DVD of the Week: “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father”

Vincente Minnelli was one of Hollywood’s most inventively decorative filmmakers, but he ascends to the ranks of great directors because his exquisite style presents worlds of deeply felt and provocative material, such as in the 1963 comic drama “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father.” The movie tells the story of a father and son recovering from the loss of their wife and mother; it pulsates with vulnerability. Minnelli was among the most sensitive and sympathetic artists working on the turmoil of children as they cope with parents, elders, and authority figures—and on the struggle of parents against their children while contending with adult concerns. Long before the open social conflict of the sixties, Minnelli was filming in the overheated hollows of the generation gap, and what he saw there was a prescient challenge to prevailing notions of masculinity. In such films as “Father of the Bride,” “The Cobweb,” “Tea and Sympathy,” “Designing Woman,” and “Home from the Hill,” Minnelli posed sophisticated and audacious questions about what it is to be a man, and then raised them to riotous heights in the gender-twisting comedy “Goodbye Charlie.” That’s why, though I love many of Minnelli’s musicals, I would, if I had to choose, prefer to take a stack of his melodramas and comedies to a desert island. I’m glad I don’t have to choose.