Undercurrent (Vincente Minnelli, 1946)

Robert Mitchum and Katharine Hepburn in Undercurrent

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Robert Taylor, Robert Mitchum, Edmund Gwenn, Marjorie Main, Jayne Meadows, Clinton Sundberg, Dan Tobin, Kathryn Card, Leigh Whipper, Charles Trowbridge, James Westerfield, Billy McClain. Screenplay: Edward Chodorov, based on a story by Thelma Strabel. Cinematography: Karl Freund. Art direction: Randall Duell, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ferris Webster. Music: Herbert Stothart. 

Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954)

Van Johnson, Barry Jones, Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse in Brigadoon

Cast: Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse, Van Johnson, Elaine Stewart, Barry Jones, Hugh Laing, Albert Sharpe, Virginia Bosler, Jimmy Thompson, Tudor Owen, Owen McGiveney, Dee Turnell, Dodie Heath, Eddie Quillan. Screenplay: Alan Jay Lerner, based on his book for a stage musical. Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Albert Akst. Music: Conrad Salinger; songs by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. 

Three years after Brigadoon, MGM's biggest musical star wasn't Gene Kelly or Judy Garland, it was Elvis Presley, who made Jailhouse Rock (Richard Thorpe, 1957) and eleven more movies for the studio. Arthur Freed, Brigadoon's producer, made six more musicals for the studio before leaving it in 1961, but Brigadoon is often regarded as a sign that MGM's golden age was ending. It's not an original movie musical like An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951) or Singin' in the Rain (Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952), the most highly regarded of the films produced by the Freed Unit, but an adaptation of a Broadway hit. It's also filmed in Ansco Color, widely regarded as inferior to classic Technicolor. It was originally intended to be shot on location in the Scottish Highlands, but the studio decided the weather was too uncertain there. After considering another location in California near Big Sur, the decision was made to film it entirely on a soundstage in Culver City. The expensive set earned an Oscar nomination for art direction, even though the decision to make the film in CinemaScope only magnified the artificiality of the artificial turf and painted sky. Brigadoon is not just stagey -- there are pauses at the end of musical numbers where the Broadway audience would have applauded -- it's soundstagey.  Kelly, who also choreographed, is in good voice and Cyd Charisse (whose singing voice was dubbed by Carol Richards) dancers beautifully, The song score by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe is one of their best, including hummable tunes like "The Heather on the Hill" and "Almost Like Being in Love." (Although some of the songs from the stage version, including "Come to Me, Bend to Me" and "There But for You Go I," were cut.) Yet there's something lifeless about the movie. Van Johnson, who was cast in the role of Kelly's sidekick after Donald O'Connor was considered, seems a little bored with his part. The cutesiness of the village that outwitted time and space is a little too thick: There's something almost refreshing about the scenes satirizing life in New York near the end of the film, which are supposed to indicate that Kelly's character made a big mistake in not staying in Brigadoon. Vincente Minnelli directs these scenes with a sharpness and vigor that's absent from the rest of the movie. 

The Pirate (Vincente Minnelli, 1948)

Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in The Pirate

Cast: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Walter Slezak, Gladys Cooper, Reginald Owen, George Zucco, Fayard Nicholas, Harold Nicholas, Lester Allen, Lola Albright, Ellen Ross. Screenplay: Albert Hackett, Frances Goodrich, based on a play by S.N. Behrman. Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Jack Martin Smith. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: Lennie Hayton, Conrad Salinger, Cole Porter (songs). 

Props to Walter Slezak, who is the only person in the cast of The Pirate who knows how to pronounce the name of the heroine. Everyone else refers to Manuela (Judy Garland) as "Man-you-ella." Manuela is a young woman in the Caribbean village of Calvados who is engaged to the town's portly, middle-aged mayor, Don Pedro Vargas (Slezak). Her head is full of tales of the dashing pirate Macocco, aka "Mack the Black," and she fantasizes about him taking her away from the village for a life of adventure. Don Pedro, however, likes the village perfectly well and never wants to leave. Visiting the city of Port Sebastian to have her wedding gown fitted, Manuela encounters a traveling player named Serafin (Gene Kelly), who falls for her, and during his act he hypnotizes her, hoping she'll fall in love with him. Instead, she reveals her passion for Mack the Black. Serafin follows her with his troupe to Calvados, where he recognizes Manuela's fiancé as the real Macocco, retired from piracy and hiding his secret past. From there, the plot thickens into a series of complications as Serafin decides to win Manuela away from Don Pedro by pretending that he's the real Macocco. It's not a bad premise to hang a series of songs and production numbers on, and there's some spectacularly athletic dancing by Kelly and Garland is in fine voice. The songs by Cole Porter are not his best work, however. The lyrics are sometimes silly: "Niña," for example, rhymes the name Niña with "neurasthenia" and "schizophrenia." Only "Be a Clown," which Kelly dances to first with the Nicholas Brothers and then with Garland, has had any life outside the film, and that mostly because producer and songwriter Arthur Freed notoriously copied it for Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh" number in Singin' in the Rain (Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952). Garland's increasing emotional problems, which worsened after she experienced postpartum depression following the birth of Liza Minnelli in 1946, also affected the production. The film feels a little disjointed and the ending is perfunctory, a reflection of some script problems and cost overruns. It wasn't a box office success. Still, it has moments that are as good as any of the more successful Freed Unit productions. 

An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951)

Georges Guétary, Oscar Levant, and Gene Kelly in An American in Paris

Cast: Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Georges Guétary, Nina Foch. Screenplay: Alan Jay Lerner. Cinematography: Alfred Gilks, John Alton. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, songs; Conrad Salinger, orchestrator. 

