Every 70s Movie: liza minnelli

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Thursday, June 9, 2016

A Matter of Time (1976)

As talented as he was versatile, Vincente Minnelli directed a handful of great films, plus quite a few that were merely respectable, before his career started to lose momentum in the late ’60s. Anyone would be proud of a legacy including Meet Me In St. Louis (1944), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and Gigi (1958). Minnelli also lived long enough to watch Liza Minnelli, his daughter with Judy Garland, blossom into a dynamic and award-winning entertainer. The wise move after the moderate success of his Barbra Streisand vehicle On a Clear Day you Can See Forever (1970) might have been to retire gracefully. Unfortunately, showbiz professionals often need to get yanked off the stage, and that’s what happened when Minnelli made his final film, A Matter of Time.
Convincing Liza to play the leading role presumably trumped any concerns that producers might have had about Minnelli’s old-fashioned style, since she was a hot commodity at the time, and Papa Minnelli recruited another big name, Ingrid Bergman, for the film’s main supporting role. Things didn’t go so well past that point. Minnelli was fired for going overbudget and overschedule. Then distributor American International gutted his footage to generate a 97-minute version of what Minnelli originally intended to be a three-hour epic. Ouch.

Watching the released cut of A Matter of Time, it doesn’t seem as if Minnelli’s ouster represents a loss to cinema history. Telling the fairy-tale-like story of a maid who rose to fame and fortune by learning from an eccentric old woman how to seduce powerful men, A Matter of Time is overproduced, tone-deaf, and unseemly. After a present-day prologue, the film flashes back to Rome during some undetermined stage of the postwar era, where 15-year-old Nina (Liza) arrives at the decaying hotel where her cousin works as a maid. (Yes, Liza, who was pushing 30 when this film was released, plays her character as a teenager.) Nina befriends the strange Contessa Sanziani (Bergman), who wears a flamboyant cloak with leopard-skin trim and sports ghastly black makeup rings around her eyes. Back in the day, the Contessa played muse to great artists and thinkers, so she passes along her philosophy of, put bluntly, using sex to help men realize their potential even if the woman gets nothing in return. Nina thinks this lifestyle sounds terrific, so she does the Contessa one better by trading sex for wealth and notoriety.

All of this icky stuff plays out in stilted dialogue scenes, and the gaudy production design gives a more spirited performance than any of the actors. Oh, and about halfway through its running time, the movie suddenly becomes a musical, with Liza howling a few forgettable numbers. Need we even mention the scene in which Mina forgives a would-be rapist for assaulting her because he’s upset about writer’s block? Ultimately, the saddest and strangest thing about A Matter of Time isn’t watching a venerable director derail his career and legacy—Minnelli never made another movie—but the notion that he roped his Oscar-winning daughter into playing an opportunistic whore. Not the best “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” in Hollywood history. Having said that, nepotism worked out better for Bergman, because her daughter Isabella Rossellini made her screen debut in A Matter of Time, playing the small role of a nun.

A Matter of Time: LAME

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Journey Back to Oz (1974)

The most noteworthy aspect of Journey Back to Oz, a slipshod animated sequel to the classic live-action movie The Wizard of Oz (1939), is the fact that Liza Minnelli provides the voice of intrepid heroine Dorothy Gale. (Minnelli’s mother, legendary entertainer Judy Garland, played the role in The Wizard of Oz.) Minnelli acts the part with passion and sweetness, singing several songs with her signature gusto, but the novelty of her presence isn’t sufficient to make Journey Back to Oz feel special. Setting aside the film’s second-rate visuals—production company Filmation’s crude style falls somewhere between the cheapness of Hanna-Barbera and the elegance of Walt Disney—the main problem is the story, an unimaginative retread of the original film. When Journey Back to Oz begins, Dorothy is once again bored in Kansas, wishing for a return visit with her magical friends. A cyclone conveniently appears, plopping Dorothy on the side of the Yellow Brick Road. She meets several new friends, discovers that the kingdom is once again threatened by a wicked witch, and rallies new and old pals to help restore order.

