1963 - THE COURTSHIP OF EDDIE'S FATHER, a romcom about a little kid I guess

Glenn Ford and Shirley Jones get top billing in this romantic comedy about a single father and his young son.  The son thinks it's time for his dad to find someone to marry again after the death of his mother.  So we are off on another mild romantic comedy adventure as Glenn Ford appears to have his choice of three attractive women. Even though the credits would lead you to believe that Ford and Jones are the stars of this film the emphasis is really on child actor Ronny (Ron) Howard.

Howard has had a very long career in Hollywood. He actually started his acting career at six years old and got a part in The Andy Griffith Show at the age of seven.  In The Courtship of Eddie's Father he is all of eight years old and basically carrying the movie.  It's hard to judge Howard's performance, technically he's a total pro.  He cries hysterically when he has to, he acts cute when it's required of him and he's good at playing the innocent son.  He's impressive but a lot of his performing doesn't seem to have a lot of emotional feeling to it.

 

I'll give the other actors Glenn Ford, Shirley Jones, Stella Stevens and Dina Merrill credit, they know enough to stay out of the way of Howard.  They are basically seconds bananas to this tiny terror of a scenery chewing kid actor.  This film wants to be sort of wholesome entertainment but it's not above throwing in Stella Stevens in her usual thankless role as a gorgeous but clueless bombshell who ends up with Jerry Van Dyke miscast as a "love em or leave em" ladies man.   

 

The film was shot in widescreen and color.  The director was Vincente Minnelli who as usual spends about as much time directing the sets and women's fashions as he does the actors.  Shirley Jones is supposed to play a volunteer nurse but you would never know it from the incredible apartment and clothes she wears, the salary for a volunteer nurse must have been in the six figures back in 1963..

 

The film marches along to it's inevitable end. Will Glenn Ford end up with career woman Dina Merrill or earth mother type Shirley Jones?  Don't ever bet against motherhood.

The screenplay was by John Gay, the running time is 118 minutes.

1958 - GIGI, an MGM musical about prostitution.

 Coming towards the end of MGM's dominance in musicals, Gigi was a very classy film with a lot of big time talent involved.  For starters lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Fritz Loewe were very hot with their hit musical based on Shaw's Pygmalion, My Fair Lady which was playing on Broadway at the time.   In addition, MGM producer Arthur Freed assembled a group of very talented people in front and behind the camera.

Cecil Beaton designed the costumes and sets and never meet a weird headpiece for a woman he didn't like.  Andre Previn adapted and conducted the music and most importantly Vincente Minnelli was assigned to direct the film.  In front of the camera were Leslie Caron, Louis Jordan, Maurice Chevalier and Hermoine Gingold.  Gingold and Chevalier were expert scene stealers and Caron and Jordan did make an attractive couple.

One of the oddest things about Gigi was the complete lack of dancing in this film, very unusual for a musical.  The other odd thing about this film was the story.  This is essentially a film about a young girl being trained to be a prostitute by her grandmother.  The girl manages to turn the tables on everyone and holds out for marriage.  

 

This film looks very good it was photographed by Joseph Ruttenberg in that MGM style where everything is very pretty.  Minnelli directed with his usual fussy precision spending as much time on the set design as he did on the actors.

 

For all that, the film does work and is very entertaining.  This is truly towards the end of the MGM musical run.  Freed went on to produce Bells Are Ringing which was his final musical film.

The film was written by Alan Jay Lerner, the running time is 115 minutes.

1958 - SOME CAME RUNNING, another 1950's small town melodrama

There were several  challenges for Vincente Minnelli. He had to take a 1000 page novel and condense it into a coherent narrative and put up with hot tempered Frank Sinatra a performer only interested in shooting 1 or 2 takes in his scenes.  That Minnelli could pull this off is somewhat of a tribute to his skill as a storyteller.

Some Came Running is one of those stories that wants to eviscerate the sleazy underside of small town American life.  Sinatra is a supposedly sensitive author returning home after his service in the army.  He hooks up with cardsharp Dean Martin playing a character called "Bama" who holds women in such low regard he calls them pigs to their faces.  Shirley MacLaine is the trampy women who has a big crush on Sinatra and Martha Hyer is the frigid prude who is enamored of Sinatra's writing talent but doesn't want to sleep with him.  

 

 

Stir this mess of characters up and you've got one fairly stylish Peyton Place of a film.  Minnelli was a director who primarily made his reputation as a director of musicals, but he was pretty good at filming comedies and dramas.  The film is famous for it's crazed carnival scene towards the end of the film where Minnelli and his cameraman William Daniels pull out all the stops.

 

 

 

The screenplay was by John Patrick and Arthur Sheekman.  It runs a rather longish 136 minutes.  This film is for lovers of exaggerated melodrama.

1962 - THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE, boring remake of a silent film success.

