Stanley Donen (1924-2019)

The last film Stanley Donen made for a cinema release was Blame It on Rio (1984) and in one sequence Michael Caine (who plays the male lead) is looking out the window of the airplane he is a passenger on. What he sees is Rio de Janeiro, but then the scenery changes from colour to black and white and instead of the present-day Rio it is a clip from the film Flying Down to Rio (Thornton Freeland 1933), with women dancing on top of airplanes flying over Rio.

This is a moving reference to the very film which made a then 9-year-old Donen want to get into the dance and film world after he saw the extravagant musical in the cinema. As soon as he was old enough, he got himself immersed in that world. At first he was primarily a choreographer but he also directed scenes, and two exceptionally fine examples of his art, with Gene Kelly, are from Cover Girl (Charles Vidor 1944) and Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney 1945). He conceived of them and choreographed them with Kelly and then directed them and did the post-production too.

A few years later he became director of whole movies and not just individual scenes. It was a very uneven career, with perhaps more failures than successes. Some consider him the greatest maker of musicals, even better than his rival Vincente Minnelli, but for me Minnelli is far superior both in individual films and as an artist, and with a much richer oeuvre. It is however interesting to compare them, as they are so different in style, vision, temperament and ideas.

Here are some favourite sequences:

Royal Wedding (1951)

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

It's Always Fair Weather (1955)

Funny Face (1957)

Charade (1963)

Charade is uncommonly delightful and an excellent blend of light comedy and thriller. Two for the Road (1967) is also good, and for a change Audrey Hepburn is there playing against a man younger than her, Albert Finney. It also has one of Henry Mancini's most beautiful scores.

For a comparison between Donen and Minnelli this clip from Minnelli's The Pirate (1948) is a good starting point, as it is more or less the same song as Donald O'Connor does in Singin' in the Rain, seen above. Cole Porter wrote the original, Be a Clown.

I shall not show any clips from Blame it on Rio because I cannot stand it. But here is the scene from Flying Down to Rio.

Late work and last films

In Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman argues that after Psycho (1960) Hitchcock lost his creative touch and began making bad film and that this was due to the lavish praise he had received during the 1950s, particularly by French critics, which had gone to his head. I do not buy this as all. It is true that his films in the late 1960s are not as good as before, but he had been highly praised already in the 1930s and should be used to it, and his two films after Psycho, The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964) are not the films of a director in decline. Whatever happened after Marnie is related to other things; personal issues, changes within the film industry, changing tastes and so on. And he did get back on his creative feet with Frenzy (1972). Besides, Hitchcock made only two films between Marnie and Frenzy: Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969), and they have their merits. They are not worse than some of his earlier films, like Stage Fright (1950).

This is about a topic that interests me a lot, that of late films, or a "late phase", in a filmmaker's career. These films are often dismissed or unacknowledged and in general it is earlier works that are the focus of peoples' and critics' attention. Sometimes, as with Satyajit Ray, it is only the very first films that are talked about at any length. I remember a discussion I once had with a student about Billy Wilder being a filmmaker who (the student claimed) lost it completely in his later stage, and the student is not alone in this belief. But Wilder in the late 1960s/early 1970s is to me as good and interesting as he was in the 1940s, there is no decline there.

The first thing to wonder about is at what stage in a career it becomes appropriate to talk about a late phase. When does it begin? How should it be measured? Obviously the career itself must be of some length, spanning a couple of decades at best. And what is meant by it? There has to be a distinct change in the films for there to be a point of talking about a late phase. With Hitchcock it seems possible to see Psycho as the beginning of such a late phase. With Howard Hawks I would like to suggest Rio Bravo (1959) as the first film of his late, and glorious, phase. It was made after a longer pause, and it and his later films are looser, more meandering and even less concerned with plot than before. While thematically consistent with his films of the 1930s and 1940s, they have a different tone, mood and pace.

What about John Ford? Is there a late phase beginning with Sergeant Rutledge (1960) maybe? When he, as is sometimes suggested, began make films that deliberately questions assumptions and ideas from earlier days. (Although he had already done that too, in the late 1940s for example.) Does Vincente Minnelli's late phase begin with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962)? David Lean's late phase, when he ventured abroad and made long epics, began with Bridge of the River Kwai (1957); a phase which, with the exception of Lawrence of Arabia (1962), is also often disparaged. Michael Powell's late phase began after the thrashing Peeping Tom (1960) got by British critics. After The Queen's Guard (1961) he did some TV-work, two fine films in Australia and an adaptation of Béla Bartók's opera Bluebeard's Castle.