Even though the makers of Journey Back to Oz borrowed liberally from the work of L. Frank Baum—the creator of the Oz universe—new characters and contrivances fail to impress. The Signpost (Jack E. Leonard) is a likeable dunderhead patterned after the original story’s Scarecrow; Woodenhead Pinto Stallion III, a wooden horse, serves the same valiant-but-clumsy function as the original story’s Tin Man; and so on. Worse, beloved characters appear in disappointing iterations. For instance, the Cowardly Lion is portrayed as having lost the nerve he gained with Dorothy’s help, and the Scarecrow, though now King of Oz, is a non-presence who spends most of the story in captivity. Furthermore, Filmation’s strategy of frontloading the voice cast with famous actors is distracting, because each of the actors adheres to his or her familiar persona. For instance, Ethel Merman delivers obnoxiously loud vocals as the witch Mombi, while Paul Lynde, portraying the new character Pumpkinhead, sounds like his usual bitchy-queen self.

Yet another problem is the film’s song score, penned by Hollywood pros Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen, because the numbers are hopelessly trite compared to the magical tunes in The Wizard of Oz. The Cahn-Van Heusen numbers range from the saccharine (“Keep a Happy Thought”) to the embarrassingly blunt (“That Feeling for Home”). Ultimately, Journey Back to Os doesn’t trample on fond memories—as did the bizarre live-action 1985 sequel Return to Oz—but the whole thing feels half-assed and unnecessary. No wonder the picture flopped during its initial theatrical release. Nonetheless, Journey Back to Oz found an audience when it was resuscitated for television a short while later, with new live-action bits featuring Bill Cosby created to bracket the original animated feature.

Journey Back to Oz: FUNKY

Thursday, November 14, 2013

New York, New York (1977)

A generous reading of Martin Scorsese’s quasi-musical, New York, New York, would situate the film as a grand attempt to mesh Old Hollywood artifice with New Hollywood realism. And, indeed, the juxtaposition of intense Method acting with soundstage fakery gives New York, New York a unique flavor. However, even though the film’s look is exquisite—Scorsese and cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs create dazzling effects with dense compositions and elegant camera movement—the project’s aesthetic value is undermined by the trite narrative and the ridiculous running time (nearly three hours).

A period piece that begins in the mid-1940s and stretches into the ’50s, New York, New York presents an uninteresting riff on the oft-filmed A Star is Born formula. Sax player Jimmy Doyle (Robert De Niro) is an egomaniacal, insecure, sexist hothead with the morals of a snake. His on-again/off-again lover, Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli), wobbles between being a doormat and being a shrew during her long career as a singer. As per the A Star is Born playbook, Jimmy helps Francine achieve fame but then resents her success, and his jealousy (combined with his self-destructive behavior) drives them apart. Watching an asshole abuse an enabler doesn’t make for the most enjoyable experience. Worse, the film is subplot-averse; although minor characters including an agent (Lionel Stander), a bandleader (Barry Priums), and a chanteuse (Mary Kay Place) all get decent amounts of screen time, these characters exist only to accentuate Jimmy, Francine, or both.

Scorsese’s fidelity to such pet themes as the animalistic nature of overachieving men is admirable, after a fashion, but the inescapable question is why Scorsese thought the world needed a bummer musical done in the candy-colored style of a World War II-era MGM extravaganza. Plus, at times, it seems Scorsese would have preferred making a straight-up song-and-dance epic. In a long sequence that was cut from the original release but restored for reissues, Francine toplines a movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie (she plays a character who’s playing a third character). The sequence, built around the song “Happy Endings,” has the over-the-top production design and boisterous vocalizing one normally associates with the work Minnelli’s father, director Vincente Minnelli, did with the actress’ mother, showbiz legend Judy Garland. What this homage has to do with New York, New York’s street-level story of Jimmy’s love life is anyone’s guess.

Broadway tunesmiths John Kander and Fred Ebb created a number of original songs for this project, the most famous of which is the title track (“Theme from New York, New York”), but there’s a fundamental imbalance stemming from the fact that only one of the protagonists sings. Whenever Minnelli bursts into song while De Niro fakes playing the sax, she overwhelms the movie. That suits the A Star is Born formula, of course, but it represents yet another manner in which New York, New York feels contrived and inorganic. Often (rightfully) cited as a prime example of auteur-era hubris, since Scorsese went apeshit with grandiose sets and hordes of extras while creating easily half the film’s scenes, New York, New York isn’t an outright disaster, simply because the technical aspects are impeccable. That said, the movie’s absurd scope bludgeons the story’s meager virtues to a degree that’s almost laughable, and De Niro’s characterization is so repellent that the performance wears out its welcome far before New York, New York’s endless 163 minutes have unspooled.

