Mark Griffin (33 page)

Vincente married his second wife, Georgette Magnani (“The Sister of Miss Universe”), in 1954. PHOTO COURTESY OF PHOTOFEST

“I was excited about being in it, but it started off badly,” Charisse recalled. “That was because Kelly wanted to film it on location, in Scotland, while the studio said no, that was impractical because of the weather there, and insisted it be done in Hollywood. Minnelli preferred shooting inside a soundstage, so tons of earth were moved onto several soundstages and it was all shot inside.”
³
The heathered hills of
Brigadoon
were brought to life with a gargantuan 600-foot-long matte painting that encircled the entire set. The blatantly artificial environs would remain a sticking point with Gene Kelly.

If Minnelli and Kelly couldn’t agree on
where
the film should be shot, they were also at odds regarding
how
it should be shot. “Vincente and I were
never in synch, I must confess,” Kelly admitted. Minnelli envisioned the movie as “more of an operetta”—the type of “theatrical artifice” that was less like
An American in Paris
and more like
The Pirate
. Kelly, however, saw
Brigadoon
as “a Scottish Western”—Arthur Freed meets John Ford. When the entire production veered more in Minnelli’s direction, the star-choreographer was unhappy, and it showed. Minnelli later said he “had many talks with [Kelly], trying to impress on him the need to show exuberance in the part.”
⁴
But the star remained remote and grim-looking.

Although he had been overruled on location and approach, Kelly would get his way in another matter. “Minnelli was named as the director but Gene seemed to be doing everything,” remembers Michael Maule, a former New York City Ballet dancer who was initially cast as
Brigadoon
’s bridegroom, Charlie Chisholm Dalrymple. “I must say that I was very suspicious because there was this stand-in for me. A nice-looking young man. Gene would say, ‘Let whatever-his-name-was run through the scene for you. You just take it easy and let him do everything for you.’ And he kept doing this. Never giving me a chance to play a scene myself. I was very suspicious but everybody was so nice.” One day, after a run-through, Maule was abruptly dismissed:

Principal photography got underway in December 1953. Adding to the already palpable tension on the set was the fact that once the performers finally managed to produce whatever effect their exacting, nonverbal director was looking for, they were obliged to do it all over again. As beleaguered costar Van Johnson recalled,

Minnelli would later praise Lerner’s fantasy as “ingenious” and the score as “melodic and haunting.” However, according to Gene Kelly, Vincente was never in love with
Brigadoon
, and this seems to be borne out in the claustrophobic, airless feeling that permeates parts of the film. Occasionally, the musical manages to free itself from its soundstage shackles and soars. “The Heather on the Hill” is a glorious sequence, which succeeds because of the gracefulness of Kelly and Charisse and the inspired arrangements of Conrad Salinger.

At first glance,
Brigadoon
appears to contain all of the makings of a Minnelli classic: It’s a musical in which a restless soul traverses the pathways between an unsatisfying everyday existence and a far more enchanting dream world. Yet, a frustrated Minnelli, a “curiously remote” Kelly, and the drudgery
of repeating every shot a second time in the name of CinemaScope added up to a 108-minute disappointment for some observers. “I told him I thought it kind of sucked and particularly a lot of Vincente’s work,” Stone Widney says of a postscreening autopsy he conducted with Alan Jay Lerner. “It had lovely touches in various places but clumsy staging, though Alan didn’t want to hear that and I think he was probably kind of in denial about that. As long as the show gets on and it has big stars and it makes money, I think Alan felt that it was a success.”
⁷

Fifty years after its initial release,
Brigadoon
is dismissed by some, championed by others. “I think
Brigadoon
is an underrated film,” says film and dance scholar Beth Genne:

Despite some of
Brigadoon
’s redeeming features, most of the critics took aim: “The whimsical dream world it creates holds no compelling attractions,” said Penelope Huston in the
London Times
. “Hollywood can still put its worst foot forward in the classic manner,” griped
Newsweek
.

