Vincente Minnelli critica

DANA STEVENS

The Boston Globe

Even recounted in the starkest factual terms, the life of Vincente Minnelli, the director of classic MGM musicals like “Meet Me in St. Louis,” “Gigi” and “An American in Paris,” is as packed with color and incident as one of the dream ballets that became his trademark. Born Lester Anthony Minnelli in 1903, he grew up the only child in a family of traveling performers in the Midwest (his mother, Mina Mary LaLouche LeBeau, played the ingénue in stock melodramas, while his father, Vincent, conducted the Minnelli Brothers Tent Theater orchestra). In young adulthood, the pathologically shy, stammering Lester, who had once apparently had a penchant for trying on his mother’s clothes, read a biography of the flamboyant painter James McNeill Whistler and decided to reinvent himself as a worldly aesthete, working as a department-store window dresser in Chicago before making his name as a designer of lavish theatrical sets in New York. It was there that he became “Vincente.”
Once he moved to Hollywood as a director in MGM’s stable, Minnelli quickly built a reputation as a fearsome perfectionist, despite his passive, retiring personality. A closeted gay man, Minnelli had been known to sport “light makeup” while frequenting places like the Gershwin brothers’ New York salon in the 1930s. Nonetheless, he was married four times — first, and most famously, to MGM’s troubled star Judy Garland — and fathered two daughters, the older of whom is the perpetually re-self-inventing Liza Minnelli.

In “Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer,” Emanuel Levy, a film critic and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, makes the case that Minnelli was largely responsible for elevating movie musicals from their earlier incarnation as filmed vaudeville into sophisticated middlebrow entertainments by integrating musical numbers into the plot. Levy, the author of a biography of George Cukor and numerous books on Hollywood history, is a tireless cinephile and a prodigious researcher. He has trawled through the archives — including many previously unseen papers left in the possession of Minnelli’s fourth wife, Lee Anderson Minnelli, after his death in 1986 — and returned laden with lore. Some of the anecdotes that emerge belong in a Minnelli-directed melodrama (he named his and Garland’s pet dog Gobo, a play on the name of Lester Gaba, who was the closest thing Minnelli ever had to a boyfriend and whose heart was broken by the marriage to Garland). Other details seem tailor-made for one of his farces (while filming “Gigi” in Paris, “Minnelli was bitten by a swan in the Jardin de Bagatelle”).
No book that combines lifelong thwarted passion and Parisian swan assault can be all bad. But the vigor Levy poured into amassing biographical data seems to have deserted him when it came time to shape those facts into an artist’s life story. Reading “Vincente Minnelli” can feel like scaling a vast, slippery mountain of internal studio memos, news clippings and telegrams. What analysis of the 1952 Lana Turner melodrama “The Bad and the Beautiful” would be complete without noting that “shooting . . . began with an exterior of the cemetery, Scene 7, then the cemetery gate, Scene 8, then an exterior of Jonathan’s estate, Scene 10, and an exterior of a Hollywood club, Scene 25”? Similar details pop up throughout the book in sudden, impenetrable clumps. Yet elsewhere, information that would be crucial for comprehending the significance of a story is mysteriously absent. For instance, Levy mentions that Minnelli persuaded his longtime producer, Arthur Freed, to abandon the working title for “The Band Wagon” — without ever telling us what that working title was. The lack of a complete Minnelli filmography adds to the frustrating impression of wandering through a forest without a map.
Levy’s prose does have its vivid moments, especially when he’s lamenting some of the low points in Minnelli’s oeuvre, like the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton howler “The Sandpiper.” I laughed aloud at Levy’s image of Taylor “parading about in lurid lavender . . . while a wounded fowl nests in her raven tresses.” (Unable to restrain his glee, Levy goes on to describe how Taylor “sports a violet-blue bra while she fends off a randy ex-lover by brandishing a dainty hatchet.”)
In fact, the degree to which the author’s language gains in liveliness when he criticizes his subject’s work raises the question: Why does Levy believe that Minnelli’s career merits this, the director’s first full-length biography? Of course, no artist need produce an unblemished string of masterpieces to deserve critical attention, but Levy seems hard pressed to find a Minnelli film he actually likes. “Kismet” is “heavy-handed, grim and listless.” “Brigadoon”is “curiously flat and rambling, lacking in warmth or charm.” “The Long, Long Trailer” is “vulgar” and “banal.” After half a dozen such assessments, it’s puzzling to hear on Page 308 that “Gigi” counts as “one of Minnelli’s few movies that occasionally feels like an overly studied work.”
The account of Minnelli’s brief, dreadful marriage to Garland exerts a ghoulish fascination, but so many details are left out that the portrait that emerges is maddeningly vague. Nearly 100 pages after chronicling their breakup, Levy offhandedly mentions that “Judy caught him in compromising positions at least twice, once with a bit player and once with their gardener.” Now you tell us? It’s one thing for a biographer to play down intimate details of his subject’s life in order to emphasize the work. But as long as Levy has already disclosed Garland’s startlingly explicit complaints to friends about Minnelli as a lover, shouldn’t we also be privy to the extent and nature of his dalliances?
The gauzy cloak of privacy Levy draws over Minnelli’s sex life hints at the author’s ambivalence about the role his subject’s sexuality should play in the book. In the introduction, he calls “queer sensibility” “a concept I am not fond of,” but he does allow that Minnelli “channeled his sexual and other anxieties into his work in both manifest and latent ways.” Though Levy seldom revisits this notion in the course of the book, he acknowledges in a final chapter on Minnelli’s legacy that certain gay and bisexual directors — including Minnelli, Cukor, James Whale and, in our day, Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant — “imbue their work with a gay/queer sensibility regardless of the particular genre or narrative they work in.”
Yet among the book’s strongest passages are those few in which Levy reads the director’s work from, as it were, inside the closet. When Minnelli turned the play “Tea and Sympathy” into a film in 1956, the industry censorship bureau known as the Breen office forced MGM to sanitize the story: the hero, originally a sexually confused schoolboy bullied for his lack of interest in masculine pursuits, became a sensitive straight lad mocked for his ill-defined “nonconformity.” Despite his low opinion of the resulting picture, Levy offers a powerful reading of the film’s use of color: the signature shade of yellow worn by Deborah Kerr and the male characters’ varying shades of blue (dark for the “virile” characters, pale for the “sissies”) are combined in the green dress Kerr wears in the climactic seduction scene. And in his assessment of “Gigi,” Levy deftly equates the anxiety of the heroine, a courtesan in training played by Leslie Caron, with Minnelli’s own insecurity about being both a closeted artist in ’50s Hollywood and a “kept” man in the MGM studio system.
It’s the delicate, perhaps impossible task of the biographer to find a balance between the virtues of thoroughness and trenchancy, between the roles of archivist and critic. In this book, Levy errs on the side of thoroughness, with the paradoxical result that readers learn more than they ever wanted to know about Vincente Minnelli’s life, but not nearly enough about Vincente Minnelli.
VINCENTE MINNELLI
Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer
By Emanuel Levy
Illustrated. 448 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $37.95
Da The New York Times, 26 Aprile 2009

