Ziegfeld Follies

Vincente Minnelli (February 28, 1903 – July 25, 1986) was a Hollywood director and stage director. His skilled integration of story, music, lighting, and design elements in a film made him the most critically respected crafter of American film musicals. With first wife Judy Garland, he was the father of Liza Minnelli.

Born Lester Anthony Minnelli in Chicago, Illinois, United States, Minnelli was the youngest surviving child of Mina Mary LaLouette Le Beau and Vincent Charles Minnelli. His father was musical conductor of Minnelli Brothers’ Tent Theater. Minnelli’s Chicago-born mother was of French Canadian descent and his paternal grandfather was from Sicily.

With his background in theatre, Minnelli was known as an auteur who always brought his stage experience to his films. The first movie that he directed, Cabin in the Sky (1943), was visibly influenced by the theater. Shortly after that, he directed Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), during which he befriended the film’s star, Judy Garland, although it is probable the two had met casually earlier. The two began a courtship that eventually led to their marriage in June 1945. Their one child together, Liza Minnelli, grew up to become an Academy Award-winning singer and actress.

Though widely known for directing musicals, including An American in Paris (1951), Brigadoon (1954), Kismet (1955), and Gigi (1958) he also helmed comedies and melodramas, including Madame Bovary (1949), Father of the Bride (1950), Designing Woman (1957) and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963). His last film was A Matter of Time (1976). During the course of his career he directed seven different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Spencer Tracy, Gloria Grahame, Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, Arthur Kennedy, Shirley MacLaine and Martha Hyer. Grahame and Quinn won Oscar for their performances in one of Minnelli’s movies. He received an Oscar nomination as Best Director for An American in Paris (1951) and later won the Best Director Oscar for Gigi (1958). He was awarded France’s highest civilian honor, the Commander Nationale of the Legion of Honor, only weeks before his death in 1986.

Minnelli’s critical reputation has known a certain amount of fluctuation, being admired (or dismissed) in America as a “pure stylist” who, in Andrew Sarris’ words, “believes more in beauty than in art.” His work reached a height of critical attention during the late 1950s and early 1960s in France with extensive studies in the Cahiers du Cinéma magazine, especially in the articles by Jean Douchet and Jean Domarchi, who saw in him a cinematic visionary obsessed with beauty and harmony, and an artist who could give substance to the world of dreams. Minnelli served as a juror at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival. The MGM compilation film That’s Entertainment! showed clips from many of his films.

In July, 1986, Minnelli died at age 83 after struggling with emphysema and bouts with pneumonia that caused him to be repeatedly hospitalized in his final year. He reportedly also suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. Interment was in Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. —Wikipedia

A former journalist, Roy Del Ruth entered films in 1915 as a screenwriter and gagman for Mack Sennett. Turning to directing two years later, he made two-reel comedies with such top comedians as Billy Bevan and Harry Langdon. He began directing features in the mid-‘20s, but found his niche with Warner Bros. in the early 1930s. Del Ruth was one of the directors who turned out the kind of gritty, tightly made urban and crime dramas for which Warners became famous. He left the studio and went to MGM, where he specialized in the kind of splashy, lavish musicals that made MGM’s reputation. Del Ruth was the stereotypical studio director—with the resources and backing of a major studio he was at the top of his form and capable of turning out solid, enjoyable, technically excellent films, but once he left the environment of a major studio and struck out on his own, his fortunes waned. After leaving MGM he made a few musicals and weak comedies (he was also responsible for what is generally considered the worst sports biography, and one of the worst biographies, ever made – the godawful The Babe Ruth Story (1948)), a cheap sci-fi opus that was picked up, but not made, by 20th Century Fox (The Alligator People (1959)) and an overheated drama for starlet Terry Moore, Why Must I Die? (1960), that was nothing more than a ripoff of the classic Susan Hayward film, I Want to Live! (1958). —IMDb

The son of a producer and MGM executive, and a mother who was one of the Mooney Sisters in vaudeville, George Sidney worked his way up from messenger boy to director of numerous MGM musical hits—at one point 15 consecutive box office winners. Though his artistry is not as renowned as Vincente Minnelli, Stanley Donen and Busby Berkeley, Sidney can lay claim to having directed such classic musicals as “Anchors Aweigh” (1945) “The Harvey Girls” (1946), the 1951 remake of “Show Boat” and “Bye Bye Birdie” (1962).

Sidney actually broke into show business as a five-year old, playing sidekick to Tom Mix in the silent film “The Littlest Cowboy” (1921). But he did not pursue acting as a child. Instead, at age 18, Sidney went to work at MGM, first as a messenger boy, then as a sound technician and film editor. Still a teenager, he graduated to directing “Our Gang” comedies, and, at the age of 20, was put in charge of directing all of MGM’s screen tests. He was also directing short films, including “Third Dimensional Murder” (1937), which experimented with the 3-D technique (which would later be in vogue during the 1950s), as well as the back to back Oscar-winners “Quicker’n a Wink” (1940) and “Of Pups and Puzzles” (1941).

In 1941, Sidney was handed his first feature film directing assignment, “Free and Easy”, a lackluster Robert Cummings vehicle. He went on to direct Esther Williams in her first starring vehicle, “Bathing Beauties” (1944), and helped pioneer the combination of live action and animation in “Anchors Aweigh” (1945), notably in the now classic sequence in which Gene Kelly dances with a cartoon Jerry the Mouse. The animated character was created by the animation team of Joseph Barbera and William Hanna and the film marked the start of a long association between Sidney and the duo which would later include a five-year (1961-66) stint as president of the independent Hanna-Barbera Productions.

Sidney helped to consolidate the stardom of Judy Garland with “The Harvey Girls” (1946) and he had a success with an all-star version of “The Three Musketeers” (1948) Among his other notable features are “Annie Get Your Gun” (1950), with Betty Hutton in the title role, the 1951 color remake of “Show Boat” and “Kiss Me Kate” (1953) which teamed Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel and provided Ann Miller with one of her best screen roles. Late in the 50s, with MGM collapsing with the end of the studio system and lavish musicals a thing of the part, Sidney moved to Columbia as a producer as well as director. He served in both capacities on the middling biopic “Jeanne Eagels” (1957), with a miscast Kim Novak in the title role. He fared better with the screen version of the hit Broadway musical “Bye Bye Birdie” (1962), with Ann-Margret, Janet Leigh and Dick Van Dyke. Sidney’s screen directing career ended with the unsuccessful musical “Half of Sixpence” (1968).

Sidney had occasionally worked on the small screen, including producing the 1964 Academy Awards telecast. He earned an Emmy nomination for directing and producing the United Nations-inspired film “Who Has Seen the Wind?” (ABC, 1965), in which the audience follows a refugee family as it seeks to reach America on a steamer. Still alive and nimble long after many of his contemporaries were not, Sidney participated in American Movie Classics’ “Unscripted Hollywood” chat programs, sharing recollections with other stars, such as Betty Garrett and June Allyson. He and his second wife also hosted a local Los Angeles cable show devoted to films, “Reel to Reel”. —tcm.com