New York, New York: FUNKY

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

That’s Entertainment! (1974) & That’s Entertainment, Part II (1976)

Made to commemorate Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 50th anniversary, That’s Entertainment! is a documentary in name only, since the picture comprises clips from old movies that are introduced—through new, scripted footage—by a group of movie actors closely associated with the MGM studio. Anyone looking for behind-the-scenes gossip or insight will be disappointed, but, as the film’s title suggests, providing information isn’t the point. Rather, That’s Entertainment! offers a massive array of show-stopping musical numbers, including such classic moments as Fred Astaire’s graceful dance duet with Cyd Charisse in The Band Wagon (1953), Judy Garland’s plaintive rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gene Kelly’s exuberant performance of the title song in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and dozens more. The picture also spotlights rarely scene clips, including Clark Gable performing “Puttin’ on the Ritz” in Idiot’s Delight (1939), and features montages celebrating the work of such Golden Age stars as Lena Horne, Ann Miller, and Esther Williams.

The clips are nearly all dazzling, running the gamut from outrageous Busby Berkeley-directed spectacles to simple vocal performances, and the film’s seven editors did a remarkable job of organizing the material into logical sections while also creating a smooth flow. Writer-producer-director Jack Haley Jr.’s use of MGM stars as hosts works, too, because their participation validates the piece; furthermore, seeing the passage of time through their aging faces and physiques amplifies the nostalgia of recalling a magical era from the past. (Accentuating this effect, many of the hosts are shot walking through decrepit sections of the long-unused MGM backlot.)

The impressive roster of hosts includes Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly, Peter Lawford, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Mickey Rooney, Frank Sinatra, James Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor, and the late Judy Garland’s daughter, Liza Minnelli, who presents a sweet segment about “Mama.” Each host offers a canned anecdote or two, and then narrates a few minutes of clips, so Haley creates the illusion of old friends sharing memories at a reunion. That’s Entertainment! is total fluff, but it lives up to its title and, in a cheerfully superficial sort of way, provides a history lesson simply by cataloguing the best output from one studio.

Alas, the film’s first sequel, That’s Entertainment, Part II, is not nearly as charming. Kelly took over the directing chores, and he co-hosts the entire film exclusively with fellow song-and-dance legend Astaire. (Songwriter Sammy Cahn makes an ineffectual appearance during one quick bit.) Kelly and his team cast a wider net for different types of clips, since most of MGM’s best musical numbers were used in the previous film. As a result, this picture features random montages about great movie lines, plus such extended comedy bits as the Marx Brothers’ classic “stateroom” scene from A Night at the Opera (1935). Combined with the lack of organization—the movie jumps around between eras and genres—the inclusion of nonmusical scenes makes That’s Entertainment, Part II confusing and unfocused. Worse, Kelly stages all of the hosting bits as musical numbers. While it’s fun to see Astaire and Kelly hoofing together, their age and a general lack of inspiration makes these original production numbers seem second-rate when juxtaposed with classic clips. Nonetheless, the franchise soldiered on with a quasi-official follow-up called That’s Dancing In 1985 and then an official, made-for-TV threequel called That’s Entertainment III in 1994.

That’s Entertainment!: GROOVY

That’s Entertainment, Part II: FUNKY

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Lucky Lady (1975)

Screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz were hot after American Graffiti, scoring a huge purchase price for their screenplay Lucky Lady, which gene-spliced the music-driven ribaldry of Cabaret (1972) with the twisty plotting of The Sting (1973). An impressive roster of A-list talents converged on the project, including director Stanley Donen and the three stars billed above the title: Gene Hackman, Burt Reynolds, and Cabaret Oscar-winner Liza Minnelli. Cabaret vets working behind the camera include cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth and songwriters Fred Ebb and John Kander. But even with all of this cinematic firepower, and a hefty budget of $13 million, Lucky Lady is little more than a well-made train wreck.

