As talented as he was
versatile, Vincente Minnelli directed a handful of great films, plus quite a
few that were merely respectable, before his career started to lose momentum in
the late ’60s. Anyone would be proud of a legacy including Meet Me In St. Louis (1944), The
Bad and the Beautiful (1952), and Gigi
(1958). Minnelli also lived long enough to watch Liza Minnelli, his daughter
with Judy Garland, blossom into a dynamic and award-winning entertainer. The
wise move after the moderate success of his Barbra Streisand vehicle On a Clear Day you Can See Forever
(1970) might have been to retire gracefully. Unfortunately, showbiz
professionals often need to get yanked off the stage, and that’s what happened
when Minnelli made his final film, A
Matter of Time.
Convincing Liza to play the leading role presumably trumped any concerns that producers might have had about Minnelli’s old-fashioned style, since she was a hot commodity at the time, and Papa Minnelli recruited another big name, Ingrid Bergman, for the film’s main supporting role. Things didn’t go so well past that point. Minnelli was fired for going overbudget and overschedule. Then distributor American International gutted his footage to generate a 97-minute version of what Minnelli originally intended to be a three-hour epic. Ouch.
Convincing Liza to play the leading role presumably trumped any concerns that producers might have had about Minnelli’s old-fashioned style, since she was a hot commodity at the time, and Papa Minnelli recruited another big name, Ingrid Bergman, for the film’s main supporting role. Things didn’t go so well past that point. Minnelli was fired for going overbudget and overschedule. Then distributor American International gutted his footage to generate a 97-minute version of what Minnelli originally intended to be a three-hour epic. Ouch.
Watching the released cut of A Matter of Time, it doesn’t seem as if Minnelli’s ouster
represents a loss to cinema history. Telling the fairy-tale-like story of a
maid who rose to fame and fortune by learning from an eccentric old woman how
to seduce powerful men, A Matter of Time
is overproduced, tone-deaf, and unseemly. After a present-day prologue, the
film flashes back to Rome during some undetermined stage of the postwar era,
where 15-year-old Nina (Liza) arrives at the decaying hotel where her cousin
works as a maid. (Yes, Liza, who was pushing 30 when this film was released,
plays her character as a teenager.) Nina befriends the strange Contessa
Sanziani (Bergman), who wears a flamboyant cloak with leopard-skin trim and
sports ghastly black makeup rings around her eyes. Back in the day, the
Contessa played muse to great artists and thinkers, so she passes along her
philosophy of, put bluntly, using sex to help men realize their potential even
if the woman gets nothing in return. Nina thinks this lifestyle sounds
terrific, so she does the Contessa one better by trading sex for wealth and
notoriety.
All of this icky stuff plays out in stilted dialogue scenes, and the gaudy production design gives a more spirited performance than any of the
actors. Oh, and about halfway through its running time, the movie suddenly
becomes a musical, with Liza howling a few forgettable numbers. Need we even
mention the scene in which Mina forgives a would-be rapist for assaulting her because
he’s upset about writer’s block? Ultimately, the saddest and strangest thing about A Matter of Time isn’t watching a
venerable director derail his career and legacy—Minnelli never made another
movie—but the notion that he roped his Oscar-winning daughter into playing an
opportunistic whore. Not the best “Take Your Daughter to Work Day” in Hollywood
history. Having said that, nepotism worked out better for Bergman, because her
daughter Isabella Rossellini made her screen debut in A Matter of Time, playing the small role of a nun.
A Matter of Time: LAME
2 comments:
Mutilated might be the better word. Minnelli disowned the film after it was re edited without his OK. It's running time is a rather short 88mins.
I remember seeing this upon its release; I was (and still am) a big fan of Liza Minnelli and also Ingrid Bergman. I had seen a few of Vincente Minnelli's pictures and was hoping for the best, but I had already decided the title was not very grabby and was very dubious about AIP's involvement with a project like this.
My worst fears were realized almost instantly with the tinny musical score, cheap-looking opening credits, and after a few minutes in, the sudden insertion of a a shockingly edited present day montage of present day Rome in a film supposedly set in the 40s. It was downhill from there. Liza is at sea with this role, and she gets no help from Daddy. Bergman walks off with what there is left to salvage, but overall the movie is a depressing mess, considering the talent involved. Watching it I knew it would not help Liza's film career (it came about ten months after another disappointment post-"Cabaret": "Lucky Lady" (which compared to this is a masterpiece).
Liza followed this was the brilliant "New York, New York", which did not set the world on fire upon release but has since gained considerable appreciation. To no avail, though, Liza's movie career suffered for sure until "Arthur" in 1981, another smash that she had trouble finding a suitable follow-up for.
A New York station was constantly playing this when I moved to the city, and I gave it another look. Its flaws are less magnified on televison, but there is no getting around the fact that any chance this had of being anywhere close to the filmmakers' intentions were torpodoed by Samuel Z. Arkoff's disastrous re-editing of the aforementioned stock footage and many other glaring blunders--the sound was dubbed in many key scenes, the score was consistently treacly, and the story, even for a fairy tale like this, was thin and uninvolving.
I don't think Liza has ever mentioned this filmi since to any conceivable degree. Undersandable, it's probably a painful subject on many levels. I wouldn't say "A Matter of Time" should be altogether forgotten, but the whole affair is just very unfortunate for all involved (except for Ingrid).
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