Some filmmakers move around and this might make it easier to distinguish phases. Luis Buñuel's late phase might be said to begin when he began making films in France, with The Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), or perhaps better to push it forward to 1967 and Belle de Jour. Jean Renoir, who also did a version of The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946), could be said to having inaugurated his late phase when he left the US, first for The River (1951) in India, and then his last films in France. Max Ophüls is another filmmaker who moved around, and could be said to have three phases, first a European, then in the 1940s an American and then in the 1950s a French phase, although in his case the last phase is too similar to the earlier ones for it to be meaningful to talk about it as a distinct "late phase". This is also his most celebrated phase; much like Yasujiro Ozu, the later films are the ones most people talk about. Buñuel is a similar case. They are exceptions to an otherwise strong rule.

Vittorio De Sica and Ophüls on the set of The Earrings of Madame de... (1953).

But is there any value of talking about a late phase? Or argue about when it might have begun? I think there is, if you are interested in film as art, and in the artists who make them. The conventional response is to focus on the earlier work, or some alleged golden age, and then ignore or belittle the later work, but often only because the later films are in one way or another (or more ways) different from the earlier ones. Sometimes this can be put down to an inability among critics and people at large to appreciate change and development, and often it comes from an unwillingness to look beyond the usual classics and established "masterpieces". Another reason might be that a late phase is often not in tune with the prevailing styles and themes of the younger contemporary filmmakers' work, and is therefore not considered hip and trendy and consequently dismissed as old and conservative. This is often unfair though and leads to dismissals on shallow grounds. But these aspects are still interesting to discuss. To follow a filmmaker's long and winding career can be very rewarding, and lead to insights about not just personal developments and creativity but also to discussions about how filmmakers navigate changing societal and industrial contexts and circumstances, and also to discussions about how we evaluate films. Another aspect is to consider how artists deals with ageing and mortality, including their own, in their later years. Many filmmakers have done this, from Hawks to Ozu, and some not yet mentioned here such as Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa.

Sometimes it is in their late phase that filmmakers really burrow deep, get personal and sometimes reach for the sublime. I think Fred Zinnemann began to blossom in his late phase, which began with The Nun's Story (1959).

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Related to this, and particularly poignant to me, is a filmmaker's very last film, and even the very last image of them. I am not talking about the solution to the story but the very last thing we see, the final image. Here are five last images that have always struck me as being particularly suitable or poignant, from the last films of Buñuel, Lean, Hitchcock, Minnelli and Ozu.

Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) ends with a sudden and unexplained explosion, a fabulous end to an explosive and surreal style of filmmaking. Lean's A Passage to India (1984) ends with Judy Davis's main character turning away from a window, on which it is raining. A temperamental person trapped in a damp English apartment which is too small for her outreaching personality. Hitchcock's Family Plot (1976) ends with the main character, played by Barbara Harris, looking directly into the camera and wink to us, as if it has all been one big joke and Hitch wants to let us know. Minnelli's last film, the flawed but marvellous A Matter of Time (1976), ends with a freeze frame of the face of his daughter Liza Minnelli, who plays the lead. But most moving of all is the last shot of Ozu's last film An Autumn Afternoon (1962). Chishu Ryu who had played the male lead in Ozu's films ever since the 1930s, sits alone in a small room, now old and tired, looking away from the camera and us, faced with his own loneliness and approaching death. It is the end scene to end all end scenes.

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The meaning of a last image might change, or deepen, depending on whether you know if the filmmaker knew that this was the last film they would make. That is a topic worthy of a book...

And speaking about books, Goldman says a lot of dumb things in his book, but I shall have to come back to that another day.

Theory readings #3 - Film as Film by Victor Perkins

The first piece in the series "Theory readings" was a general introduction and the second one was about Robert Warshow and "The Gangster as Tragic Hero". The next was about "The Death of the Author." Those were about articles but in this post a book is covered, due to the recent death of its writer Victor Perkins, critic and film scholar at the University of Warwick.

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Fabulous cover design on the second edition.

Victor Perkins began writing Film as Film in the late 1960s and it was first published in 1972. Before that he had been an editorial member of the influential journal Movie and written film criticism in various other journals and newspapers, and Penguin Books invited him to write a whole book.