The main problem is that expensive script, which puts three despicable characters into an icky housekeeping arrangement. After an unnecessarily convoluted set-up, Prohibition-era schemers Kibby (Hackman), Claire (Minnelli), and Walker (Reynolds) become rum-runners sailing their ship, the Lucky Lady, back and forth between Mexico and the U.S., chased by a homicidal Coast Guard captain (Geoffrey Lewis) and a ruthless fellow bootlegger (John Hillerman). Half of the picture is devoted to criminal intrigue, including several high-seas shootouts, so the movie’s frothy tone disappears whenever the story turns dark and violent, which is often. The other half of the picture is devoted to the farce of Kibby and Walker competing for Claire; she moves back and forth between their beds until all three finally sleep together. Why these two men are so excited by the abrasive Claire is as mystifying as why viewers are expected to care about any of them, since all three are deceitful, shallow, and tiresome. (Supporting player Robby Benson, as a Lucky Lady shipmate, adds the film’s only glimmer of sweetness.)

With its painfully episodic structure, the movie feels much longer than its 118-minute running time, and Unsworth goes berserk with his signature haze filters, making some images almost indecipherable. The stars try valiantly to make the material work, with Reynolds thriving in his light-comedy métier and Minnelli belting out a few numbers, but aside from the production values and star power, there’s little to recommend in Lucky Lady.

Lucky Lady: LAME

Monday, February 28, 2011

Cabaret (1972)

Cabaret is the quintessential musical for people who don’t like musicals, myself included. Not only does it tell a hard-hitting, provocative story instead of just delivering cheerful fluff, it’s a real movie that happens to have music instead of a contrived framework for musical numbers. Tunes arise naturally during moments in which characters believably break into song, such as performances in the titular nightclub, so the numbers become tools that wizardly director Bob Fosse employs, alongside brazen editing and meticulous camerawork, to guide viewers into the psyches of the characters.

Adapted from a pair of musicals that were in turn based on autobiographical stories by the English writer Christopher Isherwood, who lived in Germany during the Third Reich’s rise to power, Jay Presson Allen’s Oscar-nominated script weaves the myriad threads of source material into a seamless whole, telling the story of how sexually confused Englishman Brian Roberts (Michael York) learns life lessons with, and from, crass but vulnerable American songstress Sally Bowles (Liza Minelli) during their eventful idyll in pre-World War II Berlin. Sally sings at the debauched Kit Kat Klub, and Brian is a new neighbor at her boarding house. After her overpowering personality draws Brian into Sally’s life, the two become enmeshed with three Germans: poor striver Fritz (Fritz Wepper), rich Nazi apologist Maximilian (Helmut Griem), and sheltered Jewish heiress Natalia (Marisa Berenson). The audience’s sense of what the future holds for these people lends a sense of pervasive dread to the narrative.

Tying the film together are surrealistic scenes featuring the Kit Kat Klub’s unnamed Master of Ceremonies (Joel Grey), who functions as a perverse Greek Chorus complete with grotesque makeup and an immaculate tux.
Fosse’s storytelling is astonishing from the first scene to the last because he jumps from incisive subtlety to shocking directness at regular intervals, often in the same scene, and his legendary choreography infuses the film with propulsive physicality. Whether he’s staging a comical number such as “Two Ladies” or a tender one (especially the moving “Maybe This Time”), Fosse adeptly weaves the themes of the musical interludes into the flow of the story, so Cabaret never feels like it’s stopping for big numbers. Yet while the dancing is sensuous and spectacular, Fosse’s handling of quiet dramatic scenes is just as confident. Minelli and York have never been better than they are here, with Minelli blending soft colors into her brash persona, and York expertly depicting his character’s complicated mix of moral outrage and sexual angst. Grey is equally great, turning “Emcee” into one of the most enigmatically creepy characterizations of the early ’70s.

Cabaret: OUTTA SIGHT

Monday, February 14, 2011

Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970)

