True Best Movie: Vincente Minnelli
After Howard Hawks’ TBM, hop on for Vincente Minnelli’s!
Usual Best Movie: An American in Paris (or The Band Wagon)
True Best Movie: The Bad and the Beautiful
This one is an odd director I thought I knew well by having watched more than twenty of his movies. Until I read his memoirs (“I Remember it well”).
Almost all his movies dealed with creative characters struggling in a world that is not made for them. And I thought that such a consistent body of work spread over more than thirty years of movie directing in Hollywood meant it was a huge topic for him.
Well, no. Not at all. As far as I recall, the man started as a costume and set designer in Broadway and he’d rather spend pages in describing the set of his movies better than talking about the actual plots and what they meant to him.
Too bad but still, the depth and weight of his movies remain and that’s what I like the most about his work. So don’t be astonished if I discard his musicals. I think they’re pretty good but his “heavy” movies move me even more (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Tea and Sympathy for instance).
That being said, nothing gets me started as much as a movie that deals about the process of making movies. I can relate to the problems that, let’s say, a painter or a stage director has to face but I just can’t resist to see a screenwriter or a director struggling to get a movie done. It’s a neverending pleasure and, in that specific range of movies that tickle me, The Bad and The Beautiful is one of the most incredible I’ll ever seen.
