“Somehow this crazy world has taken on a wonderful design”:

Vincente Minnelli’s Neo-Victorian Utopias in Hollywood

Abstract

The mid-twentieth century Hollywood film director and artist Vincente Minnelli had a life-long fascination with the fin de siècle, which both precipitates and problematises the category of neo-Victorianism. In nine films Minnelli recreated this period as a utopian space of aesthetic excess and sexual freedom. Yet his interest in the fin de siècle has gone all but unnoticed by his critics. This article sets out the roots of Minnelli’s concern with the period, as an illustrator and set designer in 1920s and 1930s New York and Chicago, and suggests that the assertion of his neo-Aestheticism in early 1940s Hollywood participated in a significant aesthetic shift in the Hollywood musical. It illustrates this claim by exploring the evolution of Minnelli’s conception of the fin de siècle in the musicals Meet Me in St Louis (1944), Ziegfeld Follies (1946), and An American in Paris (1951). In so doing, this article considers how and to what extent Minnelli can be considered as neo-Victorian, and how his musicals ask us to reflect on exactly when neo-Victorianism can date from.