Minnelli + Minnelli at HOME
Tom Grieve, Cinema Editor
HOME presents a short four-film season celebrating father and daughter Vincente and Liza Minnelli’s contributions to the big screen. Across two generations, and two eras of cinema, the pair worked separately on some of the most iconic movies to come out of Hollywood.
As a director Vincente Minnelli is synonymous with the movie musical. He was responsible for classics such as An American in Paris, Brigadoon and Gigi, but HOME have chosen to highlight a pair of his melodramas as part of this summer film season.
The five Oscar-winning The Bad and the Beautiful (Sun 14 July) features Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner in a hard hitting inside-Hollywood satire about a megalomaniacal movie producer who comes undone. That film is followed by more stars in the grand and celebrated MGM melodrama Some Came Running (Sun 21 July) which sees Frank Sinatra joined by Shirley MacLaine, Dean Martin, and Arthur Kennedy, who was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role.
Liza Minnelli is of course the daughter of Vincente Minnelli and celebrated movie star Judy Garland. She became a musical icon in her own right in the 1970s, and two of her most famous movie musicals bookend her father’s films in HOME’s season.
Opening the season is Bob Fosse’s glorious Cabaret (Sun 7 July), which won eight Academy Awards, including Minnelli’s Best Actress for playing Kit Kat Club entertainer Sally Bowles. The season concludes with Liza opposite Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s 1977 New York, New York. Unfairly dismissed for a long time, this undeniably bloated tale of post-war big band jazz is electrifying as it fuses the sweep of Old Hollywood and with the grime of New Hollywood.