In the first chapter Perkins criticises early (1920s and 1930s) film theory for often being too focused on one single aspect of cinema, such as obsessing over "pure cinema" or editing, and the suspicion of reality; that real art was that which was far remove from the ordinary or realistic. "As a result, the theory is most emphatic where it should be most cautious, in imposing obligations on the artist; it is least helpful where it should be most relevant, in developing the disciplines of criticism." (pp. 26-27)

He then follows with a chapter on André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, pointing out how they too suffer from the same problem: too much emphasis on one aspect, although now it is the opposite of the earlier theorists. The new generation celebrates the long take as opposed to editing, and thinks great art is that which is as close to reality as possible.

Both theories discriminate in favor of certain kinds of cinematic effects, in other words certain kinds of attitudes given cinematic form. The image dogma would assess quality in terms of the artist's imposition of order on the chaotic and meaningless surface of reality. Object dogma would derive its verdict from his discovery of significance and order in reality. Each of these positions presupposes a philosophy, a temperament, a vision - terrain which the theorist should leave open for the film-maker to explore and present. (p. 39, italics in original)

Perkins instead wants to emphasis the complexity of the medium of film, and that it should not be narrowed down to be about one thing in particular. He is against analysing and evaluating a film from a priori positions, instead the art work should be engaged with from a neutral position and discussed on its own terms. The film is apparently trying to do X but how does the filmmaker go about getting X across and is the filmmaker successful in this endeavour? That is the kind of approach Perkins argued for. "The critical problem is to arrive at descriptions which are both specific and comprehensive enough to be useful. The critic cannot require a movie to fit his definitions; it's his task to find the description which best fits the movie." (p. 62) Instead he emphasises the fact that film is a hybrid medium: part reality, part magic or, if you will, part Lumière, part Méliès. He criticises the charge that films are only about escapism and he is also against the distinction between art films and commercial films. "In its crudest form it amounts to the belief that the quality of a film is inversely proportional to the size of its audience." (p. 162)

But even though Perkins says that he is against preconceived ideas about how a film should be, he still has his own idea. He favours coherence and unity, and an organic aesthetic in which everything works together to form that unity. Synthesis is another word he uses. "I believe a synthetic theory, a theory of balance, coherence and complexity, does carry us towards this goal" (p. 189), the goal being a successful way of discussion subtlety.

Jean Simmons in Elmer Gantry

One key aspect of the successful film for Perkins is one in which meaning and symbolism grow naturally out of the sequence or the imagery. He for example talks about Richard Brooks's use of colour in Elmer Gantry (1960), and compare it favourably with Michelangelo Antonioni's use of colour in Red Desert (1964). In both cases it is highly symbolic but in Elmer Gantry it is all done organically with what is already in the shot, clothes, wall paper and such, whereas in Red Desert the symbolic colours are added afterwards, they do not naturally appear in the actual shot. For Perkins, using what is a natural part of the film is a more impressive achievement than adding stuff that has no place in the shot for no other reason than that the filmmaker wanted it to be there. This is not subtlety, as we cannot fail to see it, whereas in Elmer Gantry we may or we may not notice the symbolism. Another example he uses is the rising stone lions in Battleship Potemkin (1925), in the famous sequence at the Odessa steps. The symbolism is just in Eisenstein's head, when seen in the film they could mean anything. It is, as Perkins put it, "an extreme imprecision of effect." (p. 104)

Another way of expressing this coherence and unity that is so important for Perkins is to talk about connections, that "significance, emotional and intellectual, arises rather from the creation of significant relationships than from the presentation of things significant in themselves." (pp. 106-107), thus the failure of the lions in Potemkin. He stresses that the value of a film comes from the skills with which it is put together, not from the moral of the story or from any intellectual references to "the philosophy of Hegel or the poetry of Goethe." (p. 118)

Although perhaps not an auteurist like Andrew Sarris, the key figure for Perkins is still the director. She or he is the person responsible for the whole film, its very unity and coherence that is so important. Even when the director has not written the script, what matters is still the way a written scene is shot and the meaning that comes from acting, setting, decor and camera angles. There is a long description of a kitchen scene in Vincente Minnelli's The Courtship of Eddie's Father (1963), how it is the setting and the props such as chairs and the cutlery that give meaning and pathos to the scene. He also makes this point when taking about the films that Harold Pinter wrote and Joseph Losey directed, such as The Servant (1963), which is "dominated by the tensions between two creative minds, two styles, two personalities and two attitudes. But it is Losey's version of the Pinter script; and if we are concerned with film as film it is the realization that must claim our interest and judgement." (p. 178, italics in original). Among Perkins's favourites are Otto Preminger and Alfred Hitchcock, and he discusses the way in which they are fundamentally different, such as this: "The contrast between their methods is further reflected in narrative style. Hitchcock tells stories as if he knows how they end, Preminger gives the impression of witnessing them as they unfold." (p. 130)