Sure, there are things wrong with An American in Paris. The Oscar-winning screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner relies on clichés like the infatuation at first sight by Jerry (Gene Kelly) with Lise (Leslie Caron) and the threat of the predatory wealthy divorcee played by Nina Foch, and it serves too often as a mechanical way of setting up the musical numbers. Some of the numbers, like Oscar Levant's performance of the third movement of Gershwin's Concerto in F and Georges Guétary's "Stairway to Paradise," are simply shoehorned into the story. And the once-celebrated concluding 17-minute ballet now seems a little overblown and pretentious. Yet I cherish the film for serving up as many Gershwin songs as it does, including some comparative rarities like "By Strauss" and "Tra-la-la (This Time It's Really Love)." I like, too, that Kelly's sometimes overbearing charm offensive is checked by Levant's acerbity and by Guétary's less strenuous effort at being charming. It's not the greatest of MGM musicals, lacking the wit that Betty Comden and Adolph Green infused into their screenplays and the style that Stanley Donen brought to his directing. I sometimes think that Vincente Minnelli was a better director of melodramas like The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Some Came Running (1958), and Home From the Hill (1960) than he was of musicals like Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), An American in Paris and Gigi (1958), in which he could let the songs do the work for him. Still, if you've got Gershwin to do the work for you, why not just lean back and let go?

Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956)

Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn in Lust for Life

Cast: Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, James Donald, Pamela Brown, Everett Sloane, Niall McGinnis, Noel Purcell, Henry Daniell, Madge Kennedy, Jill Bennett, Lionel Jeffries, Laurence Naismith, Jeanette Sterke. Screenplay: Norman Corwin, based on a novel by Irving Stone. Cinematography: Russell Harlan, Freddie Young. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons, Hans Peters. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: Miklós Rózsa.

After watching Julian Schnabel's take on Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity's Gate (2018), I thought it made sense to go back and see Hollywood's portrait of the artist, Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life. Schnabel is himself an artist, of course, so it's not surprising to find his film focused on the aesthetics of madness (along with propounding a theory that Van Gogh didn't commit suicide but was the victim of an accidental gunshot). Minnelli and screenwriter Norman Corwin are less successful in finding a coherent image of Van Gogh than Schnabel and his co-screenwriters Jean-Claude Carrière and Louise Kugelberg were, partly because the latter were working with one of the most insightful actors of our time, Willem Dafoe, while Minnelli's Van Gogh is played by Kirk Douglas, who brings to the role a physical resemblance to the artist but is never quite strong enough to craft an integrated characterization. Lust for Life seems to suggest that Van Gogh's problems stemmed from a lack of reciprocated love -- from his father, the church he tries to serve, the several women in his life, the art-buying public, the citizens of Arles, and his fellow artists -- most notably Paul Gauguin, played (perhaps overplayed) by Anthony Quinn in an Oscar-winning performance. The film is visually stunning, although the transformation of the landscapes that Van Gogh sees into what he painted is handled more subtly and intelligently in Schnabel's film. Minnelli seems content merely to juxtapose place with painting. The sensational events in Van Gogh's life, especially the amputation of an ear, are treated sensationally in Minnelli's film, which only suggests that Van Gogh did it out of frustration with Gauguin, as if pleading for that artist's attention. We also get a sentimental deathbed scene, a kind of reconciliation with Vincent's brother, Theo (James Donald). Lust for Life is a watchable but flawed and inconsistent film -- even the name of the artist gets a variety of pronunciations, from "Van Gokh" to "Van Gog" to "Van Goh."

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

Cast: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Martha Hyer, Arthur Kennedy, Nancy Gates, Leora Dana, Betty Lou Keim, Larry Gates. Screenplay: John Patrick, Arthur Sheekman, based on a novel by James Jones. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: William A. Horning, Urie McCleary. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Like Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli had a special touch with the movie melodrama, taking its often objectively silly elements seriously enough that you can actually believe in them. The James Jones novel on which the screenplay for Some Came Running was based is one of those semi-autobiographical books that writers seem to need to get out of their systems, but adapting it meant challenging the Production Code strictures, particularly on sex, at almost every turn. So the characters in the film are only as believable as the actors can make them. There's a lot of shorthand in the film about the relationships between Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) and the two women in his life, the "schoolteacher" Gwen French (Martha Hyer) and the "floozie" Ginnie Moorehead (Shirley MacLaine). It's not immediately clear why Dave falls in love so swiftly with Gwen, who seems to want to mentor him as a writer more than she does to sleep with him, or why he stays connected with the illiterate and rattle-brained Ginnie, to the extent of marrying her on the rebound from Gwen. Fortunately, all three actors are adept at pulling characters out of the script, where they don't seem to have been fully written. Dean Martin was just beginning to show that he could act -- Howard Hawks would complete the process the following year with Rio Bravo -- and Minnelli helped give his career a boost by casting him as the alcoholic gambler Bama Dillert. And Arthur Kennedy completes the ensemble as Dave's go-getter older brother, Frank. Minnelli makes the most of these colorful performers, to the extent that MacLaine, Kennedy, and Hyer all received Oscar nominations. But he's also adept, as he would show in 1960 with Home From the Hill, at taking a real small town location and bringing it to full life, especially in the climactic scene that takes place in the carnival celebrating the town's centennial. The location gives the film a substance and reality that the script never quite supplies.

The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli, 1952)

The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli, 1952)

Cast: Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Dick Powell, Walter Pidgeon, Gloria Grahame, Barry Sullivan, Gilbert Roland. Screenplay: Charles Schnee, George Bradshaw. Cinematography: Robert Surtees. Art direction: Edward C. Carfagno, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Conrad A. Nervig. Music: David Raksin.