Vincente Minnelli

[Drucker]

I just watched it the other day as well, coincidentally, and got it because of the Minnelli praise around here. An absolutely superb film that uses all two and a half hours perfectly.

[Red Screamer]

From “Triplets” to The Pirate, it’s clear that Vincente Minnelli has a bizarre sense of humor. Even in this company, his approach to The Long, Long Trailer is unusual, twisting its insipid premise into something grotesque and bleak. It’s one of the few times that Minnelli seems to be actively working against his material. If I were psychoanalytically inclined, I’d suggest that this approach might come from Minnelli’s agonized feelings about his own troubled marriages, but I have something more important to get to: A defense.

It opens like a film noir, with Desi Arnaz running through a heavy downpour, searching a trailer park for his wife. When she’s nowhere to be found, he seeks refuge inside and starts venting to a stranger in the tenor of tragedy. Knowing this film was a comedy, I assumed that when the flashback started, there would be a joke in how his heavy introduction is contrasted with the goofiness of what’s to come. But it turns out that his despairing tone sets the mood appropriately.

There’s a lot of discussion around 50s satires of television, but The Long, Long Trailer goes further than all of them by becoming, in effect, I Love Lucy’s evil doppelgänger. Minnelli, Goodrich, and Hackett bring the cynical undercurrent of Father of the Bride to the forefront here, in that film’s thematic and spiritual sequel. Father of the Bride has affection for its characters and a sweetness that hangs around the edges as money and social obligations get in everybody’s way, bringing them frustration and sadness. But The Long, Long Trailer’s characters have practically nothing else outside of those irritations. Ricky and Lucy become Nicky and Tacy, as the beloved sitcom characters are hollowed out into charmless voids. There’s no warmth between them and their relationship is fueled solely by anger, emotional pressure, and economic transactions. Their world is unescapable and unpopulated as well, as they rarely interact with characters other than each other, and never on a human level.

Minnelli regularly uses wide lenses, emphasizing the space between the characters and their ungainly body language. His mise-en-scène is unexpectedly ambitious, perhaps out of a disdain for the material. Father of the Bride’s famously cluttered long takes are reprised in The Long, Long Trailer’s first half, but they become even busier and more prolonged, with the inkling of violence amped way up. Later, when the trailer gets stuck in the mud, the scene is shot in canted angles, chiaroscuro Technicolor, and slapstick that feels like it’s playing out in slow motion. It’s as if Minnelli took Father of the Bride’s expressionistic nightmare segment and its waking world of gentle social embarrassment and fused them together into a Frankenstein’s monster of horror-burlesque. For those who think this discomfort is unintentional, I offer the scene of the couple driving up mountain as evidence to the contrary. It’s glacially paced, with stunning diagonal compositions. There’s no music, just the whine of the car as Lucy and Desi trade empty, looping small talk. I guess the joke is supposed to be that they’re both scared of the car crashing down the side of the mountain and neither of them will acknowledge it. But Ball and Arnaz deliver their lines so flatly, with long, strained pauses that render their dialogue nearly incoherent, that the scene bears less resemblance to a screwball comedy than to a numbing exchange in a Harold Pinter play. It’s a masterful sequence—and completely unwatchable.

Throughout The Long, Long Trailer, what passes for jokes on paper are subverted into escalations of humiliation and pain, with few of them actually seeming to be played for laughs. In some ways, it’s a precursor to The Heartbreak Kid and cringe comedy, but the film has its own weird, mortifying effects. Minnelli turns sitcoms inside out by making their cheerful cynicism and materialism the outlook of its characters while the world of the film, in contrast, has the weight, exasperation, and emptiness of a cruel existential joke. Some kind of essential viewing.

[Matt]

Fantastic post! I’ve always hated this film but am still somehow always drawn into it when it’s on, and now I understand why.

[otis]

Does anyone know if the transfers of The Cobweb, Tea and Sympathy and The Reluctant Debutante on the French Trésors Warner DVDs are the same as on the US Warner Archive discs? Are the French discs pressed?

[Ann Harding]

Does anyone know if the transfers of The Cobweb, Tea and Sympathy and The Reluctant Debutante on the French Trésors Warner DVDs are the same as on the US Warner Archive discs? Are the French discs pressed?