Courtship of Eddie's Father

Perkins demands from his own and others' writings on cinema what he demands of the films. Coherence and clarity. "We have a duty to ourselves to ensure that our standards are as clear and consistent, as perceptively applied, as we can make them." (p. 192), and in this he succeeded. His writing is so good that it is a source of pleasure in itself, regardless of what he is writing about. But this does not mean that he is free from weaknesses or contradictions. For example, through the book he talks about various films from Hollywood and from around Europe, comparing and contrasting them, such as Elmer Gantry and Red Desert. Then suddenly he says at the very end, on page 190, that Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963) should not be analysed in the same way or by using the same approach as for example Rope (Alfred Hitchcock 1948) or Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray 1954). But why not, if Red Desert and Battleship Potemkin should be. What is the difference there? When he is criticising Antonioni's use of colour in Red Desert it would have been good if he had something to say about Hitchcock's use of colour in, say, Marnie (1964). Does he disapprove of it, even though he otherwise holds Hitchcock as being one of the best, or is it somehow different from the Red Desert. To remain with Hitchcock; Perkins has a discussion about the difference between the characters played by James Stewart (dark and ambiguous) and those played by Cary Grant (light and playful), but in this discussion he conveniently leaves out Notorious (1946), starring Grant, presumably since it would undermine his distinction between the two actors. I also happen to disagree with his interpretation of The Bridge on the River Kwai (David Lean 1957). "War was said to be futile and experienced as glorious, victory was said to be empty and felt to be magnificent." (p. 149) Perkins says but as I see it there is no victory in the film, only various degrees of failure and futility. I do not see the alleged contradictions Perkins dislikes. (Perkins described it as a friction between the script by Carl Foreman and the direction of Lean, but Foreman had only written an early draft and the actual script was by Lean himself and Michael Wilson.)

But Perkins liked other films, Lean was not for him. This is how he describes his favourites:

The great film approaches an intensity of cohesion such that its elements do not operate solely to maintain or further the reality of the fictional world, nor solely to decorative, affective or rhetorical effect. Of course this is a counsel of perfection, even though it is derived from existing movies. Exodus, Johnny Guitar, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Psycho, La Règle du jeu, Rio Bravo, Wild River: these are the films which I recall as approaching this condition most closely. (p. 131)

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During my years as a student in cinema studies I never actually came across Perkins or Film as Film in class or on reading lists. He is one of the many I had to discover on my own. I do not remember exactly when, but I was immediately impressed and delighted, and his writing has been a companion for many years. When he died last week it therefore gave me great pleasure to see the amount of love and affection for him and his life's work that flooded my Twitter and Facebook accounts. If you want to experience more of his work, and tributes to him, please visit the tribute page on Katie Grant's Film Studies for Free: https://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.se/2016/07/for-all-to-see-and-to-see-sense-of-in.html

If you want to read just one article by him I can recommend "Moments of Choice" from 1981, republished on Rouge.

As a side note, or final note, I love The Courtship of Eddie's Father. It is close to perfection, and incredibly moving at times. I think of the goldfish scene at least once every week.

Misfortunes and malfunctions instead of Charles Walters

During his years as dancer, choreographer and director Charles Walters was highly regarded, and well-paid. He began working on Broadway in the 1930s and directed his first film in 1947, Good News. He was then part of the Arthur Freed unit at MGM and was nominated for an Academy Award for directing Lili (1954). He did choreography both on the films he himself directed as well as on other films, including Meet Me in St Louis (Vincente Minnelli 1944) and Gigi (Vincente Minnelli 1958), sometimes having sole responsibility, including for the camera movements, for those scenes he choreographed. Walters was also, unusually at the time, an openly gay man, living with his partner John Darrow. He made his last film in 1966, Walk, Don't Run, after which he worked for television for ten more years. He died in 1982.

I had planned for this week's post to be about Walters and his films alas, due to a remarkable number of technical difficulties and lost books, that will not happen. It will have to wait for another day. And as I had nothing else planned, this is pretty much all you are going to get this time.

Well, and this scene from High Society (1956), with music by Cole Porter. I love it.

Lonely are the queer

This is a paper I presented a couple of years ago in St Andrews. I thought I post it here, more or less unedited (so the language is not all that it could be). Also, I mention important plot points for several films, Girl With Hyacinths, These Three, Tea and Sympathy and The Browning Version, just so you know.

