![]() Photograph: 16/Kings Road Entertainment/Allstar 11. Minnelli plays a sex worker (in the era when Hollywood loved the idea of sex workers being picturesque comedy types) who is the witness to a violent crime and hires Reynolds (now working humiliatingly as a shopping mall security guard) to protect her. Reynolds is the ex-cop busted out of the police when a case went horribly wrong for no real fault of his. ![]() Minnelli’s career initially soared in tandem with that of Burt Reynolds and here she was reunited with the moustachioed hunk as co-star in this sparky if dated comedy thriller. Very bizarrely, the opening credit sequence uses the dramatic library stock music The Awakening, by the British composer Johnny Pearson, which at the same time in the UK was being used as the ITN News at Ten theme tune. Here is a cult oddity for Minnelli fans, but, in its way, an important link between her and her mother: an animated family musical inspired by L Frank Baum’s follow-up Oz novel from 1904, The Marvelous Land of Oz, with Minnelli voicing Dorothy and live-action sequences with Bill Cosby as the wizard. Minnelli has to act opposite Finney and Colin Blakely, with whom she has no chemistry. Minnelli plays the American photographer who hangs out in his palatial modernist home, being glimpsed on the CCTV screens on which Charlie rather creepily keeps an eye on things, and cruises around with him in his Rolls, taking pictures of his depressed home town. Charlie Bubbles (1968)Īlbert Finney’s sole directorial outing was this very 1960s romp about a fashionable northern writer, Charlie (Finney), who becomes gigantically rich and famous and winds up in a mood of directionless despondency in his wealthy London habitat. Photograph: Universal Pictures/Allstar 14. “His clothes danced with you,” she says of Halston’s work. The movie shows Minnelli’s own role in the history of fashion and her grasp of how costume works with choreography. She is being featured here in the role of an intelligent expert observer, rather than an opaque star commodity. Halston (2019)įashion documentarist Frédéric Tcheng gave us this study of designer Roy Halston – creator of Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat – which had some interesting commentary from his great friend and ally Minnelli. The three guys dressed as knights in armour clank up to her table, kicking off some uproarious physical comedy. One star that he and his two buddies (Marty Feldman, Dom DeLuise) approach is Minnelli, who is one day eating lunch at that legendary place that had in 1976 not quite vanished from Hollywood mythology: the studio commissary. Mel Brooks’s all-star stunt-casting extravaganza was a silent movie featuring himself as a washed-up director who needs stars to appear in his planned silent movie. ![]() He sneakily takes Minnelli’s photo off the wall and replaces it with his own, just she sweeps in she is deeply annoyed at being erased by the Muppet upstart. Kermit is pretending to be a bigshot producer, hoping to spread whispered rumours among the moneyed crowd that his show is the one to invest in. But in reality, all we got was this very brief cameo playing herself as Kermit enters the restaurant Sardi’s in New York. Minnelli would be a brilliant proper Muppet guest star: a Muppet Cabaret is the obvious choice. Photograph: United Archives GmbH/Alamy 17. With Kermit in The Muppets Take Manhattan. With some poise, she plays a deadpan straight-woman role, as blowhard Rupert continually interrupts her anecdotes. Minnelli plays herself in the delusional Rupert Pupkin’s dream of being on the top-rated TV chatshow, hosted by the glowering star Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis). The King of Comedy (1982)Īnother of Minnelli’s meta-cameos, this deleted scene surfaced many years afterwards, revealing that Scorsese had reunited his stars from New York, New York. It’s rather low energy and low on laughs, but Minnelli does at least carry a plausible supporting role. ![]() Lovable alcoholic Arthur is now married to Minnelli’s Linda, the shoplifter he fell for in the first film he loses all his money but is offered the chance to get his wealth back if he divorces his true love (Minnelli) and marry someone else. Here is a role and a movie that most Minnelli fans (and, come to think of it, most Dudley Moore fans) prefer to pass over in silence.
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