Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood's Dark Dreamer (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Former Variety critic Levy has written nine books on film, including All About Oscar and John Wayne. In the first full-length comprehensive biography of film director Minnelli (1903–1986), Levy unveils a compelling portrait. A lonely, awkward, painfully shy boy, Minnelli was born into show business because his father and uncle operated a touring theater company. In New York, during the 1930s, Minnelli graduated from costume and set designs to directing. After a decade on Broadway, he was sent by producer Arthur Freed to MGM, where Minnellis stylish and exuberant élan captivated audiences for the next 25 years. Meet Me in St. Louis became a huge WWII home-front hit, establishing Minnelli as a major Tinseltown talent. Levy delivers an outstanding chapter on the making of that film and how it brought Minnelli and Judy Garland together: Judy could never separate professional from emotional relationships, and that kind of blend—or confusion, if you will—was at the very foundation of her marriage to Minnelli. Levys exhaustive research taps into three key sources: the Special Minnelli Collection at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; letters and documents kept by Minnellis widow, Lee Anderson Minnelli; and various drafts of Minnellis 1974 memoir, I Remember It Well. Along with coverage of memorable musical and nonmusical films, the work tells Minnellis personal life with illuminating insight. Levy captures the color, verve and panache of the directors life and legacy in high-gloss Hollywood. (Feb.)
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From The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Louis Bayard His facial features, at least, live on: The large, staring brown eyes; the plump lower lip; the retreating chin . . . all can be seen very clearly in his daughter, Liza, even as she now concertizes her own survival. As for Vincente Minnelli's feature films, they live on, too. A passel of classic musicals ("Meet Me in St. Louis," "An American in Paris," "The Band Wagon," "Gigi"), a chewy Hollywood exposé ("The Bad and the Beautiful"), a deeply felt life of van Gogh ("Lust for Life"), a much-imitated family comedy ("Father of the Bride"). And, even in his lesser pictures, moments that astonish: the famous waltz sequence in "Madame Bovary," for example, which conveys Emma's erotic fever entirely through music and movement and which climaxes to the sound of chairs, flung through windows as punctually as cymbals. Baz Luhrmann has spent his whole career trying to make a sequence as good as that, and a YouTube browser could spend a whole day finding Minnelli moments equally rich. Why, then, are there still question marks around his legacy? Perhaps because his favored genres are the sort to draw scorn from aesthetes. Perhaps, too, because of the homophobia that sometimes infects movie criticism. Minnelli was heterosexual on paper -- four marriages, two children -- but his gay liaisons were equally, if not more, numerous, and few of his intimates doubted his true orientation. Which may explain why words like "decorative" and "flamboyant" creep into discussions of Minnelli's work and why a faint disapproval hovers over his memory. A man who worries so much about flower arrangements and the drape of a woman's dress can't belly up to the bar with Ford and Hawks. So Emanuel Levy's biography must immediately take the form of a counterargument. "Much more than a stylist," Levy argues, Vincente Minnelli was "a film artist of the first rank," "a genuine auteur" whose work "bridged the gap between high art and popular culture." Don't hate him, in short, because his movies are beautiful -- or because his whole life was dedicated to beauty. This spiritual urgency extended to his own birth name, Lester, which he discarded for a Latinized version of his father's name. One of Vincente's first jobs, fittingly, was dressing windows at Marshall Field, and his road to eminence took him straight through the Deco splendor of Radio City Music Hall, where he served as art director. From there, he was promoted to producer and then director, and by 1937 he had three shows running on Broadway and a roster of pals that included Lillian Hellman and the Gershwins. "Broadway's wunderkind" was closing in on 40 by the time he made it to Hollywood, and for a few years no one knew what to do with him. Minnelli's first real assignment was helming the all-black musical "Cabin in the Sky" (1943), featuring Ethel Waters and Lena Horne, where he acquitted himself so well that MGM gave him the combined gift of "Meet Me in St. Louis" and reigning singing star Judy Garland. Director and actress formed an improbable and ultimately doomed union, but they both survived its dissolution, and Minnelli remained a moviemaking force through the 1950s, eventually winning an Oscar for "Gigi." (He had a particular forte for melodrama -- forged, perhaps, in the caldron that was Judy.) What he couldn't survive, in the end, was the collapse of the studio system, and we can see in retrospect how much he relied on MGM's corporate expertise for his effects. We can see, too, how specific those effects are to him. The swirling camera, the gorgeously orchestrated color, the teeming foregrounds and backgrounds: No one had a gift for imagery quite like Minnelli's. Ideally, then, any biographer should have a comparable gift for language. This one, to put it charitably, does not. The prose is clammy and awkward ("Minnelli's elaborate mise-en-scène struggled hard but ultimately didn't succeed to elevate the form to new stylization.") when it's not downright ungrammatical. Time and again, Levy repeats his observations, sometimes word for word, and his almost dadaist sense of continuity produces choice non sequiturs: "Although they had their friends and the theater world to distract them, the Minnellis still found time to grow more intimate together. Minnelli would say that, like everyone else, they were awed by the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima." There is still reason to be grateful for Levy's book. For one thing, it's the only full-length biography of Minnelli we're likely to get. Levy is a close observer of the films in question, and while his judgments rarely stray from the conventional ("It's useful to think about 'Lust for Life' as an intense melodramatic biopic"), he does afford some insight into the work's complexity. "Minnelli's richest and most complex narratives," he points out, "either defy or simply cannot contain the whole filmic system." The result is a series of "spectacles that go beyond the nominal stories." Nominal indeed. Consider the extraordinary Halloween sequence from "Meet Me in St. Louis." Not much happens -- the youngest Smith daughter, Tootie, works up the courage to throw flour into a neighbor's face -- yet in Minnelli's hands it becomes a child's garden of horror. "I killed him!" shrieks little Margaret O'Brien. She hasn't, of course, but the terror of her act, of her self-understanding, is almost more than the movie can accommodate. And by now, who cares that the plot isn't being advanced? (There isn't any to begin with.) We have tasted something rich and strange, and it is precisely Minnelli's "weakness" as a storyteller -- his predilection for moments over narratives -- that brought us here. More than any other director, I think, Minnelli's deficiencies are impossible to disentangle from his strengths. He is a perpetually hung jury.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press (April 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312329253
• ISBN-13: 978-0312329259
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #144,855 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Top-Notch Minnelli Biography, April 23, 2009

