Vincente Minnelli’s most popular movies were never forgotten, but there was a time when he was almost better known as Liza’s dad than as director of American in Paris and Gigi. Although the influential generation of film critics who came of age in the 1960s often admired his work, they accorded him less respect than Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles. Maybe they derided the genre most associated with Minnelli, the musical, as a showboat without substance; perhaps Minnelli’s superficial lack of seriousness cost him a demerit.
But the wheel of critical fortune seems to have turned in favor of the filmmaker, honored in the last couple years with two respectful biographies. The latest, A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life and Films of Vincente Minnelli (DaCapo), begins with a confession by author Mark Griffin. At age 16, as a teenager in the decade of Ferris Bueller, he underwent a “life altering experience” when he caught Minnelli’s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, a musical whose offbeat protagonist spoke to his own sense of being different than his peers. Griffin’s thesis is that the “hundred or more hidden things” (of which Minnelli once spoke) includes the secret lives of the captivating eccentrics celebrated in the dreamy plots of his films, along with the signs and symbols that can be encoded in the even the most innocuous entertainment. For Griffin, Minnelli was the champion of characters who dared to rise from the dreary, stagnant pool of conformity much as the director himself was drawn from middle class banality toward the bright lights of show business.
Remarkably, Minnelli was able to establish a fiefdom of lush imagination under the gaze of the Hollywood Production Code and within one of the more rigid fantasy factories of Hollywood’s Golden Age, MGM. Griffin not only makes his case entertainingly but with a determined sense of commitment. After all it’s one thing to profoundly respect the work of a director. To have a “life altering experience” at his hands is something else again.
