The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (286 page)

Not always well, at or around ninety, Mills persisted in work:
Night of the Fox
(90, Charles Jarrott);
Harnessing Peacocks
(92, James Cellan Jones);
Frankenstein
(93, David Wickes); as Jack the Ripper in
Deadly Advice
(93, Mandie Fletcher);
The Big Freeze
(93, Eric Sykes); as Mr. Chuffey in
Martin Chuzzlewit
(94, Pedr James);
The Grotesque
(95, John-Paul Davidson); as Old Norway in
Hamlet
(96, Kenneth Branagh);
Bean
(97, Mel Smith);
Cats
(98, David Mallet);
The Gentleman Thief
(01, Justin Hardy);
Bright Young Things
(03, Stephen Fry).

Anthony Minghella
(1954–2008) b. Ryde, Isle of Wight, England
1991:
Truly, Madly, Deeply
. 1993:
Mr. Wonderful
. 1996:
The English Patient
. 1999:
The Talented Mr. Ripley
. 2000:
Play
. 2003:
Cold Mountain
. 2006:
Breaking and Entering
. 2008:
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
.

Something quite odd has happened with the career of Anthony Minghella. In 1996, he was lavishly rewarded—first by the critics and then by the Academy—for a brilliant screen translation of a novel by Michael Ondaatje that seemed one of the least likely movies in waiting. I admired the film very much—not just for its screenplay, for Minghella’s rapt collaboration on editing and sound with Walter Murch, but for the sustaining of so many disparate moods and stories. Yet it was possible, even in ’96, to feel that the movie had been overpraised—and wonderfully promoted by Miramax.

Rebuke set in three years later with
The Talented Mr. Ripley
, a considerably better film and—as I suspect—a much more personal work. It was not exactly, or simply, Patricia Highsmith, and that offended some people and helped them to ignore the deeply felt study of a personality so insecure that it wants to be someone else. What made
Ripley
so remarkable was not just the feeling for jazz, Italy, young people, and class in the 1950s, but using all those things to explore an existential topic—being and acting—that had come to mean so much more by the nineties.

Minghella rose by way of the University of Hull (where he studied and taught) to be a playwright and then a writer and director with Jim Henson. I have seen one of his Henson works, a fairy story that is filled with a sense of death and magic—something that leads directly into his very striking and touching debut feature,
Truly, Madly, Deeply
, one of the funniest and yet most serious films about death and mourning.

My guess is that Minghella, for all his great skills, was a slow and even a shy developer. I doubt we saw the best or even the darkest from him. But it is so rare nowadays to look at a filmmaker approaching fifty and feel that much confidence or anticipation.

What can one say about
Cold Mountain
except that so many elegant elements never linked up? The story is hardly there. The central casting was questionable. The war did not seem American, or black, enough. Inman wasn’t inward enough and Ada was too much a pretty surface. Literary adaptation seemed to have squeezed away its own vitality. There was a lesson from
Gone With the Wind
—that such heroines must be greedy, wicked, and selfish before they are loved.

It’s still hard to accept the suddenness of Ant’s death at fifty-four. His last two films did not work, and maybe his chairmanship of the British Film Institute got in the way. But you understood the BFI wanting him—he was so lovable a man, and so smart. He and his company, Mirage, helped produce several special films. As for his own work,
Truly, Madly, Deeply
and
Mr. Ripley
seem the most interesting. But no art or business—let alone the perilously insecure medium of film—could stand his loss. He is a hole now in so many lives.

Liza Minnelli
, b. Los Angeles, 1946
Genetically, it must have been possible that Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli would produce a child made to be a plumber or a nurse. But not this one. It is difficult to exaggerate the problems that must have confronted Liza Minnelli. No matter that she coped with life with her mother, many others failed—notably Mother herself. Living in a variety of locations and being perpetually hauled up and down financial and emotional hillsides, Liza Minnelli grew up as a performer in the reckless area of emotional exposure that her mother had made famous. How could one expect a daughter looking so like the mother, and so naturally repeating Garland’s breathless vocal mannerisms, not to pursue the mother?

