vincent minelli

Bonus Features: A Place in the Sun (1951)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1951’s A Place in the Sun, is a high-emotions noir about a desperate social climber who drowns his pregnant girlfriend so she doesn’t get in the way of his wealthier, prettier romantic prospect.  In essence, it’s an epic-fuckboy melodrama about the moral crimes young men were willing to commit for the chance to be with Elizabeth Taylor.  She was the most marriageable woman of all time, after all, apparently lethally so.  At the time, Taylor was just starting to make the transition from child star to adult romantic lead, and A Place in the Sun doesn’t ask her to do much other than to look elegant while modeling classic gowns designed by Edith Head.  Most of the film’s more serious brooding is left to Taylor’s costars Montgomery Clift & Shelley Winters as the factory-worker couple who’re undone by her natural glamor. 

Elizabeth Taylor’s onscreen transformation into a convincingly mature actress did not begin & end with A Place in the Sun.  It was a gradual rebranding over several projects under her studio-system contract with MGM.  If you’re curious to track her progress through this transitional era, here are a few more titles to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

Conspirator (1949)

Elizabeth Taylor’s first role as an adult character was co-lead of the Cold War espionage thriller Conspirator, starring opposite Robert Taylor.  Elizabeth plays Robert’s 18-year-old bride but was only 16 at the time of shooting, while her co-star was more than double her age, in his late 30s.  That might sound like a gross, old-fashioned approach to Old Hollywood romance—and maybe it is—but it’s at least acknowledged & addressed in the text.  Elizabeth plays a young, bratty teenager who has no business getting married, while Robert plays a Soviet spy posing as a British officer who’s attracted to her because she’s naive and easy to manipulate.  There’s some sly humor to the way the pair star in entirely separate movies for the first half of Conspirator.  Elizabeth is playing girlish, flirty games while Robert is plotting to subvert the Western Bloc, often undermined by his young wife’s immature antics.  That tension slowly deflates once the bride is fully clued into her husband’s true allegiances, but the path to that reveal is more fun than you might expect.

Of course, the teenage Taylor radiates pure movie star glamor in this otherwise mediocre Red Scare noir — the same natural glamor that she echoes in the soon-to-come A Place in the Sun.  There’s something incredibly charming about her character’s insistence on being treated like an adult, while also being too scared to sleep alone during thunderstorms and waiting around like a puppy for her crush to call on the telephone.  Conspirator is far from her best onscreen work, but it is a clear marker of her transition into being seen as an adult by her audience, almost to the point of it being her character’s arc.  In a third-act argument with her Filthy Commie husband, he remarks, “You’ve grown up, haven’t you?”, and she spits back “You can’t lie to me anymore, if that’s what you mean.”  The couple’s age gap may make for an uncomfortable pairing, but the movie clearly knows what it’s doing with it; the paranoid anti-Communist politics on the other hand . . .

Father of the Bride (1950)

Vincent Minnelli’s original adaptation of the 1949 novel Father of the Bride is just as bubbly & fluffy as its later adaptations in Norah Ephron’s 1991 version and the most recent straight-to-HBO-Max remake.  Like in A Place in the Sun, Taylor isn’t asked to do much in the picture besides look elegant in her couture gowns, this time including an iconic wedding dress (that ironically telegraphs of her many tabloid-covered weddings decades down the line).  Most of the film’s psychological grit defaults to the titular father (Spencer Tracy), who narrates his neurotic breakdown as he watches Daddy’s Little Girl prepare to walk down the wedding aisle, struggling to reconcile how he sees her vs her actual, adult autonomy.  In that way, it’s a perfect role for the teenaged Taylor, who was asking audiences to stop looking at her like a little girl and start seeing her as an adult.  It’s also a strange, upsetting reflection of macho insecurities lurking just under the surface of every American dad’s Neanderthalic skull.

The 1950 Father of the Bride might be light-hearted fluff, but it’s still high-quality fluff when compared to the mawkish sentimentality of its two remakes.  At the very least, its surrealistic nightmare sequence in which Tracy sinks into the floor while walking Taylor down the aisle is the high-water mark for the series as visual art.  More importantly, there’s something about the promo shots of Tracy spanking Taylor in her wedding dress that gets to the core of this series’ Suburban Dad Psychosis more than anything that happens in the actual films.  This is fundamentally a comedy about how fathers infantilize their daughters for as long as they can get away with it, so there’s something apt about casting a young actor who was pleading to no longer be infantilized by her audience as a child star.

