12 by Vincente Minnelli
February 6-March 3, 2003

Celebrating the centennial of Vincente Minnelli’s birth and the recent publication of Emanuel Levy’s Painting with Light: The Life and Times of Vincente Minnelli (William Morrow/HarperCollins), the Department of Film and Media presents twelve of the Hollywood director’s most acclaimed films. This exhibition is dedicated to the late MoMA curator Stephen Harvey, organizer of the Museum’s first major Minnelli retrospective and author of its accompanying monograph.

Primarily known for his lavish musicals, Minnelli contributed significantly to other genres, including intensely emotional melodramas and domestic comedies. Minnelli got his start in Hollywood as a set and costume designer, and the opulent scale and elaborate décor of his films led critics at the time to perceive the director as a mere stylist. But Minnelli never neglected narrative or character development, and as an astute critic of social taboos and conventions of gender and class, he infused even his glossiest films with dark, autobiographical undertones, revealing his own struggle between self-expression and conformity.

Organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film and Media, and Emanuel Levy, author and noted Los Angeles critic. Levy will sign copies of his book in The Gramercy Theatre café on Friday, February 28, at 8:00 p.m., before introducing The Bad and the Beautiful at 8:30 p.m. The Department extends its deepest gratitude to Richard May and Turner Entertainment Co., and the Academy Film Archive, for the loan of prints.

The Bad and the Beautiful. 1952. USA. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Screenplay by Charles Schnee. With Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Dick Powell, Gloria Grahame, Barry Sullivan, Walter Pidgeon. This stylish inside-Hollywood saga concerns an ambitious, seedy producer whose career is recounted through lengthy flashbacks by his collaborators: an actress, a writer, and a director. Captivating and subversive, this brilliantly staged melodrama won five Oscars. 118 min.
Thursday, February 6, 4:00; Friday, February 28, 8:30

The Clock. 1945. USA. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Screenplay by Robert Nathan, Joseph Schrank. With Judy Garland, Robert Walker. A highly engaging love story, set during World War II, about an office worker and a soldier who, within two intense days, meet, court, fall in love, get married, quarrel, and finally separate when the soldier goes to the front. During production Minnelli fell for his star, and married her shortly thereafter. 90 min.
Friday, February 7, 2:30; Saturday, February 15, 7:00

Some Came Running. 1958. USA. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Screenplay by John Patrick, Arthur Sheekman. With Shirley MacLaine, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Martha Hyer. This overheated melodrama barely slipped past the Production Code…. Discharged from the Army, writer Dave Hirsh goes home to the Midwest where, bored, he takes up with a gambler and a waifish prostitute. 136 min.
Saturday, February 8, 1:00; Friday, February 14, 2:30

Lust for Life. 1956. USA. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Screenplay by Norman Corwin. With Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn. Minnelli’s toughest challenge and proudest achievement, Lust for Life, about the anguished artist Vincent van Gogh, reflected Minnelli’s own artistic turmoil as well as his affinity for France’s landscape and cultural traditions. 122 min.
Thursday, February 13, 4:30; Sunday, February 16, 2:00

Bells Are Ringing. 1960. USA. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Screenplay by Betty Comden, Adolph Green. With Judy Holliday, Dean Martin. A sprightly adaptation of Comden, Green, and Jule Styne’s Broadway musical hit about a telephone operator who falls in love with the man she knows only as a voice. 127 min.
Friday, February 14, 6:15; Sunday, February 16, 7:00

Meet Me in St. Louis. 1944. USA. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Screenplay by Irving Brecher, Fred F. Finklehoffe.With Judy Garland, Mary Astor, Margaret O’Brien, Leon Ames, Lucille Bremer. Minnelli’s first collaboration with Garland, this delightful musical set in 1903 during the St. Louis World’s Fair features timeless renditions of “The Boy Next Door,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and “The Trolley Song.” 113 min.
Friday, February 14, 8:45; Saturday, February 15, 4:30

The Cobweb. 1955. USA. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Screenplay by John Paxton. With Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, Lillian Gish, Gloria Grahame, Charles Boyer. In this lavish melodrama set in a mental ward, the hospital staff seems to be more unbalanced than the patients themselves. Shot in glorious CinemaScope. 124 min.
Saturday, February 15, 2:00; Friday, February 21, 3:00

Madame Bovary. 1949. USA. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Screenplay by Robert Ardrey, based on the novel by Gustave Flaubert. With Jennifer Jones, James Mason, Van Heflin, Louis Jourdan. For Minnelli, Emma Bovary’s tragic career as a frustrated and misguided nineteenth-century housewife was not the result of willful sinning but rather the consequence of her conservative environment, rigid upbringing, and hopelessly romantic illusions. Ardrey’s literate script is greatly assisted by Minnelli’s refined direction, the high point of which is a ballroom scene that spins in a whirl of rapture and crashes in a
shatter of shame. 115 min.
Saturday, February 15, 8:45; Saturday, February 22, 3:30

Gigi. 1958. USA. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner. With Leslie Caron, Louis Jourdan, Maurice Chevalier, Hermione Gingold. With a book by Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe based on Colette’s novella about a turn-of-the-century Parisian courtesan, costumes and production design by Cecil Beaton, and direction by Minnelli, Gigi represented the apotheosis of the 1950s Hollywood musical. The day after Gigi won nine out of ten Oscar nominations, MGM telephone operators were instructed to answer, “M-Gigi-M.” 116 min.
Sunday, February 16, 4:30; Saturday, February 22, 8:30

Tea and Sympathy. 1956. USA. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Screenplay by Robert Anderson, based on his play. With Deborah Kerr, John Kerr, Leif Erickson. One of the most problematic and controversial films in Minnelli’s oeuvre. Skirting homosexual issues for fear of the Production Code, this sanitized, though well-acted, version of Anderson’s script concerns the coming of age of a prep-school boy. 122 min.
Saturday, February 22, 6:00

Two Weeks in Another Town. USA. 1962. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Screenplay by Charles Schnee. With Kirk Douglas, Cyd Charisse, Edward G. Robinson, Claire Trevor. Though nominally based on Irving Shaw’s gossipy novel about Hollywood types making a movie in Cinecittà (Rome’s famous studio), Two Weeks in Another Town should be regarded as the sequel to Minnelli’s 1952 picture The Bad and the Beautiful. Glorious mise-en-scène, lush production values, and memorable performances transcend the film’s more hackneyed elements. 107 min.
Sunday, February 23, 2:00; Monday, March 3, 8:15

The Band Wagon. 1953. USA. Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Screenplay by Betty Comden, Adolph Green. With Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Oscar Levant, Nanette Fabray, Jack Buchanan. Minnelli’s chef d’oeuvre is essentially a sophisticated twist on the familiar premise of “let’s put on a show.” Paired with sexy dancer Charisse, Astaire plays a washed-up movie idol snagged to appear in a campy musical. 112 min.
Friday, February 28, 6:00; Monday, March 3, 6:00

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