This is an elaborate remake of a silent film success which started Latin type Rudolph Valentino.  No expense was apparently sparred by MGM.  The film lost a lot of money

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is the usual miscast mess with Glenn Ford playing an Argentine playboy.  Ford's a member of a rich land owning family which has Lee J. Cobb as the patriarch giving a hammy and fortunately short performance.  Part of the family are European German's for some reason and since this film is set during World War II they are also evil Nazis.  Ford ends up partying in Paris during the war and falls in love with Ingrid Thulin a Swedish actress who was known for working with Ingmar Bergman.  Thulin plays a French woman of course, MGM glamored her up and also ended up dubbing her voice with Angela "Mrs Potts" Lansbury.  You can already see the train wreck coming.

 

Vincente Minnelli was under contract to MGM and was hired to direct.  Minnelli was known for stylish musicals and over blown if entertaining melodramas so he wasn't the worse choice for this film.  However Minnelli wasn't exactly on his game with this gfilm.  He clearly didn't respond to the actors and most of his interest seems to be in photographing very expense but phony looking sets and pretty on location shots of Paris.  

This film runs over two hours and seems to consist entirely of Glenn Ford and Ingrid Thulin walking around Paris and constantly talking that love talk stuff they liked to do in these old films.

 

 

An expensive big budget disaster that is a companion piece to MGM's other wreck of a remake, Mutiny on the Bounty.

153 minutes, written by Robert Ardrey and John Gay.

1946 - ZIEGFELD FOLLIES gaudy and fascinating musical revue from MGM

Producer Arthur Freed wanted to recreate the kind of musical revue that Florenz Ziegfeld mounted in the 1900's.  He assembled some of MGM's musical and comedy talent for a series of sketches.  Vincente Minnelli directed about half of the film but apparently none of the comedy bits.

This is a technicolor extravaganza with big splashy tasteless sets and musical numbers that range from surreal dance sequences to a crazy opera performance completely out of context from source material.  It's all performed by top talent.  The end result is very strange.

Lucille Ball is the ringmaster in some strange cat/tiger number where she runs around with a whip trying to keep cat women under control, very kinky.  Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer, appear in a couple of numbers.  Astaire is in his prime.  His partner Lucille Bremer is an interesting story.  Bremer was a good dancer who never hit the big time.  Rumor had it that she was also Freed's mistress.  In any case she and Astaire dance together in a couple of very watchable numbers.

Some of the more fascinating parts of Ziegfeld Follies are the comedy sequences.  They are to put it plainly not funny.  Red Skelton does a bit with a hat as a prop which is interesting to watch because it's so bad.  Keenan Wynn does a telephone bit that's awful but it all shrinks in comparison when Fanny Brice shows up.

Ziegfeld Follies is an opportunity to see an actual Ziegfeld star Fanny Brice in a comedy skit with Hume Cronyn of all people as her husband.  It's hard to believe this obnoxious overbearing personality was even remotely popular with the public.  I guess she played better on Broadway because she sure is something to see up close on the fairly big TV screen.

The film wraps up with iron lung semi opera singer Kathryn Grayson bellowing something called "There's Beauty Everywhere" all the while a crazed bubble machine dumps soap suds all over a dancing Cyd Charisse.  It was the perfect way to end this amazing film.

110 minutes, Charles Walters takes writing credit apparently.

1970 - ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE FOREVER another odd musical disaster

Another big budget musical disaster from queen Barbra.  On A Clear Day You Can See Forever is a film directed by Vincente Minnelli who clearly didn't have a clue how to make this interesting.   Barbra Streisand is at at her Drag Queenie best. 

On A Clear Day You Can See Forever is a musical about ESP, reincarnation, telepathy and hypnosis.  These subjects would be better suited for an episode of Star Trek.  The film was produced and written by Alan Jay Lerner, part of his three picture deal with Paramount.  Lerner's other film for Paramount was the disaster, Paint Your Wagon.  On A Clear Day You Can See Forever is one of those one hit musicals, where only one song in the entire score had any kind of popularity, this was kind of a dubious way to spend millions of dollars, witness Hello Dolly.

Yves Montand was another in a line of European film stars who attempted off and on to start a Hollywood film career.  After taking on Marilyn Monroe's diva like behavior in Let's Make Love he apparently was looking for a rematch with super diva Barbra Streisand.

No one would ever say that Barbra Streisand can't sing, but she really belts out every song.  She also repeats her Fanny Brice neurotic Jewish bit from Funny Girl, just not a lot of subtlety in her.  Full credit should be given to the cinematographer Harry Stradling, an old MGM cameraman, who knew how to take a woman like Streisand and photograph her very carefully.

A very expensive production, back when studios believed that musicals were going to save Hollywood. With the exception of Mary Poppins, most of these musicals were mediocre rehashes from Broadway like Song of Norway, Camelot, Sweet Charity and Man of La Mancha.

129 minutes, screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner.

