Word: minnelli
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...disjointed from the opening sequence, a frenzied victory celebration in a skyscraper nightclub where Tommy Dorsey's orchestra is doing a radio spot. Unemployed Sax Player Jimmy Doyle (Robert De Niro), on a spree in his sporty new civvies, picks up ex-U.S.O. Singer Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli) in an ill-paced scene that is lumbered with flat, witless dialogue ("Give me your phone number...
Auld Acquaintances Liza Minnelli and Sammy Davis Jr. are getting together for a little New Year's Eve celebration, and other couples are invited to join them, if they have $200 to $500 to spare. Davis, 50, who was best man at her 1974 wedding to Jack Haley Jr., will share the spotlight with Liza, 30, singing, dancing and clowning in a 1½-hour cabaret act at the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Fla. Bubbles Liza: "I've been dreaming about this ever since Sammy jumped onto the stage in the middle of my act at Harrah...
...Auden about the boy bars in Berlin. Between affairs, he met Jean Ross, the prototype for his fictional Sally Bowles, and wrote of her escapades in Goodbye to Berlin. Sally turns out to be somewhat less vulnerable than portrayed by Julie Harris in I Am a Camera and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret. Says Isherwood: "Sally wasn't a victim, wasn't proletarian, was a mere self-indulgent upper-middle-class foreign tourist who could escape from Berlin whenever she chose...
...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...