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Lonely Are the Brave is a beautiful film from 1961 about a man who was born in the wrong century. In the opening scene he is seen resting on the prairie with his horse, and then a jet plane flies over him, moving us quickly from what we thought was a scene from the century of the steam engine to a scene in the century of the jet engine. However, that is not what this talk is about, I just wanted to explain where the title came from. The talk is rather about the theme of loneliness and how it is connected to queerness.

The history of gay and lesbian characters in cinema has still to be written, or rather it is constantly being re-written. One thing though is that they are much more common than they are given credit for. They are there, more or less hiding. Much has been made about how These Three from 1936, the first film version of Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour removed the lesbian aspect from the play. Instead of love between one woman towards another, it became love between one woman and the boyfriend of another woman. But These Three smuggle these queer things into the film. The boyfriend is called Joe, so the woman who was lesbian in the original still get to say to the girlfriend to the boy she fancies “I love Joe/you”. When a truer version was made in 1963 now called The Children's Hour, by the same director William Wyler, it was more modernist and outspoken, but it had not the same emotional punch. Such hidden suggestions and innuendos are common within cinema, not least Westerns.

One thing that has always stood out for me when watching Hasse Ekman's Girl With Hyacinths is how lonely the main character is. This theme of loneliness runs through his films, in his last great film Stöten – The Heist there is towards the end a shot of a young woman standing alone in a pool of darkness, surrounded by policemen, asked to give up her boyfriend. But nobody is as lonely as Dagmar Brink in Girl With Hyacinths. This loneliness is a mystery, and it is what intrigues the men in the film, as well as the audience I would suggest. Why is she so lonely? Because she is a lesbian in a time when that was not allowed or, when it was not allowed, was not talked about, or acknowledged.

Recently I watched Vincente Minnelli's fantastic Tea and Sympathy from 1956 and there again was a lonely person, well two actually, but one that is the point here, and that is the main character. I will show you the opening sequence to exemplify.

[In this scene we see the main character, Tom, walk around at a college reunion, where everybody are talking to each other and discussing the past and the future. But not Tom, he speaks with nobody.)

One of the key elements of Minnelli's mise en scène is the multidimensional staging, that there are several things going on at once. Sometimes two simultaneous scenes will take place at the same time in the same long shot. We can see that here.

The film is about a boy who when he was in high school was bullied and ridiculed for being "girlie". The woman in whose house he's staying, the wife of one of the teachers, takes him under her wings and tries to protect him. It doesn't go very well. He was, is, and remains lonely.

So I had both these films fresh in my mind when I watched a British film, the highpoint of director Anthony Asquith and playwright Terrence Rattigan's cooperation, The Browning Version from 1951. This is also a film about a lonely person, in this case a Latin teacher, played by Michael Redgrave in an astonishing performance. I did not think of it at once but at the end of the film I thought “but of course!”.

I would argue that the hidden assumption is that Redgrave's teacher is gay. That this is why he is lonely, that this is why he does not mind that his wife has had an affair.

All these examples are from the 1950s, which was coincidental, although since it is such a golden age of cinema, at least in the US and Japan, it is perhaps not that coincidental. But the thing that connects these three films is the explicit loneliness of the main character and his or her queerness, in different levels of explicitness. There is a lot more of queer subtexts in cinema before the 1960s than is acknowledged. And even when it is fairly obvious, like in Tea and Sympathy it is not seen. Geoff Brown wrote that “the combined forces of censorship and CinemaScope the tendencies threatened to disappear completely”  But he misses the point. It has been criticised for the fact that in the end the boy is “saved” and he gets married. But that is just mentioned in passing. We never see the alleged wife, he is still alone. In the first shot as well as in the last. There is nothing to “reassure” as, there are no heteronormative shots (such as of him with his wife, kissing, or some such).

But actually, the most interesting character in Tea and Sympathy is the sports teacher, the husband. He is clearly a closet gay man, and the most tragic character in the film. The boy is not in denial, but the husband is. In the end his wife leaves him and he now, too, is alone. So even if the boy would get married, what hope is there for that marriage? Marriage is just a blindfold, it will not cure anything, only hide it.

The love that dare not speak its name it was called, and the argument I'm making, an argument that needs to be backed up with plenty of more examples, is that in a time when it could not be pronounced, looking for the lonely characters might help us detect the ever present gay, or queer, characters. I would be interested in investigating this further. One obvious contender is Rebel Without a Cause (1955), to look at the real rebel, Sal Mineo's character, the boy who loves James Dean's character, and with whom he enters a weird relationship, in hiding building up a nuclear family which must end, like all family affairs in Nicholas Ray's world, in catastrophe.

