The series of powerful and often subversive melodramas produced in Hollywood after the second World War have often been read as a direct response to the radically changing landscape of the late 1940s and 1950s, offering a subtle critique that pointed to the deep problems festering beneath the glossy surface of the nation’s newfound prosperity and power. The postwar melodrama is celebrated and much discussed today for staging the discontents in American life cinematically, particularly through the expressive use of light and color, décor and framing. It is somehow fitting that one of the masters of this genre began his career designing department store windows.

Vincente Minnelli was born in Chicago and grew up in the Midwest, his parents traveling performers who worked in tent-show theater and vaudeville. An aspiring artist, Minnelli used his drawing skills to land a job designing window displays for Marshall Fields, which in turn led to work for the Balaban Theaters in Chicago, where he designed and eventually directed the live stage spectacles presented before films. After a stint at Radio City Music Hall, Minnelli became, by the mid-1930s, a successful director of musical revues on Broadway, with Hollywood beckoning as the logical next step. Minnelli landed happily at MGM’s famed Freed Unit, where he directed many of the most popular and respected Hollywood musicals: Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, The Band Wagon, Gigi. While continuing to turn out inspired musical masterpieces, Minnelli also directed a string of melodramas whose visual sophistication and biting edge endure to this day.

The key to Minnelli's melodramas is their deep compassion for the misfit: men who long to be sensitive and gentle, women who yearn for autonomy, artists who refuse to conform.  No doubt Minnelli experienced similar struggles himself as a young man interested in art and literature growing up in Delaware, Ohio during the first decades of the twentieth century.  Minnelli's genius lies in his ability to convey the struggles of these misfits visually. His work in the theater had given him a masterful command of décor, a visual flair that only expanded as he worked increasingly in color and widescreen in the 1950s.

Minnelli's melodramas rank with those of two other Hollywood directors now celebrated for their stinging critiques of American postwar society: Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray. Indeed, the films included in this series steer a middle course between the soapiness of Sirk's later films and Ray's tender toughness. A century after his birth, Minnelli's virtuosic ability to match aesthetic vision and emotional drama has earned him a place in the pantheon of American filmmakers.