By	CBrandon - See all my reviews

As a fan of Minnelli, I was eager to read Emanuel Levy's biography of this distinguished filmmaker. His book is fascinating; Levy does a brilliant job of analyzing Minnelli's work in the context of his life and in doing so putting him in his rightful place among Hollywood's great directors. The book thoroughly details how Minnelli worked, how he collaborated, how his particular cinematic style developed, and his ups and downs in the studio system. Levy does an excellent job in showing why Minnelli should belong to the pantheon of Hollywood directors, alongside Hitchcock and Welles among others, how consistent his cinematic vision is, and how events of his life molded that vision.

The lengthy analysis of each Minnelli film is illuminating and clearly illustrates Minnelli's stature as an innovative director both thematically and technically (his mise en scene, camera work, sense of color) especially in the musicals which I know the best. After reading the book I look forward to revisiting the films I know and love with fresh eyes, as well as exploring more of Minnelli's rich body of work in melodrama and comedy.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Horray for Hollywood!, April 26, 2009

By	stantheman (Bubank, CA) - See all my reviews

The most interesting aspect of Emanuel Levy's informative biography of Minnelli, which I recommend to anyone interested in Hollywood history, is his discussion of how an artist like Minnelli developed and blossomed in the studio system of the 1940s and 1950s. Hollywood is considered to be a mass assembly of movie dreams, a factory for manufacturing fantasies, and yet Levy shows so convincingly that a talented but passive director like Minnelli could only survive and develop in the Hollywood system, and as soon as the studios declined (around 1960), he and many other gifted directors like Ford and Cukor declined too, because they lost the support and resources that the studio provided.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sexuality and Creativity, June 4, 2009

By	PeteB (NY) - See all my reviews

What impressed me the most about your fascinating biography of Vincente Minnelli is your serious, non-gossipy approach in handling his homosexuality, or is it bisexuality since he was married four times. In this day and age, when our whole culture is obsessed with celebrities and their private lives, it's remarkable how discreet your discussion is, how much you resist the temptation of criticizing Minnelli vis-à-vis his marriage to the troubled Judy Garland (who reportedly also slept with women) and fatherhood to Liza. You really use Minnelli's sexual orientation in an interesting way, as an interpretive tool of his creative career and the kinds of movies that he made. I hope your book comes out in paperback so that it can reach the wide audience it deserves. I am still baffled by the fact that your book is the first biography of this major Hollywood director.