Vincent Minelli

  • Panama Hattie (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2022) My interest in Panama Hattie was in watching one of the last performances from Virginia O’Brien that I hadn’t yet seen, but there’s something charming about the overall film –a frothy musical comedy that heads over to a stage-bound Panama hotel for sailors yukking it up (led by Red Skelton, up to his usual standards), songs (with the screen debut of Lena Horne, and O’Brien actually not going all-in on her deadpan shtick) and a bit of romance featuring star Ann Sothern. An early production of the famed Freed Unit, it’s a Broadway musical with elements of MGM’s roster. The plot doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and the tone keeps changing all over the place, but the fun of Panama Hattie is in the bits and pieces loosely strung together. O’Brien is a hoot as always (notably in “Did I Get Stinkin’ at the Savoy”), while Skelton and his two pals clearly play to a specific comedy register. Horne is never less than compelling, and Sothern is good enough in this middling vehicle to make anyone wonder why she wasn’t a bigger star. The final cherry in the blend of elements is a rousing final war-propaganda musical number that clearly sets the audience in a WW2-fighting mood followed by the usual exhortation to go buy war bonds. Behind the scenes, the picture was rescued from disastrous test screenings by musical number reshoots directed by Vincent Minelli, who added much of what’s still remarkable about the film, albeit at the expense of the film’s overall tone and continuity. Panama Hattie is not a good film, but it’s enjoyable if you know what you’re getting into, and especially if you’re deliberately trying to complete the filmographies of its stars.

  • A Matter of Time (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) The weirdness about A Matter of Time starts early: What is Vincent Minelli, once a darling director of MGM’s golden age, doing shooting a film for low-rent studio American Pictures International? Why are the sumptuous Roman exteriors act as background to such stilted dialogue? For that matter—why does Ingrid Bergman look so dreary in a bad wig, while Liza Minelli looks so good in a good one? For that matter, why are Bergman and Minelli slumming in a film shot in TV aspect ratio? Why does the film feel like a crash between A Star is Born and a Broadway musical? Well, maybe the year can be a clue—well past the Golden Age of musicals, late in Bergman’s career, early enough in Minelli-fille’s career to be part of a project for Minelli-père. (It ended up being his last movie after a six-year silence, capping an illustrious thirty-six-year-long career.)  The result is not unwatchable—Minelli is unusually cute with a long wig and there are a few nice moments here and there. But Minelli-fille aside, A Matter of Time often feels like a tired attempt at recapturing various glories—those MGM musicals, for one, but also the short glorious Hollywood-on-the-Tiber energy of the early 1960s. For a film that mixes fantasy and reality, it’s a clunker—the framing device brings down the film, and even from the opening narration (“This is a true story […] adapted from a novel”), it’s reaching for gravitas that it can’t quite create by itself. Whether you can claim that the film is the result of Minelli-père’s veteran direction is unclear: According to rumours, an initial three-hour-long film was cut to barely 97 minutes, which probably accounts for much of the resulting choppiness. A Matter of Time remains an essential part of movie history if you’re interested in the Minellis, but it may remind you that in Hollywood, career endings are seldom glorious.