FERNALDO DI GIAMMATTEO

Nasce praticamente in teatro, figlio di attori di varietà (nello stesso modo sarebbe nata sua figlia Liza, dal primo matrimonio con Judy Garland). Pittore e scenografo, lavora al Radio City Music Hall di New York, inscena commedie musicali di successo ed è subito invitato a Hollywood, prima come assistente di Busby Berkeley e poi come regista. Puntuale, fine organizzatore di ritmi e di storielle del genere «musical» in cui si afferma come un autore tra i più efficienti, ha al suo attivo alcuni capolavori e molti film interessanti. Simpatici sono i musical interpretati da Judy Garland (Incontriamoci a Saint Louis, 1945, Il pirata, 1947, fra gli altri) e quelli che hanno per protagonista Fred Astaire ( Yolanda e il re della samba, 1945, o Spettacolo di varietà, 1953, con una, flessuosa Cyd Charisse), ma non possono reggere il confronto con i due Oscar che Minnelli ottiene a distanza di sette anni l'uno dall'altro: Un americano a Parigi (1951), esile vicenda turistica intessuta su una collana di canzoni e sul celebre pezzo sinfonico An American in Paris di George Gershwin, sorretta non solo da uno sfavillante apparato scenografico ma anche dalla felicissima vena di un danzatore come Gene Kelly e dall'arguzia parigina di Leslie Caron; Gigi (1958), dove Leslie Caron forma un duo brillante con Maurice Chevalier per dar vita, fra un equivoco e l'altro, fra una canzone e un indugio poetico, alla vicenda della ingenua ragazzina del romanzo omonimo di Colette (fra le numerose canzoni spiccano «Thank Heaven for Little Girls», «The Night They Invented Champagne», «I Remember It Well»: quest'ultimo è anche il titolo dell'autobiografia di Minnelli).

Rassegna stampa di Vincente Minnelli