HOME FROM THE HILL ***

If, like me, you consider Vincente Minnelli one of the all-time great directors then you have to accept that his melodramas are just as good as his musicals. In the fifties and sixties he made a series of heightened melodramas, grandly operatic in tone and shot largely in Cinemascope and colour, (the 1952 "The Bad and the Beautiful, which he made in black and white, is perhaps the most famous of his non-musicals but it's a piece of Hollywood hysteria I've never actually liked). If the subject matter of most of his films gravitated towards soap-opera, the style he applied and the look of these pictures was extraordinary.

Minnelli was fundamentally a designer and Cinemascope gave him the opportunity to use the screen as a vast canvas in which he could place his characters. A lot of these films are among the most visually stylish of their period. Of course, he was also blessed with very strong scripts and outstanding casts. He made "Home from the Hill" in 1960 and it's not as well-known as some of his other films. It doesn't deal with as 'controversial' a subject as homosexuality like "Tea and Sympathy", the same level of hysteria as "The Cobweb", the deep intensity of "Some Came Running" or the insider knowledge of the movie business of "Two Weeks in Another Town" but it remains a hugely exciting piece of cinema nevertheless.

It's a family drama and a surprisingly intimate one considering its two and a half hour running time. Robert Mitchum is the small-town patriarch who can't keep it in his pants and is living in a loveless and sexless marriage with Eleanor Parker. Their son is George Hamilton, initially a momma's boy but taken under his father's wing when he turns 17 and George Peppard is the young rough-neck who, it turns out, is Mitchum's illegitimate son.

The very fine screenplay was by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr from a novel by William Humphrey that veers from small-town soap opera to faux Greek tragedy complete with a Greek Chorus of gossipy old men and like almost everything Minnelli did he handles the interplay between his characters with the same brio as he handles the widescreen and his use of colour. It's also beautifully played by the entire cast with Peppard proving to be the revelation. It may be the least revived of his films but it's still unmissable if you do get the chance to see it.