The UW Cinematheque kicked off its schedule for the fall semester this past weekend with two films generally regarded as cinematic masterpieces, though of very different species: Vincente Minnelli's iconic musical ""Meet Me in St. Louis"" (1944) and the Harold Lloyd silent comedy ""The Kid Brother"" (1927).
Friday night's screening of ""Meet Me in St. Louis"" was the first in a nine-film series devoted to the work of Minnelli, a legendary director best-known for his crayon-box musicals and his star-powered melodramas. This retrospective will feature some of Minnelli's most highly-regarded films, including ""The Bad and the Beautiful"" (1952), a glossy yet brooding critique of the Hollywood money machine (screens on September 26th), and the Technicolor classic ""Some Came Running"" (1958), a vaguely literary drama starring the duo of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin (screens on November 14th).
""Meet Me in St. Louis"" contains much of what is most distinctive and endearing about Minnelli's style: the freewheeling camera movements, the vibrant and polychromatic color schemes, the pithy one-liners and the lingering sense that the film is a small world onto itself. Sure, the film's sentiments are awfully sappy at times, and the 35mm print that the Cinematheque used for the screening occasionally lapsed into irksome graininess; but overall, ""Meet Me in St. Louis"" was a lot of cinematic fun.
Minnelli was the sort of director who could never settle for constructing a cute, modest little flick—he insisted on creating cinematic worlds composed of compelling personas and lavish locales. ""Meet Me in St. Louis"" is exactly that: A world whose social structure is utterly confused and barely existent; a world in which an entire milieu can be stuffed into a single mansion without losing any crucial details; a world where every room of every home is stocked with bowls of fruit. Nobody in the audience on Friday night seemed to mind being transported to this world, nor did they seem to want to leave. This movie, which the great film critic James Agee once called ""a musical that even the deaf should enjoy,"" certainly did not disappoint.
Saturday night's screening was the film that many consider to be the best work of silent comedy legend Harold Lloyd: ""The Kid Brother."" The screening featured live musical accompaniment by local piano player David Drazin, who did a remarkable job keeping pace with the unrelenting momentum of Lloyd's comic chaos. In ""The Kid Brother"" Lloyd flies all over the screen like a flabbergasted pinball, accidentally dragging everybody he encounters into his strange world of semi-conscious absurdity. Throughout the film, Lloyd's self-confidence is alternately inflated and deflated, yielding a balloon-like figure whose wildly expressive eyes nearly replace him as the central protagonist.
Agee wrote that Harold Lloyd ""was outstanding even among the master craftsmen at setting up a gag clearly, culminating and getting out of it deftly, and linking it smoothly to the next,"" and anybody who attended Saturday night's screening would agree with this assessment. Nearly every element of ""The Kid Brother"" scores in one sense or another: the masterfully expressive faces, the hilarious novelty of having a monkey dress as a sailor and serve as a pivotal character, the bumbling and bickering villains, a pair of fraudulent medicine men who closely resemble the duo of Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare in ""Fargo,"" and so on. ""The Kid Brother"" is nothing if not a beautifully and logically constructed work, a master lesson in the sacred art of provoking chuckles.
The Cinematheque holds its screenings every Friday and Saturday night all semester long.
