Vincente Minnelli was husband to Judy Garland and, more successfully, father to Liza Minnelli. During his many years at MGM, he became the studio’s premier director of musicals such as Ziegfeld Follies (1944), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), An American in Paris (1951), The Band Wagon (1953), Brigadoon (1954) and Gigi (1958). He worked with the stars of the genre, including Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and his future wife Judy. And yet film historians seldom rank him with the great directors of Golden Age Hollywood. Minnelli is seldom named in conversation with Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks or John Ford. The reason? Film scholars seldom took musicals seriously.
In the biography Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer (published by St. Martin’s Press), author Emanuel Levy endeavors to raise the director’s profile. Levy appears to be that rarity, a film scholar who loves musicals. But the UCLA film studies professor also dwells on a fact duly noted but little explored by previous historians of Hollywood: two-thirds of Minnelli’s three-dozen films were comedies or dramas in which no one broke out in song and dance. Among them is the Hollywood satire The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), the Vincent Van Gogh biopic Lust for Life (1956) and the Spencer Tracy-Elizabeth Taylor comedy Father of the Bride (1950). He even dipped into film noir with Undercurrent (1946).
Minnelli began as a set and costume designer in New York theater before receiving his call to Hollywood. He quickly understood the mechanics of classic moviemaking, mastering its combination of “dramatic reality and fabricated art.” His on-with-the-show professionalism saw him through third-rate material such as Kismet (1955). Levy identifies themes that persisted even in many of Minnelli’s lighter productions. In his films, artists were outsiders, successful careers usually compensated for personal failure, individuals were often emotionally isolated in society and American attitudes toward masculinity were narrow and debilitating.
Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer is the first biography of Minnelli ever written, and Levy combines close and analytical readings of each of his films with the careful spadework of the reporters in Citizen Kane trying to uncover the meaning of Rosebud. For Minnelli, Rosebud may have been his bisexuality and all the complications that ensued. Working in an era when Hollywood Production Code censors excised a negative comment about American-made cars from the scrip, Minnelli sublimated his precarious position in movies whose intriguing complexity was embedded in shadows, color schemes and tantalizingly oblique references.
