Vincente Minnelli subverts patriarchy with humor
It was a kind of sacrilege when Steve Martin remade the Father of the Bride films in the 1990s. They mislead moviegoers into thinking that flat, obvious sitcom humor was cinematic (a misconception that runs rampant in today’s pop culture). The unfortunate box office success of the wretched Martin remakes worked to bury the reputations of the original films, Minnelli’s 1951 double-header Father of the Bride and Father’s Little Dividend. Both show at BAM’s The Complete Vincente Minnelli series Oct. 11.
In those days, MGM’s factory was so well-tooled that the studio system could instantly respond to public enthusiasm. The first film’s spring success was answered with a fall sequel no less charming or ingenious. In MoMA scholar Stephen Harvey’s essential book Directed by Vincente Minnelli, the Father of the Bride series was analyzed as the proto-sitcom, yet Harvey was also alert to Minnelli’s very cinematic subtlety, which TV has never been able to replicate. Minnelli captured sensitive family dynamics—the obligations that a male breadwinner (Spencer Tracey) felt toward his fort-holding mate (Joan Bennett) and the intense affection for and inevitable sharing of his daughter (Elizabeth Taylor) who goes from teenage chattel to independent young woman, wife and mother.
Nothing slaphappy about Minnelli’s observation of Modern Family hood, but he found humor—and all our recognizable selves—in the way Tracy’s white male patriarch gave in to the society that he supposedly ruled, but that in fact controlled and imposed obligations upon him. When fools talk about the repressive 1950s and how only Douglas Sirk ripped off the decade’s façade, it’s obvious that they know not the rich, melodramatic Minnelli of Home from the Hill, The Cobweb, Some Came Running and The Sandpiper, but the “comic” Minnelli who portrayed the depth of American ambition and emotional adjustment in the Father of the Bride series and the nearly subversive Lucy-Desi masterpiece The Long, Long Trailer.
If a new millennium sitcom like Modern Family shows how crude we have become, Minnelli’s classic preserves how human we once were.
It was Minnelli’s sensitive genius (and Lucy’s artistic ambition) to challenge the primacy of TV’s I Love Lucy hit sitcom series with a sober-minded, serious look at the obstacles to contentment that define actual marriage. Think about it: “The Long, Long Trailer” is a beautiful title for a film about the sojourn of lifemates and their shared joys and burdens. Minnelli’s fatherhood/grandparent diptych expands those joys and burdens into commonplace profundity. Harvey was right: TV sitcom mechanics emulated Minnelli’s sensitivity, yet they never quite got the sociological nuances, as when Tracy plays host and beverage openers won’t cooperate. It finds a moment of Buster Keaton existentialism in a suburban American kitchen, and Tracy’s grimaces have W.C. Fields’ authentic all-American exasperation—details that let you know Americans bristle under the very conformity that they thought they craved. When Tracy repeated this trope in George Cukor’s 1953 The Actress, his acting was stellar but the story was stale. Minnelli’s vision was fresh and remains so.
The Complete Vincente Minnelli runs at BAM through Nov. 2. For more information, visit www.bam.org.
