Vincent Minnelli's Career Roared out of the Gate With Cabin in the Sky and Ended Bleakly With A Matter of Time

In his 1940s and 1950s heyday, Vincente Minnelli proved a master of melodrama, musicals and that timeless show-business fixation (and subject of my Fractured Mirror column here) movies about movies. He was at once a populist entertainer of beloved mainstream hits like Meet Me in St. Louis and Gigi and a stealth social critic who exposed the underlying despair and uncertainty lurking behind the shimmering mirage of the American dream both in devastating dramas like Some Came Running and quietly searing comedies like Father of the Bride, which is darker and more despairing than its status as a beloved American family classic would suggest.

But it was as a director of musicals that Minnelli first made his mark, originally on Broadway and later as a feature filmmaker, beginning with 1943’s Cabin in the Sky, one of the all-time great directorial debuts.

Minnelli’s breathtaking first film was no mere movie. No, it was a bona fide pop culture event, a landmark for black Hollywood and black film that showcased the beauty, talent and soul of black America like few films before or since. It was a veritable one-movie Harlem Renaissance, a rollicking celebration of the black experience and the eternal push and pull between good and evil, God and the devil, the salvation of the church and the temptations of dice, wine and wicked women.

Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, best known as Jack Benny’s chauffeur, sidekick and comic foil on radio, television and film, lends his impeccable timing, expressive features, trademark rasp and everyman affability to the lead role of Little Joe Jackson, a good man with some very bad habits, most notably a gambling addiction and a wandering eye that frequently strays from his gold-hearted wife Petunia (Ethel Waters) to sexpot Georgia Brown (Lena Horne), the town seductress.

As in The Devil and Daniel Webster, an American classic this often resembles, right down to its protagonist climactically getting saved from hellfire by a technicality, an everyman’s soul becomes the unlikely subject of a tug of war between the forces of heaven and hell, good and evil, God and the big guy with the horns and hooves and pitchfork downstairs.

In this case the spiritual battle begins when degenerate gambler Little Joe gets shot by hotshot gambler Domino Johnson (the magnetic John William Sublett, who takes center stage in “Shine,” a show-stopping production number ghost-directed by an uncredited Busby Berkley) and lingers in a strange limbo between life and death, with demons and angels debating the ultimate fate of this lovable sinner’s eternal soul.

The thoughts and prayers of Petunia, who as a good, strong-willed Christian woman, is a force to be reckoned with in heaven and hell as well as Earth, end up saving her hubby from death and hell but with a big caveat: he’s got six months to prove that he is a good man who deserves salvation despite his unfortunate predilection for sinning, with demons and angels both working behind the scenes to try to influence him to follow the wrong and right path respectively, without him remembering his close brush with death and deadline to prove his righteousness.

Hell predictably plays dirty by dispatching one of its most effective agents, femme fatale Georgia Brown (Lena Horne) to slink around an understandably infatuated Little Joe and make him forget his godly love for Petunia in a flood of hormones and lust.

Horne’s bare midriff here violates the dreary puritanical spirit of the Hays Code, if not any specific ordinances. Let’s just say it’s a good thing that “scorching, overwhelming, almost preternatural sexuality” was not explicitly, specifically banned or Horne’s mesmerizing performance would never have seen the light of day, or ended up entirely on the cutting room floor thanks to censors, as an excised production number of Georgia Brown singing in a bubble bath unsurprisingly did.

Horne reduces the men here to drooling puddles of pure lust, the human equivalent of the Big Bad Wolf stalking Red in Tex Avery cartoons. Horne oozes sensuality. When people complain that the explicitness of today’s screen sexuality pales in comparison to the smoldering suggestiveness of Golden Age Hollywood, this is what they’re talking about. Horne is distractingly, hypnotically, unforgettably sexy in a way that invites admiring comparisons to the most iconically sexy women ever to grace the big screen, your Jessica Rabbits and Kathleen Turner in Body Heat and Maggie Cheung in In the Mood for Love.

Horne and Waters occupy very different female archetypes. Horne is the jezebel femme fatale seductress literally out to pull a (relatively speaking, all things considered, if you grade on a forgiving curve) good man down into the bowels whether she realizes it or not and a God-fearing, church-going woman who is willing to move heaven and earth to save the soul of her all too relatable if questionably worthy hubby and soulmate. Yet they’re equally fierce and equally volcanic, two powerhouses at the apex of their mega-watt movie star magnetism.

Waters makes Petunia at once a pure-hearted secular Saint with a direct line to her blessed Savior and a sly, calculating schemer savvy enough to beat the devil and his soldiers at their own rigged game. Petunia isn’t just morally better than everyone else; she’s better at being bad as well.

When Petunia goes over to the dark side, or at least flirts with doing so to either bale Little Joe out of a jam or teach him a lesson, it feels like the musical equivalent of the crowd-pleasing scenes in Superman III where the Man of Steel gets wasted and turns into a real Super-Creep. Waters is so convincing and forceful as goodness and simple virtue personified that there’s something oddly transgressive, even subversive about seeing her take such playful delight in being a bad girl, if only for one night.

Hell has a two-fold plan for corrupting Little Joe. There’s Georgia Brown, of course, but the underlings of Lucifer aren’t taking any chances so they decide to make Little Joe wealthy as well. In Cabin in the Sky, as in life, money tends to bring out the worst in people.

Cabin in the Sky depicts a vision of Hell that’s less the usual nightmare realm of infinite torment than a sort of otherworldly advertising agency, with “idea men” brainstorming schemes for winning over souls for Satan the way ad men might spitball ideas to get housewives to buy more toothpaste.

