....out of respect for the intentions of this director and its two stars, I cannot go lower.
What we have here is one of the tragic examples of studio interence post-production.
The film is "A Matter of Time," the director is the brilliant Vincente Minnelli ("Gigi," "An American in Paris," "The Bad and the Beautiful," many other classics or semi-classics, the majority of them made for M-G-M during Hollywood's Golden Age). The stars are Ingrid Bergman and Mr. Minnelli's daughter, the legnndary Liza Minnelli ("Cabaret," "New York, New York").
This was a passion project for both director and daughter who longed to make a film together. They selected a rather obscure novel, "Film of Memory," by Maurice Druon, I believe.
On paper, this would seem to be an ideal project for the two. Opportunities for the father to direct a period drama in Rome with his patented, masterly visual style of gorgeous elegance, and for the daughter to sing a bit, dress up in dazzling clothes and in general enjoy playing a movie star (albeit a newly discovered one). Bergman would play Liza's mentor, an aged, slightly insane contessa living on borrowed time at an enormous, old Roman hotel. The younger woman is her chambermaid, and the two form a friendship built mostly on the older, worldly woman's memories and observations.
The studio is the last you'd think would approach a project like this one. It was American-International, known mostly for low budget drive-in horror, biker flicks, and tons of grade Z double bills. AIP, as I'll call the studio from here on, wanted to do a prestige picture and the Minnellis needed a studio, and so, a deal was made. The budget was large for AIP ($5 million) and small for the Minnellis, but they put aside those concerns and hoped for the best.
They shouldn't have. The best case scenario would have been for the Minnellis to shop around their project to a more seasoned studio, but they were having little luck doing that. Even though Liza had just won an Oscar, she didn't really have box office clout, and her father had not directed a picture in almost five years (his last being the tepidly received Barbra Streisand musical "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever", a film with many similar characteristics of this one).
Filming commenced. From the beginning there were warning signs. Mr. Minnelli was in the very early stages of Alzheimer's and had trouble communicating with the largely Italian crew. FIlming went behind budget early on, and AIP began to get nervous. THey were able to finish it, though, and Mr. Minnelli provided with a first cut of almost three hours--unheard of for a studio like AIP, whose films hardly ever stretched even near the two hour mark.
Samuel Arkoff, the producer, took Minnelli's cut, and flat out butchered it. Scene after scene was cut, dreadful stock footage of modern day Rome was inserted, awful post-dubbing added, and what emerged was a truncated version of 96 minutes. And the opening credits are a tip-off of what's to come: they are alarmingly amateurish without one iota of beauty, which is a major theme of this story.
Bergman emerged relatively unscathed, but Liza Minnelli did not. Admittedly miscast, 30 years olf playing 16, she is not directed with any restraint, and the resulting performance is grating and undisciplined to the point where she often comes off as ridiculous. She does get one great musical number, but it is not enough to salvage her performance. This film was fatal to her burgeoning film career and resulted in her getting the dreaded moniker from exhibitors as "box office poison.' She regained standing in her next film, to a degree, which was Martin Scorsese's wonderfully idiosyncratic 1977 musical drama, "New York, New York", with Robert De Niro, a movie that opened softly but has gradually been generously reassessed, particularly after a 1981 reissue restoring deleted scenes. Liza did not return to the screen until the same year with the smash hit comedy "Arthur."
As for "A Matter of Time" it came and went fairly quickly. It did receive a national release to almost universal dismissal. I saw it in a multiplex in Tennesse and was mortified by what I was looking at. The color usually associated with Vincente Minnelli is nowhere to be seen; the movie looks not exactly cheap, but quite drab, although the costumes do have some flair. The editing and post-dubbing are hopeless, as is the grating musical score by Nino Rota. Bergman salvages it to a degree, but this is a movie not of its age with no compensating factors to overlook that.
As a fan of Liza Minnelli, it was a depressing experience, She will barely discuss the film, which was her only opportunity to work her father, and so that must be painful. The villain here was Arkoff, who flat out ruined any chance the film could have been received with a degree of appreciation (although some critics went out of their way to be kind, considering).
I can recommend this only as a curio. I've seen it a few times since, and it does not improve. What emerges on subsequent viewings is what a missed opportunity this was, and a sense of regret that it harmed Liza Minnelli's film career to such a significant degree. She maintained a smashing success on the stage, but Hollywood missed out, I must say. She exuded charisma even in this dreck.
It took forever to come out on DVD, but I believe it is still available. THe ABC affiliate in New York, channel 7, often showed it as a late movie, which is probably the largest audience it ever got.
I wish I could tell you it was good, believe me. But it is exactly as I've described. It ruined my opinion of AIP. They really butchered it and probably should have never released it as is, or gone back to the drawing board and brought in some type of film doctor to salvage what could be saved. As Pauline Kael, a renowned film critic at tthe time, "Minnelli's film is the movie I wanted to see, not this hacked up shambles." That about says it all.
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