Minnelli epic explores masculinity
“Let me show you how a man lives,” says wealthy Texas landowner Captain Wade Hunnicutt (Robert Mitchum) as he ushers his son into patriarchy’s lair in Vincente Minnelli’s 1960 melodrama Home from the Hill, screening Oct. 15 at BAM’s current retrospective The Complete Vincente Minnelli. Mitchum’s man-cave invitation could also be this film’s mission statement, but auteur/aesthete Minnelli delves beneath Mitchum’s machismo—and its fey flip side—to achieve a rare exploration of masculine complexity. Minnelli’s epic ponders masculinity as both biological and social fact, as he fills the Cinemascope frame with natural and manmade spaces, made equally awesome by his fluid, expressive camerawork.
As Wade’s son Theron (George Hamilton, exuding Anthony Perkins-like sensitivity) leaves the side of his smothering mother to learn the craft of the father, he comes into a confounding legacy that stalls his coming of age. Sexuality becomes his stumbling block after he is informed that his father’s right-hand man Rafe (George Peppard) is actually Theron’s illegitimate half-brother. Ensuing calamities and revelations force changes in the brothers that go beyond simply swapping social roles à la Sam Shepard’s True West; both men are driven to the very end of masculinity’s leash. Peppard and Hamilton’s Method performances are perfectly calibrated to gauge the inner (psychosexual) consistency of each character as he outwardly changes—as well as fraternal symbiosis.
Minnelli’s auteur method builds a meticulous mise-en-scène around these complexities, visualizing the impact and implications of what one character in Home from the Hill calls “a human gesture.” If James Cameron hadn’t made the word “immersive” suspect, I’d be tempted to use it to describe how Minnelli shoots and lights interiors so that they seem to protrude directly from the subconscious. Wade’s man-cave, with its enormous mounted animal heads and bearskin rug, is surely a shrine to Man Over Nature, but we also see how each slain beast represents an embalmed Terror. The wilderness on Wade’s property where these beasts were killed is amoral terrain but not exactly no-man’s-land; it has sunny lakeside groves where lovers can canoodle, but with mortality always hovering in the background (sulphurous fumes emitted by quicksand).
Home from the Hill’s epic narrative brings Death literally from background to foreground. Minnelli’s final shot should be up there with cinema’s most celebrated closers. Rafe’s halting walk away from a gravestone that fills half the frame symbolizes our fumbling progress from repression to recognition. A climactic moment of physical Method acting (Peppard’s uneven step) and auteurist genre revision (a variation on the hoary hero’s walk into the sunset), this final shot busts the sentimentality that has accrued to both of these mid-century movements. Christopher Nolan, take note.
The Complete Vincente Minnelli runs at BAM through Nov. 2. For more information, visit www.bam.org.
