Vincente Minnelli, one of Hollywood’s exemplary stylists, was also a leading dramatic analyst of institutions. That’s why he made the best inside-Hollywood movies of the time, “The Bad and the Beautiful” and “Two Weeks in Another Town.” And that’s why his movies about family life have exceptional depth—he films families like institutions, parsing their lines of power, extracting their strains of myth and history. His melodrama “Home from the Hill,” from 1960, which I discuss in this clip, is one of his best films and one of Hollywood’s most powerful family stories. It’s set in Texas and centered on a local kingpin, played with rugged swagger by Robert Mitchum. The grandee has two sons—one legitimate, effete, and spoiled; the other, illegitimate, independent, and capable. It’s a burly story of hunting and fighting, a romantic story of failed love and doomed love, a tale of intimate pleasures and transgressions, of open secrets and the search for identity. It’s also a story of public institutions, of laws and norms that insinuate themselves into the fabric of family life. Its rhetoric may be laconic and folksy, but its fury and its nobility seem distilled from Shakespeare.
The Front Row: “Home from the Hill,” One of Hollywood’s Most Powerful Family Dramas