Minnelli’s wildly entertaining debut looked, felt and sounded like nothing that had come before. It benefitted from the trademark lush, even decadent production values of the Freed Unit (the legendary MGM musical maestro produced an astonishing array of superstar musicians and icons in supporting roles, like Dizzy Gillespie and Cab Calloway) and a look at once dreamy and sophisticated and earthy and grounded, an art deco paradise of glamour and sex filled with impressionistic shadows and simple but effective special effects.

Cabin in the Sky is a heartfelt celebration of the love of two ordinary people in which every element is extraordinary, even transcendent, including the superlative work of the ambitious young genius in the director’s chair, who had a rare understanding of how to make stage musicals come alive onscreen even at this early stage.

As this column has unfortunately illustrated, the careers of the great auteurs of American cinema tend to end a lot weaker than they began. That’s true of Minnelli, whose career ended not with a bang but with a whimper in the form of 1976’s curiously inert show-business musical melodrama A Matter of Time. 

The movie represented a curious professional marriage between A-list filmmaker Minnelli, Italian producer Giulio Sbarigia and co-financier and distributor American International Pictures, the prolific drive-in movie and exploitation specialists Roger Corman helped make a powerful force in low-budget independent film in the 1960s.

American International Pictures had much more experience churning out beach party and outlaw biker movie cheapies for the teen market than they did working on musicals with prestigious directors. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the B-movie specialists badly mishandled the project, yanking it out of the hands of Minnelli, taking the proverbial garden shears to it in the editing room and treating its director so shabbily that fan Martin Scorsese waged an unsuccessful but spirited campaign to try to shame AIP into doing right by the fading screen legend.

A Matter of Time is a lumbering time-warp of a musical designed to showcase the offbeat charm and mega-watt charisma of a powerhouse performer near and dear to the director’s heart: his daughter Liza. Alas, the faltering auteur ended up doing his offspring a terrible disservice by woefully miscasting her in the role of Nina, a small town girl who arrives in Rome a nineteen year old innocent overjoyed to score even a modest-paying a job as a maid in a beat-up old hotel in the big city.

Minnelli, who was thirty when the film flopped, perhaps unwisely plays her character as a doe-eyed, provincial teenager as well as a glamorous movie star. The game but overmatched actress was entirely too old, too American and too worldly to be convincing as a European naif who learns all manner of life lessons from a grand old dame at the end of a long and exquisitely lived life.

Ingrid Bergman costars in the ostensibly juicy role of Countess Lucretia Sanziani, an irrepressible life-lover and free spirit based on Marchesa Casati, a real-life heiress, patron of the arts, legendary muse and all-around world class eccentric. When our teenaged maid first encounters the Countess, her finances are at a low but her spirit remains high. The daffy older woman takes a liking to the talented young ingenue. Under the Countess’ loving tutelage, the big-hearted young woman blossoms into a glamorous and dynamic young starlet and later a full-fledged diva of international film, not unlike the second-generation icon playing her.

A Matter of Time is mostly a dinosaur out of place in a New Hollywood crackling with contemporary resonance except for the unfortunately sizable role sexual assault plays in it. The screenwriter who helps catapult our plucky chambermaid heroine to stardom is working on a script but seemingly the only aspect of the film he’s writing that he cares about is a big rape scene he can’t stop talking about and that places Minnelli’s late-period folly unmistakably in the overflowing pantheon of 1970s movies that introduced rape both tastelessly and needlessly.

Minnelli’s final film, which he unsurprisingly disowned when it was slashed to a shell of its former self by its skittish distributor, opens by positing the story that we are about to see as a fairy tale that has come true but fairy tales, at least good fairy tales, are never this boring.

Time assumes the form of an endless series of flashbacks and jumps forward and backward in time, as memory bleeds into fantasy and reverie, giving the movie the feel of a Russian nesting doll just keeps pointlessly doubling back on itself.

A Matter of Time continually violates the old dictum to show, rather than tell. We are breathlessly informed, for example, that the Countess was once “The greatest love goddess in all of Europe, the absolute ravishing masterpiece of a feminine animal! The inspiration to countless artists of renown!” but she comes off more like a road show Auntie Mame dispensing fortune cookie aphorisms like “It is not enough to look at yourself. The mirror must be beautiful too!”

Few could match Minnelli when it came to musicals, melodramas and movie world melodramas. So it’s particularly unfortunate that he ended a glorious career with a movie that’s equally inept as a musical (short on both songs and inspiration), a melodrama about a woman intent on living by her own rules rather than the oppressive social codes of the time and an inside-showbiz drama.

Liza at least gets a gorgeous wardrobe and some very big monologues where she tries to single-handedly make for up for the sleepiness of the rest of the film through sheer, sweaty exertion. But as a showcase for Minnelli’s explosive talent, A Matter of Time is a shapeless, formless mistake, overly talky, sometimes poorly dubbed (a regrettable trademark of the soupy and over-produced international co-production) and claustrophobic, largely limited to one drab hotel.

Movie stars do not get much more legendary than Minnelli or Bergman. But A Matter of Time defeats these towering legends of the Silver Screen by positing them not just as exciting and dynamic but as the very personification of glittering star power and nuclear-force personality, then giving them alternately nothing and way too much to work with. Liza and Bergman are either sleepily restrained or delivering the kinds of big speeches that would win Oscar nominations and statues in less doomed, labored and clearly butchered fare. 

For quite literal reasons at the end, Cabin in the Sky feels like the kind of sublime dream that haunts you when you’re awake. A Matter of Time also sometimes has the hazy, pleasantly disorienting feel of a dream. Alas, it’s the kind of dream that’s so boring you forget it before you even wake up. Minnelli began his distinguished directorial career with a movie that roared with energy and life and concluded it with an uncharacteristically generic snoozer defined by its lifelessness.

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