1944 - MEET ME IN ST LOUIS, very nostalgic sentimental slop from MGM extremely well done

Vincent Minnelli, working for the producer Arthur Freed and collaborating with one of MGM's biggest stars, directed this fantasy about upper middle class white people living in St. Louis.  This is the kind of film that MGM loved to make, a musical extolling the values of the American way of life if you happened to be fairly well off and Caucasian.

This was a big film for Judy Garland who was the very embodiment of Midwestern middle class virtues.  Garland had three hit songs and the film is very focused on her.  Judy Garland's major competition in this film was the actress Margaret O'Brien.  O'Brien was an intense child actress, who Minnelli would direct in the crying scenes by telling her he was about to kill her pet, she is very over the top.

Meet Me In St Louis, was a big MGM production filmed in the then still unique process of technicolor.  Technicolor required lots of light to look good on the screen so the film is very bright and very pretty.  Vincent Minnelli was one of the few directors who could film musicals and bring a great deal of sensitivity to what could have been a very over the top sloppy and sentimental film. 

This film is expert Hollywood product, impeccably made entertaining and almost completely lacking in any kind of substance.

113 minutes.

1955 - THE COBWEB is about picking out curtains

The Cobweb has an all star cast, Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, Gloria Grahame, Charles Boyer and Lillian Gish. The Cobweb was filmed in Cinemascope.

 

  
The Cobweb is based on a book by William Gibson, the author of The Miracle Worker . The Cobweb has one of the first twelve tone scores used in a film which was composed by Leonard Rosenman. The Cobweb was produced and directed by John Houseman and Vincente Minnelli the team from Two Weeks In Another Town.

 The Cobweb is about picking out curtains.
 

That's all The Cobweb is about, picking out curtains.

124 "oh come on does it really need to be this long" minutes. 

1950 - FATHER OF THE BRIDE Vincente Minnelli phones this one in

Elizabeth Taylor is getting married, Spencer Tracy is the grumpy FATHER OF THE BRIDE end of story.

Vincente Minnelli directs this like a television sitcom. The movie has a few funny scenes and one surrealistic dream sequence that probably was the only part of the movie that interested him. 

A 90 minute time killer.

1962 - TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN-is this how they really make movies?

This was the film I watched after Kwaidan?  

An expose on the making of movies? A Kirk Douglas overacting fest? A florid melodrama? A comedy? One of the most ridiculous films ever made?

The director Vincent Minnelli and the producer John Houseman apparently conceived this film as a riff on The Bad And The Beautiful with the level of hysteria ramped up to the nth degree.  Kirk Douglas is a washed up actor who has spent the last three years of his life on the funny farm recovering from a crack up that involved his incredibly trampy ex-wife Cyd Charisse and the movie going public who "wanted a piece of him." Offered a job by his equally washed up mentor/director Edward G Robinson, Douglas travels to Rome where Robinson is shooting a crappy film with temperamental method actor George Hamilton at Italy's famous Cinecitta studios the home of Fellini.   Kirk stutters and shakes as he tries to maintain his sanity and stay away from ex wife Cyd who is sleeping with anything that walks on two legs. Fortunately Kirk runs into a young woman who feels his pain and screws Kirk anytime he is about to crack up from the pressure. Naturally the young woman is the girlfriend of George Hamilton. 

If movies are made like this God help us all. Minnelli had been a studio director at MGM almost his entire career and Houseman had worked for the ego that was Orson Welles so they must have seen plenty of people behaving badly in Hollywood. Still it's hard to believe this kind of behavior would go on during the making of a movie on the other hand... 

 

 Kirk Douglas is using every over exaggerated Rich Little imitation of Kirk Douglas that I ever saw.   Edward G Robinson an actor who started out a star and moved to character parts, always seemed somewhat of a larger than life personality and he's really larger than life in this film. Claire Trevor plays Robinson's wife in the film and she is definitely a highlight. There is not a single scene where she doesn't scream out her lines as a shrewish harpy.  Minnelli's directorial advice to her must have been "go for it."  Daliah Lavi an Israeli actor played the sweet innocent young thing.  Lavi was a model in a previous career and apparently nobody spent money on acting or English lessons for her as she struggles mightily. 

George Hamilton plays a James Dean type with long hair and an attitude. As his character is supposed to be a shallow actor type who better to play a shallow actor than a shallow actor.  Cyd Charisse had worked for Minnelli particularly on his classic musical The Bandwagon . Cyd was a great dancer who Fred Astaire said was the best he ever worked with but it kind of stopped there.  She couldn't sing so she was usually dubbed in her musicals and she couldn't act, so the demands that Minnelli placed on her were way past her abilities. 

MGM cut 10 minutes out of the orgy scene towards the end of the film over Minnelli and Houseman's objections and who the hell could blame them. The editing was clearly an attempt by the studio to tone down an already crazed film. The final wild car ride completely sums up and restates everything this film is about, crazed acting and weird movie making. The scene ends with Kirk driving into a waterfall with the water splashing on his face to purge him of his demons.

The film is supposedly a favorite of Scorcese and Godard.

A very campy classic. Charles Schnee is the screenwriter.

107 minutes.