The ordeal MGM imposed on their child actress was at least compensated for by a stream of films before she broke down. Today, the musical is desert territory, so that the same undeniable impulse that gripped mother and daughter is all the harder to channel through fruitful artistic forms. And how much one fears that Judy Garland’s chaotic life may be replayed—out of inheritance, the shared need for audience love, and the unvoiced urging of the media in their search for the ghoulish echo. In Garland and Liza Minnelli, there is the same perilous confusion of talent and taste with exhibitionism and neurosis. And if Garland’s childhood was more strained than any other, Minnelli has the burden of matching or departing from her mother. The latter might seem betrayal, but the former could lead to destruction. Just as there was a grotesque milking of maudlin sensibilities (as well as a quite brutal rivalry) when Garland and Minnelli appeared together at the London Palladium, so Minnelli has once reprised that occasion with a nightclub entertainer, a man who does an impersonation of Garland that epitomizes all the preying upon self-indulgence that dragged her down.

Liza Minnelli is a brash singer and a lumpish dancer, trading on nervous vitality. Both shortcomings were right for
Cabaret
(72, Bob Fosse) and the sprawling coarseness of 1930s Berlin. But the Oscar for that performance was proof of how ready the Academy was to be nostalgic. The film of
Cabaret
was built up to suit her, not just with added songs but in the way the Sally Bowles character was turned to fit our notion of Liza Minnelli’s heritage, especially in “What good is sitting, alone in your room?” and “She was the loveliest corpse I’ve ever seen.” How near that comes (and with that inimitable showbiz bad taste) to an endorsement of the way Garland “lived life to the full, rejecting caution.” And on stage, Minnelli has her mother’s need to talk to the audience, to fluff as a pretext for confiding until it becomes unclear whether the fluffs are accidental or endemic. The same strident, anxious self-advertisement once called a press conference to confess that she was in love with Peter Sellers.

To be harsh, when Liza Minnelli tries to be soulful as an actress—and that is her only vein, apart from the scatty commercials for her self—she looks half-baked, derivative, and untrained. That is as true in the dreadful emotional passages from
Cabaret
as in
Pookie
(69, Alan J. Pakula), a mannered celebration of kooky spontaneity, and
Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon
(69, Otto Preminger). Only one film captures the sparrow’s gaiety that her mother once had: her debut,
Charlie Bubbles
(67, Albert Finney). Otherwise, mother and daughter alike seem to insist that there is a virtue in fatal judgment.

Her reputation was battered by
Lucky Lady
(75, Stanley Donen) and its glum evidence that she could look bewildered and awkward—less vulnerable than numbed.
A Matter of Time
(76, Vincente Minnelli) devastated all hopes of family fruitfulness and was an outright disaster at the box office. From that low point, she came back as Francine Evans in
New York, New York
(77, Martin Scorsese). Her part there is overshadowed by De Niro’s, but she sings well in the forties idiom, impersonates her mother only once, and best of all, channels the emotional distress of that film through her large, suffering eyes. She is subdued in that film—and so she seems to be a good singer as an incidental. She was filmed with great fondness, and her marriage—her second—to Jack Haley Jr. collapsed under pressure of her feelings for Scorsese. Her acting in
New York, New York
was the first sign of maturity, but her life clung to turbulence. Scorsese began to direct her in a stage show,
The Act
, but after disputes he was forced to accept the experienced assistance of Gower Champion.

By 1993, Liza Minnelli was reduced to lip-synching a disastrous song tribute to women at the Academy Awards show that ended up with a wave to Hillary Clinton. And still she comes on to sing the few, cast-iron songs that are hers, dancing less than ever, tactically costumed, and flashing that artillery grin, as if she had never been on a stage before. Her movies have been few: the romantic interest in
Arthur
(81, Steve Gordon); a cameo in
The Muppets Take Manhattan
(84, Frank Oz); she introduced
That’s Dancing
(85, Jack Haley Jr.); good on TV as a mother with a son suffering from muscular dystrophy in
A Time to Live
(86, Rick Wallace);
Rent-a-Cop
(88, Jerry London);
Arthur 2: On the Rocks
(88, Bud Yorkin);
Stepping Out
(91, Lewis Gilbert);
Parallel Lives
(94, Linda Yellen);
The West Side Waltz
(95, Ernest Thompson).