Giant (1956)

Taylor didn’t fully come into her own as a lead actor playing adult characters until she reunited with A Place in the Sun director George Stevens for the sprawling Texas family drama Giant.  Specifically, it happens about halfway into the epic melodrama, just when my borrowed library DVD prompted me to flip the disc over to Side B.  In the first 100 minutes on Side A, Taylor plays a defiant but romantic teenager who’s swept off her feet by a Texas cattle rancher (Rock Hudson), only to discover that her handsome, charming husband is also a raging racist & misogynist in most social settings, as is the way of his home state.  At the start of Side B, she’s shown knitting in the family parlor, her hair pasted grey for an unconvincing geriatric stage-drama effect.  Decades into her marriage to an old-fashioned, uptight cowboy, she’s still a progressive do-gooder who challenges his Conservative views on women and the Mexican servant class every chance she gets, which means she has a lot more to chew on here than she has in Conspirator, Father of the Bride, or even A Place in the Sun.  Giant is the kind of well-meaning, anti-racist drama that’s just old & creaky enough to undercut its point by casting white actors in brownface for the minor roles, but it’s still surprisingly left of center for a studio production of this epic scale, and Taylor is the main mouthpiece for its political messaging.

I’m tempted to pitch Giant as what might happen if Douglas Sirk guest-directed a season of Yellowstone, but the existence of Sirk’s Written on the Wind (released the same year, also starring Hudson) makes that comparison somewhat redundant.  Stevens was a formidable contemporary of Sirk’s, but there’s nothing especially stylish or personal about his filmmaking craft that makes Giant more essential viewing than Written on the Wind or Imitation of Life, which combine to cover a lot of the same thematic territory.  He was a talented workman director within the studio system, most reliable for his ability to manage large-scale productions without them spiraling out of control.  It’s not a flashy, auteurist approach to directing, but it does allow for the Old Hollywood dream factory to do its work at peak efficiency.  If nothing else, Giant is worth seeing for the spectacle of its cast.  It almost seems impossible that a single movie could gather Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Carroll Baker, Dennis Hopper and Sal Mineo all in one picture, but when you stretch your runtime out 3.5 hours and your setting over multiple decades, you have the space for that kind of feat.  Taylor & Hudson are the white-hot center of the drama, though, and they’re the main reason to clear an evening to watch it in full.  When Hudson first spots a teenage Taylor on her family farm, she’s riding a wild, misbehaved horse and he absentmindedly calls her a “beautiful animal” in a way that equates the two.  Years into their marriage, that wild streak never fades, and the adult version of Taylor’s character is given plenty open land to run free and buck Texas social conventions, to her husband’s fury & frustration.  It was a career-making role for her, one that cleared a path to the even juicier roles in Tennessee Williams & Edward Albee adaptations that were just over the horizon. 

-Brandon Ledet

The Pirate (1948)

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Being introduced to Gene Kelly’s artistry through late-career titles like Xanadu & The Young Girls of Rochefort, I had come to associate him with nostalgic meta commentary on Hollywood past, assuming that he had become an artifact of the era only in the years after his prime. I’ve since learned a couple things about Gene Kelly’s career by returning to the older titles that made him a star. The hit musical Singin’ in the Rain, for instance, taught me that nostalgia for Hollywood’s past had always been an essential aspect of the actor/dancer’s career. As his strengths as a performer have a kind of vaudevillian undercurrent to them, he tends to play performers in his movie roles, giving both an excuse for him to sing & dance directly to the audience and for meta commentary about Hollywood’s past. I feel like I learned an even more important lesson from 1948’s The Pirate, however: not all Gene Kelly movies are good. The Pirate once again features Kelly playing an actor, allowing him to perform directly to the camera and Put On A Show. It even has an open air of nostalgia for the swashbuckling past of stars like Errol Flynn, positioning the film as yet another Gene Kelly Old Hollywood Throwback. What I discovered is that those virtues are not nearly enough on their own to save a sinking ship. The Pirate is garbage so wet & so rotten that not even Gene Kelly’s singing, dancing nostalgia schtick could save it.

