Word: minnelli
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Director Vincente Minnelli's talents are so many-sided and generous that he turns even the most over-contrived romanticism into something memorable. He has brought the budding dramatic talents of his betrothed, Judy Garland, into unmistakable bloom. He has helped give Robert Walker an honest, touching dignity in place of the shucks-fellers cuteness he has sometimes seemed doomed to. It is Director Minnelli who gives a passage like the silent breakfast scene its radiance. He has used most of his bit players and extras and crowds and streets so well that time & again you wonder whether some...
Successful Rebel. Vincente Minnelli has a number of predilections which normally don't go down too well in Holly wood. Boom shots, for instance, are generally under suspicion, both esthetically and economically. A boom shot must either be perfect or be scrapped. Constant use of a finder, too, is regarded as an affectation. Further, Minnelli often reports at the end of a day's work with only one shot perfected, and he is likely to make such remarks as: "The accidental juxtaposition of people and things makes for surrealism. The surrealists are the court painters of the period...
...such arty goings-on would ordinarily mean the kiss of death to a Hollywood career; but not in Minnelli's case. His semi-surrealist juxtapositions, accidental or no, help turn The Clock into a rich image of a great city. His love of mobility, of snooping and sailing and drifting and drooping his camera booms and dollies, makes The Clock, largely boom-shot, one of the most satisfactorily flexible movies since Friedrich Murnau's epoch-making The Last Laugh...