rink. They continue to have these little moments together made up of chance encounters and pieces of fate. Although the film hardly gets to explore the idea, Portrait of Jennie plays with time for the sake of love. And it conveniently allows its two characters to meet each other at very different reference points in life. For him, it’s only a few days. For her she’s no longer a young girl, now blossoming into a mature young woman. And that is part of the tantalizing charm. Their chemistry flourishes. It becomes evident that much of romance is made up out of memories, these little fleeting moments of joy in being together.

It’s fantasy aspects make it a fine companion piece to the Ghost and Mrs. Muir as well. Light, passionate, moving, all those things. Yes, its conclusions on love are more than soppy, but a little soppiness does wonders in this cynical world we find ourselves in presently.

Out of context, it sounds ludicrous that Adams pilots a boat out into a New England gale for no reason except that it is the last place Jennie was seen. But interestingly enough, this conclusion hardly feels out of the ordinary since we intuitively know that Eben is going where he needs to, or at least where the film suggests he needs to go. And it’s not terrifying in all its technicolor glory because those apprehensive feelings easily give way to the raw majesty of it all — the pure awesomeness of the crashing waves — the churning forces of natures.

In these moments the film reaches its crescendo of love while also coming full circle to its opening prologue. But there’s something inside of me that feels unfulfilled with this ending. There’s a hollowness. Eben and Jennie had something together but what is it exactly, is difficult to comprehend completely. Eternal, no. Immortal, no. It’s only a moment. That is all.

portrait-of-jennie-1 I find that despite his pedigree Joseph Cotten still comes off as an underrated actor and with each film I see him, I enjoy him immensely. Maybe for those very qualities. He’s not altogether handsome but he has a pleasant face. His voice isn’t the most formidable or debonair but it does have character. The supporting players lend some Irish flair to the cast and it’s striking that everyone from Ethel Barrymore to Lilian Gish glows with a certain hope. There is no obvious antagonistic force in this film. Eben Adams found his inspiration — the muse of a lifetime — and that passion is enough to lay the foundations of a film.

In some ways, I am discontent with the actual portrait of Jennie. The film acts as a better portrait of who she was as we continually get small swatches of her personality and glimpses into her character. In comparison, that painting seems little more than an austere shell. It lacks the same joyous vibrancy of the woman it was hoping to capture. That is to Jones’ own credit but to the detriment of the story. The painting lacks the same aura of the film.

3.5/5 Stars