Her life lately has been devoted to marriages, illness, comebacks, and breakdowns. She had a small part in
The Oh in Ohio
(06, Billy Kent).

Vincente Minnelli
(1910–86), b. Chicago
1943:
Cabin in the Sky; I Dood It
. 1944:
Meet Me in St. Louis
. 1945:
The Clock; Yolanda and the Thief
. 1946:
Ziegfeld Follies
(Minnelli directed ten out of thirteen episodes);
Undercurrent
. 1947:
The Pirate
. 1949:
Madame Bovary
. 1950:
Father of the Bride
. 1951:
An American in Paris; Father’s Little Dividend
. 1952:
The Bad and the Beautiful
. 1953: “Mademoiselle,” episode from
The Story of Three Loves; The Band Wagon
. 1954:
The Long, Long Trailer; Brigadoon
. 1955:
The Cobweb; Kismet
. 1956:
Lust for Life; Tea and Sympathy
. 1957:
Designing Woman; The Seventh Sin
(codirected with Ronald Neame, uncredited). 1958:
Gigi; The Reluctant Debutante; Some Came Running
. 1960:
Home from the Hill; Bells Are Ringing
. 1961:
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
. 1962:
Two Weeks in Another Town
. 1963:
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
. 1964:
Goodbye Charlie
. 1965:
The Sandpiper
. 1970:
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
. 1976:
A Matter of Time
.

In
Crazy Like a Fox
, S. J. Perelman included an appreciation of Vincente Minnelli that had the poker-faced disapproval of a particular type of showbiz friendship. It ended with one concession to sentiment: the recollection that Minnelli’s work on the stage as a designer and director transcended alleged defects of character—“I owe him plenty,” admitted Perelman. And no obsessive filmgoer of the 1940s and 1950s would not echo the cry. When credits seemed to a boy a protracted teasing of proper expectation, it dawned slowly that certain names went with certain pleasures. Those recurring names were the basis of an approach to art: George Cukor, Anthony Mann, Howard Hawks, and—the most flamboyant—Vincente Minnelli.

There was a memory of a shuddering Margaret O’Brien in the Halloween sequence of
Meet Me in St. Louis;
Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer in Limehouse in
Ziegfeld Follies;
the crane camera swooping down on Astaire’s nightmare dance in
Yolanda and the Thief;
the extraordinary profusion of the last part of
An American in Paris
, when plot stopped for extravaganza; the transformation in
Story of Three Loves
when Ricky Nelson looks into the mirror and sees Farley Granger; the puff-ball blondeness of Lana Turner goaded by Kirk Douglas in
The Bad and the Beautiful
.

But Minnelli’s career presents great problems as soon as one looks beyond that initial fondness. Do the fragments come together? Do those melodious camera movements, the most inventive conception of background action, and such ceaseless use of color, costume, and sets make him a major director? Or is he a stylist, unconcerned with subject matter, for years content to film whatever material MGM assigned him? Certainly, the loyalty to one studio seems to have been borne without the agonies that beset, say, Nicholas Ray. And Minnelli was eager to move into new genres; from the musical, he went on to psychological drama, classic novel, domestic comedy, Hollywood melodrama, biopic, epic. Nor is it adequate to pass him off as a ringmaster of the frivolous. For his biopic is a heartrending identification with an artist, as moving as anything in the American cinema. And the artist concerned is not Firbank or Toulouse-Lautrec—but Van Gogh, a harsh, clumsy mystic.
Lust for Life
has everything that is often found absent from Minnelli’s work: the use of color, setting, costume, and bravura emotional acting to define a tragic human situation. Yet it was made between the property-box colorfulness of
Kismet
and an uncertain, ladylike venture into “serious” theatre—
Tea and Sympathy
. Perhaps inconsistency is his chief characteristic.

Minnelli came to films with a great reputation in the New York theatre as a designer: at Radio City Music Hall; with the Ziegfeld Follies, and on
Very Warm for May
, a Jerome Kern musical. The talent was immense, but imprecise, and Hollywood was at first uncertain how to use him. Producer Arthur Freed had invited him to MGM, but Minnelli spent two years being generally helpful before he made the inevitable step into direction.