We were delighted to stage our first show at the iconic Cinema Museum with a rare screening of Vincente Minnelli’s Home from the Hill.

This event was particularly special for us as our previously scheduled screening at the Prince Charles was cancelled due to print damage issues. We then sourced a BFI archive print and relocated – on with the show!

An elegiac American CinemaScope epic, pitched somewhere between a western and a melodrama, Home from the Hill is an overlooked masterpiece by one of the great directors, Vincente Minnelli.

Robert Mitchum gives one of his finest performances as the philandering, imperious patriarch Wade Hunnicutt, whose wealth and influence makes him the most powerful resident of a small Texan town. George Hamilton plays his son Theron, a boy struggling to become a man in his father’s overbearing shadow, and George Peppard plays Rafe, the farmhand who holds the key to some of the family’s secrets.

Although Home from the Hill came out hot on the heels of Minnelli’s terrific Frank Sinatra vehicle Some Came Running, which was nominated for 5 Oscars, and his musical Gigi, which won a record-breaking 9, including Best Director, it has been comparatively and unjustly forgotten.

An epic family saga in a mould not unlike Giant or Peyton Place, Home from the Hill was released at the turn of the 1960s and also stands alongside works like John Huston’s The Misfits and John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as one of the great epitaphs for Hollywood’s Golden Age, embodying its genres and star machine while also anticipating the weary pessimism, sexual frankness and psychological richness of the New Hollywood era.

You can view a pdf of the programme booklet for this event here.