   Otto Preminger, a venerable Austrian filmmaker and actor who did significant work from the mid-’40s to the early ’60s, lost his creative way somewhere around the time he directed the disastrous farce Skidoo (1968), a tone-deaf riff on LSD. Continuing his inept exploration of youth-culture themes, Preminger next filmed Marjorie Kellogg’s novel Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, a heartfelt story about three damaged young people who form a surrogate family outside of the hospital where they met. In the hands of the ham-fisted aueteur known as “Otto the Ogre,” however, Kellogg’s intimate tale becomes clumsy melodrama in the worst possible taste. The main characters are presented as freaks only capable of relating to other freaks, except for occasional “normal” folks who pity them, and when Preminger cuts loose with a fantasy sequence in the middle of the picture that’s meant to illustrate a disturbed mental state, he reveals how antiquated his filmmaking style had become: Preminger’s idea of cutting-edge dream imagery is an over-choreographed, over-lit, overproduced production number.
   And it’s not as if the film starts well and goes awry, because the first 20 minutes are a traffic jam of bad and incongruous ideas. During the opening credits, Pete Seeger (!) appears on camera to wander through the Sequoia National Forest (!) and warble a melancholy folk song. Then we cut to a hospital that inexplicably treats every different kind of patient in the same ward, because lined up next to each other are burn victim Junie Moon (Liza Minnelli), paraplegic Warren (Robert Moore), and seizure-prone mental patient Arthur (Ken Howard). It’s Junie’s last day in the hospital, so the movie flashes back to her “origin story.”
   Some time back, even though she was a happenin’ young chick who knew her own mind, Junie went on a date with an uptight dude named Jesse (Ben Piazza), then ignored the obvious warning signs when he refused to dance at a nightclub and instead took her to a cemetery, where he asked her to strip while he spewed obscenities at her. (Preminger prudishly blots out the obscenities with dissonant jazz solos on the soundtrack, and this goes on forever.) Then, because Junie still hasn’t figured out that Jesse is a nutter, she lets him take her to a junkyard where he knocks her to the ground. In Preminger’s finest moment of atrocious direction, Junie writhes on the ground for several moments while Jesse methodically seeks out and cracks open a car battery, from which he leaks acid all over Junie’s face and arm.
   The film never gets any more rational than that fusillade of horrible scenes, even as it settles into trite soap-opera dynamics once the three misfits start living together. Junie’s the assertive loudmouth tortured by how people react when they see her burns; Warren’s the clichéd mincing homosexual whose portrayal constitutes a hate crime; and Arthur’s the gentle giant who reacts to everything like an oversensitive child. As these unbelievable characters, Minnelli, Howard, and Moore give ferociously awful performances. James Coco, exercising a bit more restraint than the leads, enters the mix as a fishmonger who befriends the trio, and smooth cat Fred Williamson shows up as a resort-town stud who gets Warren’s queeny heart racing. Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon is about as wrong as wrong gets, right down to the implication that the homosexuality can and should be cured by heterosexual nookie.

Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon: FREAKY

Friday, October 29, 2010

Silent Movie (1976)

After discovering his gift for spoofing movie genres with Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, both of which were released in 1974, Mel Brooks lost his way with Silent Movie. By many reports, Brooks’ considerable ego was to blame for the precipitous drop in the quality of his pictures, because he burned an important bridge by alienating actor-writer Gene Wilder, who starred in both 1974 hits, after taking too much credit for Young Frankenstein. So even though Brooks enjoyed long relationships with talented collaborators, including actors like Dom DeLuise and Marty Feldman, as well as behind-the-scenes talents like composer John Morris, it was clear that on a Mel Brooks picture, only the name above the title really mattered. Therefore, in Silent Movie, it’s all about Mel, and not in a good way. Brooks cast himself in the leading role, and his legendary comic gifts aren’t enough to compensate for his shortcomings as an actor. He plays for the cheap seats with every reaction shot, bludgeons the delivery of jokes with bug-eyed obviousness, and can’t muster the varied nuances that Wilder brought to his performances in Brooks films.

It doesn’t help, of course, that Silent Movie adheres to the gimmick implied by its title: Like an old one-reeler from the Mack Sennett era, the picture uses title cards in place of dialogue, which gives it a stop-and-start rhythm that soon grows wearying. The storyline is amusing-ish, with a film director (Brooks) trying to produce a brand-new silent movie in the modern era, and Silent Movie features cameos by big names who relish making idiots of themselves: Anne Bancroft, James Caan, Liza Minnelli, Paul Newman, Burt Reynolds. (In a clever touch, French mine Marcel Marceau delivers the movie’s only line of spoken dialogue.) Brooks has fun executing exuberant physical comedy in the silent-era style with the assistance of core players DeLuise, Feldman, Sid Caesar, Ron Carey, Harold Gould, and Bernadette Peters, but the film’s slapstick is so endlessly insipid that the fervent efforts of the cast are mostly wasted. It’s hard to actively dislike Silent Movie since it’s trying so hard to be entertaining, but it’s hard to get excited about it, either.

Silent Movie: LAME