As I borrowed those from a local library, I can tell you the discs are pressed. But I cannot compare them with the WA. I guess they use the same master + French subs.

[otis]

Thanks, Ann/Christine - I'll give them a try!

[domino harvey]

From Sight and Sound (Summer 1962):

[Maltic]

"Well, I met them a long time ago, before they had all started directing"

I've been wondering when it was, exactly, that various people got word in Hollywood. Hawks also talked about meeting the French, who knew his films frame-by-frame and so on, and of course there was Hitchcock-Truffaut in 1962, but it might be that Minnelli was out early.

[FrauBlucher]

With WAC releasing Cabin in the Sky at the end of the month, do folks on here think this is a throwaway Minnelli or much more than that?

[domino harvey]

It’s good— better than other similar films, and Rochester is fun (and has the best musical number). But I’d wait for it to be $8

[Altair]

Madame Bovary (1949)

Far better than it has any right to be: a full blown melodramatic adaptation, beautifully shot by Robert Planck, no more so than Minnelli's staging of the early ballroom scene. It creates an extraordinarily delirious, drunken atmosphere, as Jennifer Jones is seduced by the aristocracy, while her poor husband, actually a well cast Van Heflin, is left stranded and bewildered. It's peak Minnelli. The rest of the film doesn't reach such heights, and the adaptation (despite the awkward bookends showing Flaubert in the dock, defending the novel from the charge immorality) leans into Bovary's emotional arc, rather than making pointed the book's political and class critiques. Yet this has the effect of it being, perhaps accidentally, a feminist vision, foregrounding how her life is shaped by men, usually for the worst, constantly betrayed by the illusion of wealth and suffocated by love which cannot comprehend her inner life. Jones is good, but not quite good enough; the scenes with her child, for instance, show all the joins in her acting, like a rehearsal. Yet the scenes towards the end, as she goes back to former lovers to settle her debts, expose a rich vein of savage desperation.

[FrauBlucher]

I watched Undercurrent. Thought it was good but nothing exceptional. Interesting role for Katherine Hephurn. Her hysterics was a bit over doing it for my taste. What do the Minnelli fans think about this one?

[domino harvey]

It’s pretty clearly out of his comfort zone. Not terrible but not a film I think about much either

[therewillbeblus]

The Courtship of Eddie's Father is a peculiar film to be released in 1963, as it functions so much like television that it took little effort to make it so later in the decade. Now, Minnelli can sometimes work within domestic constraints (Father of the Bride, for instance), but he's hopelessly lost here. Glenn Ford, an actor of rare movement, is phoned in more than usual as the "lonely" single father widower, and the bevy of ladies he's surrounded with are all comatose. Even sure-fire money scenes, like Stella Stevens going Gene Krupa on the drums, fall flat from misdirection and weak performances. Shirley Jones' mating call consists of getting butt-hurt and storming out of Ford's apartment four or five times before he realizes she's already acting like his wife, so why not go for 'er. And then there are the dull subplots, like Ron Howard's camp crush or the housekeeper's language lessons, that take up copious screen time for little in return. A comedy without laughs, a romance without emotion, and a drama without dramatics.

I can't challenge this impression, but I found its absurdly odd glance at relationship dynamics and Ford's erratic behavior to be wildly entertaining and intriguingly fallacious in its repelling moments. Much like Jacques Tourneur's short The Boss Didn't Say Good Morning, the intended takeaways are backwards from the film's stance on unsteady male activity. A bizarre film that if taken at face value is pretty awful, but adding modern context makes it quite interesting. The digestibility of Minnelli's direction threatens to hide its surreal elements but really helps them shine in contrast to the serious style

[domino harvey]

I actually bought the Blu for a rewatch after seeing it top (!) Tavernier’s Best of 1966 list

[pistolwink]

What are people's favorite pieces of writing on Tea and Sympathy?

[domino harvey]

I think we missed that MGM released A Matter of Time on Blu in January

[ianthemovie]

What are people's favorite pieces of writing on Tea and Sympathy?

Michael Koresky has a chapter about it in his most recent book, Sick and Dirty, but I haven't read it yet. My sense is that the film has been somewhat critically neglected. There are a few pages on it in Richard Barrios' Screened Out and Steven Cohan's Masked Men.