Word: minnelli
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MATTER OF TIME Directed by VINCENTE MINNELLI Screenplay by JOHN...
...makes for an awkward occasion: a group of gifted people working so far below their best talents that everything takes on the giddy air of a runaway charade. Director Vincente Minnelli, a flamboyant, lushly elegant stylist, has been responsible not only for some of the greatest movie musicals (Meet Me in St. Louis, The Band Wagon), but some enjoyably parboiled melodramas as well (The Bad and the Beautiful, Some Came Running). Here he is working for the first time with Daughter Liza, a stops-out entertainer, and such gifted, welcome actors as Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. The material, adapted...
Silly, certainly. But the plots for such flights into never-never land have never been notable for probability. The movie could have worked with hard effort and a little magic, but something has gone terribly wrong. Director Minnelli's once wondrous alchemy turns everything to lead. The movie is disjointed, sappy, hysterical; and the actors, perhaps sensing trouble, press on with painful, overbearing desperation. American-International, the distributor, has substantially recut the movie, which is easy enough to believe. A Matter of Time does not look at all like a Minnelli movie. The fastidious craftsmanship that he has through...
...narrators cover almost as much history as the films they elucidate. Shirley MacLaine opens the show and shares the narration with Henry Fonda-a 40-year man in Hollywood-and Liza Minnelli. Schickel's script concludes with a memorable valediction: "LIFE -the magazine-[suspended] publishing in 1972. Life-as we live it -goes on. So do the movies...
...unholy trio hits the well-manicured streets of Beverly Hills, struggling to recruit the likes of Paul Newman, Anne Bancroft, James Caan, Liza Minnelli and Burt Reynolds, the studio chief stews in his office, combatting a takeover by a notoriously ruthless conglomerate called Engulf and Devour...