Farley Granger, who had remained friendly with Vincente after
The Story of Three Loves
, remembered that he and designer Oliver Smith were visiting with Minnelli when the reviews of
Brigadoon
were phoned in to the film’s mortified director.

ALONG WITH
Alice in Wonderland
and
The Catcher in the Rye
, W. H. Hudson’s 1904 fantasy
Green Mansions
was on the short list of great books best left unfilmed. Although it ranked alongside the Bible and the dictionary on the all-time bestseller list, Hudson’s classic was considered “too special” to be adapted for the screen. Set in “the forbidden forests beyond the Amazon,” the novel concerned a disillusioned political refugee who retreats into the jungle, where he encounters Rima, the ethereal Bird Girl who captures his heart. The revolutionary joins Rima on a trek to find the lost civilization of Riolama, but their journey ends in tragedy.

As several frustrated producers would discover, attempting to transfer
Green Mansions
to the screen was a daunting prospect. Even a semi-faithful adaptation would demand stunning on-location photography, a barrage of special effects, and a leading lady who could be believable speaking “bird” and flitting about in cobweb couture.

In the early ’30s,
King Kong
director Merian C. Cooper attempted to bring
Green Mansions
to the screen for RKO (which had acquired the rights to Hudson’s book in 1932). A Technicolor camera crew was dispatched to South America to shoot atmospheric location footage, and costumer Walter Plunkett was commissioned to create a smock of spider webs for exotic beauty Dolores del Rio, who was a shoo-in to play Rima. Everything seemed to have fallen into place when a regime shift at RKO spelled the end of Cooper’s
Green Mansions
—but that didn’t stop other filmmakers from trying. In 1945, MGM acquired the screen rights to Hudson’s allegory of eternal love. A steady
stream of press releases announced everyone from Peruvian folk singer Yma Sumac to the far too earthy Elizabeth Taylor as Rimas-in-waiting, but still
Green Mansions
defied the cameras.

In October 1953, the
Los Angeles Times
reported that Metro was taking a “new whack” at the property: “MGM still thinks it can lick the
Green Mansions
problem—i.e., how to get a movie out of W. H. Hudson’s classic. . . . Present solution: To turn it over to Alan Lerner, writer; Vincente Minnelli, director; and Arthur Freed, producer—a trio endowed with comparative taste and intelligence—with permission to shoot the works.”
¹

Despite the participation of Minnelli, Lerner, and Freed, none of them had any intention of making
Green Mansions
:
The Musical
. It would be a drama, though music would play an important part in the production. In fact, Brazilian composer-orchestrator Heitor Villa-Lobos was engaged to create a “Bird Symphony” for the film. This would be part of what Minnelli hoped would be a “mystical score” based on authentic birdsongs.

In February 1954, Alan Jay Lerner reported that he was “cruising up the Orinoco,” with twenty-five pages of his
Green Mansions
screenplay completed. “I am resisting desperately the temptation to write ‘charm’ and ‘local color,’” Lerner explained to Arthur Freed. “I feel very keenly that it must never look like a fantasy. . . . I am also trying to write it economically, not only to preserve the mood and narrative flow, but also so that there will be adequate room for the visual.”
²

As usual, the visual was very much on Minnelli’s mind as he flew off to Peru, Panama, British Guiana, and Venezuela to scout locations for
Green Mansions
that June. Like Lerner, Minnelli realized that the last thing Hudson’s fairy tale needed was a studio-manufactured South America. The more naturalistic the setting, the more believable the story—though once Vincente was en route to the rain forests, he may have wished he was back in Culver City: “I was in this one motor plane with Indians and their babies who vomited in the aisles, goats and hound dogs. . . . I never thought we’d get there in one piece,” he said of the trip.
³
In the jungles of Venezuela, Minnelli and company were hampered by incessant rain, primitive conditions, and oppressive heat. After a week of waiting around for the torrential rains to subside, Minnelli, art director Preston Ames, and a skeleton crew managed to shoot some stunning 16 millimeter images.