Films by Vincente Minnelli
These layers of artifice and role-playing are perfectly suited to the fantasy elements of Minnelli’s style–to his splendid panoplies of color and of diverse objects. The musical numbers also allow plenty of room for the imagination: as Manuela fantasizes about Macoco, the night is illuminated by fires, metaphors for her passion that contrast with the well-ordered spaces of her home. The Pirate offers many such paeans to the power of the imagination, the film’s sensuous colors seeming to disrupt the staid interiors, as if the colors themselves had become advocates for fantasy. Though on occasion Minnelli’s sensibility has been characterized as “decorative,” here his use of surroundings becomes a statement about how to live, recalling the late “decorative” paintings of Odilon Redon.
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Of the movies showing at the Film Center, four are among Minnelli’s great ‘Scope and color melodramas–surely some of the most underappreciated films ever made in Hollywood. In addition to my two favorites–Some Came Running and Home From the Hill–the Film Center is showing The Cobweb (1955) and Two Weeks in Another Town (1962). The former has been described with a wink as illustrating Minnelli’s fetish for decoration: in this mental-hospital drama, the central conflict revolves around a new set of drapes for the library. But Minnelli’s triumph is to make us feel how crucial it is for one of the patients to realize his identity as an artist. Two Weeks in Another Town is a deeply felt meditation on moviemaking that focuses on a troubled director, one of Minnelli’s many artistic or unusually sensitive male heroes.
Few films have spoken to me as personally as Home From the Hill (1960), an emotionally devastating two-and-a-half-hour melodrama about the degree to which individuals can free themselves of their family histories. Though the film ends with a death followed by another cemetery scene, two of the surviving characters achieve an extraordinary selflessness and are united in newly acknowledged familial affection.
These echoes are what make the characters’ attempts to break out of the film’s cycles so moving. When Rafe, sitting in an ordinary little restaurant, learns of Libby’s pregnancy and says “marry me,” his words seem to cut through all the film’s walls. The Captain’s illegitimate son gives as one of his reasons that “there are too many little unwanted kids running around loose in this world.”
