While I wasn’t as enamored with Home From the Hill as much as Vincente Minnelli’s similarly fraught melodrama of masculinity Some Came Running (which I’m increasingly convinced is one of the greatest films ever made), the film does demonstrate why Minnelli was the master of widescreen Hollywood.
Take, for instance, a scene from the midpoint of the film, where Theron (George Hamilton) tells his father, Capt. Wade Hunnicutt (Robert Mitchum), that he wants nothing to do with him given that his womanizing reputation is sullying his name as well—not to mention leading to the revelation that Wade’s loyal employee, Rafe (George Peppard), is his son. Minnelli cuts from a medium of Hamilton over to an opposing single of Mitchum, which pans into a two-shot as Mitchum stands up and walks up to Hamilton, with Wade forcing Theron to spit out his grievances. “As far as I’m concerned there’s only one bastard in this family, and I don’t mean it’s Rafe.” Minnelli cuts out to a medium-wide, diffusing the tension. “Well that cat’s finally out of the bag, huh?” The camera pulls back with a slight dolly, with Mitchum moving towards the camera faster than it’s moving away from Hamilton, as if he’s pushing it. Mitchum sits down in a medium as he sips his coffee, with Hamilton stuck in a meek and disarming full shot on the other corner of frame. Theron tries to step forward, but a chair stands in between them. Wade gets back up, and the camera tracks his medium back as he meets Theron in the middle of the room; the chair disappears below frame.
Minnelli’s mise en scène and camera movement in this sequence is constructed entirely around highlighting the absolute control Wade has of his environment, undermining at every step the control that Theron tries to take in his life. It might be more obvious to point to, say, the rifles and shotguns and game trophies framed behind Theron as a foreshadowing (even though Minnelli ultimately applies this in a more complex way than would be gleaned from this moment alone), but this narratively obvious set of imagery has little to do with how emotionally effective Minnelli is as a director—that’s found in the way people move and the way they move the camera.
Two scenes after this confrontation, Theron has found a working man’s job. When Wade tries to assert himself again over Theron, Theron drives his forklift out of the right of frame, past Wade in the center, and off frame left, symbolically pulling with him the dolly-bound camera, which pans to the right to keep Wade in center-frame—the quick action is a visual rush of emotion, and Theron has reversed the dynamic between himself and his father by taking control of the camera. Another forklift flies past Wade as the camera stays still and one shot crossfades over to the next, with a car speeding from left to right before Rafe jumps out. Minnelli’s découpage (a common term in Bazinian film criticism, which has often been conflated in English translations with “editing,” découpage concerns the conceptualization of sequencing during a film’s shooting rather than what’s found in post) establishes a stunning crash which is already in motion.
More so than Breathless as a fulcrum in film history—where there’s a specific “cinema before” and “cinema after” point—there’s a sequence three years later in Contempt which serves as the greatest theoretical distinction between eras of the medium’s history (as opposed to technical ones, like the jump from silent to sound cinema): as Fritz Lang exits the screening room at Cinecittà, the camera briefly pans while his interpreter and assistant leave frame; Lang steps forward lighting a cigarette, which causes Georges Delerue’s romantic score to kick in and the camera to slowly dolly back with Lang. When Godard cuts opposite, the camera’s now pushing forward—as if Lang was watching a film unfold in front of him—where the married leads running towards each other are cut in half as the lecherous producer drives between them.
It’s no doubt a Minnellian bit of mise en scène (Michel Piccoli’s character Paul so much as references Dean Martin in Some Came Running later when he dons a fedora and cigar in the bathtub), but with the added effect of being a moment about that kind of mise en scène—here the young director (Godard) makes the elder statesman (Lang) into an active participant; cinema can no longer exist by itself because it now has become about itself.