In 1961, in Victim, Dirk Bogarde's character is confronted by his wife about a young man who has committed suicide. The wife wants to know why; is it because her husband and the young man were getting too close? Were they having an affair? He says that the man killed himself because he was blackmailed. She then asks why he was blackmailed; because he was a homosexual? Yes, because he was a homosexual. But who was the other man. Was it you? she asks. He finally succumbs. “I stopped seeing him because I wanted him, do you understand, I wanted him!” Now it was suddenly being explicit. In The Apartment made in 1960, C C Baxter (Lemmon's character) when he asks Fran (Shirley MacLaine's) out on a date she says that she already has an appointment. “With a girl?” he shyly asks. “No, with a man.” she says to which he replies “Well, some of the guys at the office had been talking...” “Well, you tell them every now and then. Just because a girl doesn't..”

Unfortunately this “coming out” led to decades of camp and burlesque, and seldom respect and ordinariness. But what happened to the loneliness? When the cat was out of the bag, the elephant in the room a conversation piece, did the loneliness of the queer character go away? It remains to be investigated.

I'd like to end this talk with my favourite scene from The Browning Version, which shows a rare moment of kindness towards the Latin teacher and its heartbreaking effect.

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Such was the talk. In From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann 1953) Montgomery Clift's character says “Nobody ever lies about being lonely.” That is definitely a film to include in this investigation. I will write more on the subject soon.

Four aspects of Vincente Minnelli

The terror of darkness. The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).



A woman and her sexual fantasy. The Pirate (1948).



Film noir as ballet. The Band Wagon (1953).



The violent sadness of a child. Meet Me in St Louis (1944).




In the films of Minnelli reality is inherently unstable, life is filled with loneliness and pain, and we alternated between nightmares and dreams. There is nothing quite like it.

RIP Elizabeth Taylor

But the next one is probably the best of her films, at least to me, but then I'm a Minnelloholic.

Meet Me in St Louis (1944)

Meet Me in St Louis (1944) is in many ways a fantastic film. It's perfectly structured, wonderfully acted, has excellent music numbers, and, above all, the cinematography and the compositions are breathtaking and exhilarating. It's an early Vincente Minnelli, and the cinematographer is George Folsey, and even though it isn't Minnelli's best, it's still a prime example of what he does so brilliantly. Pitched emotions, lush mise-en-scène, elaborate and complex camera movements, and a touch of hidden darkness behind the merriments. I will soon write a longer blog post on Minnelli, who is one of my favourite filmmakers, but today, due to lack of time, I'll just provide some clips from Meet Me in St Louis. My favourite is a long take of Esther (Judy Garland) walking through her house, turning of all the lights, together with the object of her affections (Tom Drake). It's an astonishing sequence, from a technical point, and so very sweet and moving on top of that. But I couldn't find it, so you'll have to settle for this one instead. It hasn't the magnificent camera movements I love, but I like that it's reflexive, and acknowledges the fact that singing out loud might be annoying for some people, even if it happens to be a musical:

Here's another scene, which I can only link to, not embed. Here you get both the mise-en-scène and the camera movements. It begins with a long take, starting outside in the snow, moving in through the window, sweeping through the entire ball room, until it finds the main characters, Rose and Esther, after a minute or so. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsYazm2jzCw

Meet Me in St Louis

There are so many great films out there, so many great directors. Meet Me in St Louis is definitely one of those films and its director Vincente Minnelli one of those directors. Smooth, complex camera movements and expressive colouring, exquisite tenderness and emotional frenzy, are the most obvious hallmarks of his films, but there's more. There's such passion, such depth of feeling, it's sometimes close to unbearable. But, as I said, there's also tenderness. Here's a beautiful scene with Judy Garland seducing the man she's after.

Andrew Britton has written about it, Geoffrey MacNab has written about it and it's on Stanley Fish's list of the "10 best American films". Yet I'm not sure everybody gets it, and its greatness. But it is there for the taking, in all it's warmth and surrealism.

(That Stanley Fish calls his list "The 10 best American films" is obviously just a way of inviting heated counterarguments. I will never understand how such a list can arouse such passion, anger and sometimes vitriol. Calling it "My 10 favourite American films" would of course have been more appropriate, but he would still have gotten angry comments and e-mails from people questioning his choices.)