Melodramatic Minnelli

“Life isn’t usually characterized by the piling of one profound experience after the other,”the director Vincente Minnelli (1903–86) wrote in his 1974 memoir, “I Remember It Well.” “When a momentous occasion presents itself, it often comes in the most improbable way, the coincidences implausible and inexplicable. How many times has a friend prefaced his retelling of an experience in this way, ‘You wouldn’t believe what just happened. It’s like a B-movie.’ To take these moments and present them so they don’t look like a B-picture — that’s the challenge I relish.”Beginning today, Anthology Film Archives will celebrate Minnelli’s gift for elevating the improbable, implausible, and inexplicable into something wholly original and sublime with “The Bad and the Beautiful: The Melodramas of Vincente Minnelli,” a four-day, four-film tribute to the director’s occasional wanderings from musicals and comedies during his 26 years under contract at MGM.All four films in Anthology’s showcase also celebrate the qualities that distinguish every Minnelli movie and that have inspired two generations of filmmakers. Above all, a Minnelli film is propelled by an emphatic mobile camera. In musicals like the benign yet complex “Meet Me in Saint Louis” (1944), the garish and muscular “An American in Paris” (1951), and the insane “The Pirate” (1948), Minnelli’s frame glides from beat to beat hushing tears, conjuring dreams, finishing jokes, joining lovers, and mapping out the next big production number.In the four non-singing, non-dancing potboilers Anthology returns to the big screen — the only place Minnelli’s visual extravagance truly belongs — the director’s relentlessly declarative camera bridges an otherwise unfathomable distance between perfectly decorated MGM dream-factory interiors and the neurotic, broken, dissipated, manipulative, and narcissistic characters that these films place against them. Minnelli’s genius for camera movement was inspired by the Viennese master of the mobile movie frame, Max Ophuls. But the crazed camera excesses and even crazier characters that have become the stock-in-trade of Oliver Stone and Martin Scorsese bear thicker smudges of the Minnelli melodrama’s rouge and sawdust stylistic touch than Ophuls’s white-gloved restraint.Before it was renamed within an inch of self-parody, the original title of 1952’s “The Bad and the Beautiful” was “Tribute to a Bad Man.” The story of the rise and fall of a Hollywood producer as revealed through the reminiscences of an actress, director, and writer whose careers the producer made and who grew to despise him, was supposedly loosely based on “Gone With the Wind” producer David O. Selznick. But the film’s breathtaking deep focus “contrast in velvety blacks and intense whites,” as Minnelli himself wrote, and use of the tried-and-true “Citizen Kane” structure, braiding multiple, highly personal recollections of the same character, seems more like a tribute to Orson Welles.The confusion and curiosity over who in “the Bad and The Beautiful” is supposed to be whom (various critics through the years have suggested that Kirk Douglas’s character, Jonathan Shields, is also based upon RKO producer Val Lewton) seems conceptually irrelevant compared with the succession of camera histrionics that gild the in-jokes and references in the film. “The actors could become caricatures if not properly controlled,” Minnelli offered as an object lesson learned from making “The Bad and the Beautiful.” His cast, from an unusually restrained Mr. Douglas to an unusually believable Lana Turner, root the film’s “I love this dirty town” lunacy in the undeniable clarity of charismatic actors playing it straight in near-farce conditions.“Minnelli and his crew enjoyed the elaborate mechanical ballets they choreographed for cranes, crab-dollies, and other moving equipment,” the producer John Houseman (coincidentally, or not, an Orson Welles and Max Ophuls veteran) recalled. In one sequence, Minnelli’s dolly tracks Turner to her car, then spins around her during a high-speed emotional breakdown behind the wheel. Minnelli asked “Laura” composer David Raksin to prepare musical cues prior to shooting another Turner meltdown so that he could meticulously choreograph the actress’s agonized stumble from her dressing room through a darkened soundstage — move by lip-quivering move.“I’m not very interested in anyone but myself,” says Stevie, the house artist neurotic in Minnelli’s long, odd, and soapy CinemaScope nuthouse film “The Cobweb” (1955). That pronouncement could serve as an epitaph for any of the lead characters in Anthology’s four-film survey. Stevie, played by John Kerr (James Dean dropped out at the 11th hour due to studio salary brinksmanship) hangs alongside Mr. Douglass’s Shields from “The Bad and the Beautiful,” Frank Sinatra’s blocked writer Dave Hirsh in “Some Came Running” (a must-see high point in American wide-screen filmmaking), and Mr. Douglas again as the washed-up actor Jack Andrus in “Two Weeks in Another Town,” in Minnelli’s gallery of artistic personalities stretched to breaking by the opposing pulls of creative expression and real life.“My work in the final analysis is the story of my life,” Minnelli said a few years after his career was over and a decade before his life followed suit. With four unhappy marriages yielding only two children on one side of the life vs. art fence, and more than 30 extravagantly beautiful feature films on the other side, it would seem that Minnelli put work ahead of life for most of his 83 years. Anthology’s compendium of four of the most marvelously off-kilter mainstream films opens his creative family album in a particularly compelling place.Through Sunday (32 Second Ave., between 1st and 2nd streets, 212-505-5181).

Melodramatic Minnelli

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