I can at least admit that The Pirate‘s failure is anyone but Gene Kelly’s fault. The entire production seemed doomed from the start, going through ten separate creative team re-writes in its journey from romance adventure to movie musical. Kelly himself was freshly returned from the horrors of serving in World War II, but wasn’t even close to the most disruptive or dysfunctional personality on set. Director Vincent Minelli (Liza’s father, naturally) feuded loudly on set with his then-wife Judy Garland, whose erratic total-meltdown behavior extended the shoot from weeks to months in an ever-ballooning expense. The Pirate‘s financial failure has often been blamed on the public not being ready to see Garland transition from her girlish Wizard of Oz roles to the more adult material she’s asked to command here. What’s a lot more likely is that her on-stage nervous breakdown (which eventually led to a suicide attempt & sanitarium hospice) made the film difficult for audiences to stomach as an expression of joy. Garland’s presence in The Pirate mostly amounts to a frantic, pilled-out mess, a tragic culmination of years of personal & professional abuse. Her onscreen rapport with Kelly is more violent yelling than it is passionate yearning and the end result is physically upsetting to behold. That’s not even to mention the casual, pervasive sexism & racism that corrupt the film’s casting & narrative, two scourges that have only made an already unlovable film less appealing over time.

Judy Garland stars as Manuela Alve, a wealthy young Carribbean woman, which had to be one of Hollywood’s all-time worst miscastings. Ignoring the (times-indicative) racism of that whitewashing, Manuela isn’t an inherently awful character. Raised inland on her Carribbean island home, she’s never seen open water & fantasizes about the adventure offered by tales of pirates, which is a tale common to other notable pirate properties like Peter Pan & Curse of the Black Pearl. In particular, she lusts after the infamous pirate Mac the Black DeMarco. This is a source of great frustration to both of her would-be beaus: a smooth-talking actor played by Gene Kelly and a monstrous plantation owner who disgusts her despite, unbeknownst to everyone, actually being Mac the Black in disguise. The discomfort in this scenario is in watching Kelly’s thespian woo Garland’s confused damsel heart away from her pirate-in-disguise betrothed. He hypnotizes her in a pivotal scene, gathering information to sway her heart & eventually convincing her that he himself is Mac the Black. He also pesters her endlessly, infantilizing her with chiding like, “Stepping into the sight of other men is too much of a provocation,” sealing the predatory rapist vibes of his character. To Manuela’s credit, she’s allowed to buck against the actor’s early infantilization, snapping back, “Don’t call me ‘pure soul.’ It irritates me,” asserting that there are “depths of emotion” to “romantic longings” under her “prim exterior.” She is eventually wooed into a relationship built on a lie, however, which works out fine for Gene Kelly’s actor/predator . . . until he has to prove to the authorities that he is, in fact, a singing, dancing, vaudevillian clown and not a cutthroat thief.

There is exactly one scene worth watching in The Pirate. When Manuela first imagines her thespian beau to be a famous pirate, the movie dives into her BDSM fantasy where he wields a giant sword & sings to a big band production while she’s a helpless bunny who has to watch from the sidelines. The song in this scene is not better than any other tune Cole Porter churned out on autopilot for the production, but it’s still worth watching for Manuela’s intensely sexualized vision of a pirate: Gene Kelly in short-shorts. Watching the typically sanitized token of nostalgia show off his muscular gams in a horned up pirate number is a three minute pleasure almost blissful enough to make the wet pile of garbage festering around it worthwhile. Almost. Gene Kelly’s charisma & sexy man-legs are powerful opiates, but not powerful enough to ease the discomfort of The Pirate‘s many apparent flaws: racist casting, sexist dialogue, a near-death Judy Garland, and a god awful set of Cole Porter songs with inanely repetitious lyrics like “Be a clown, be a clown, be a clown” & “Niña, niña, niña” (which he dared rhyme with “schizophreeñia”). Even as a staunch defender of the little-loved Xanadu & a spineless sucker for Technicolor, I couldn’t allow Gene Kelly’s charms overpower The Pirate‘s cultural toxicity & the genuine harm it did to one of his visibly shaken costars. Like many pirate ships in an age old storybooks, this one’s irrevocably cursed.

-Brandon Ledet