Meet Me in St. Louis best of musicals
Who would have thought that Vincente Minnelli, the neophyte director of a lightweight musical comedy starring Red Sketon amid Nazi saboteurs, would make the masterpiece (1944) as his next film?
The musical film changed in the 1940s from the backstage musical like (1933) to the period musical, and
is the best of the lot. No longer requiring a plot about putting on a show as a pretext for the inclusion of musical numbers, the new period musical like
(1952) allowed characters to break out into song and dance in the midst of otherwise believable situations. The most memorable of these musicals, including
came out of Arthur Freed’s production unit at MGM. The situation in
is entirely commonplace. In the year 1903, the quiet middle-class life of the Smith Family of St. Louis is disrupted when the family patriarch, Alonzo Smith (Leon Ames), decides to move his family to New York City. Members of the family – Mrs. Smith (Mary Astor) and their four daughters including 17-year old Esther (Judy Garland) — voice their objections, to no avail.
But all’s well that ends well. Over the course of a year (the film is divided into sections corresponding to the four seasons), the family learns important life lessons.
Also, Mr. Smith relents and the family remains in St. Louis, a city of promise and opportunity represented by the opening of the 1904 World’s Fair.
Louis B. Mayer and the MGM studio execs weren’t keen on making the film. They thought it was dull – no plot, no dramatic conflict. But producer Freed won the day. “The Villain is New York! What more do you want?” he insisted.
shows Minnelli’s trademark elaborate visual style fully on display, with lush and warm Victorian interiors, beautifully lit exteriors, and always the director’s marvelous ability to choreograph movement (check out, for example, the way the camera glides up and through a seemingly solid window into the Christmas ball). Among the musical numbers are three standouts, original tunes written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, and sung by Judy Garland: and
The most memorable scene in this movie of memorable scenes, though, is perhaps the Halloween sequence. Minnelli himself said that it was the real reason he wanted to make the film in the first place.
As the children play in the film’s great St. Louis street set, they dare Tootie to trick or treat at the scary house of Mr. Braukoff and his ominous looking bulldog. Tootie manages to summon up all her bravery and approach the house. As she does so, the scene shifts to her point of view, and we see the action as enhanced by her imagination.
Minnelli introduced this stylized combination of realism and fantasy in his first musical, the all-black musical (1943), the year before
and it became a consistent characteristic of his work. This hybrid style was perfectly suited to the two genres Minnelli preferred, musical fantasies like
(1948), (1951), and (1954), and overheated melodramas like (1955), (1945), and (1956). Minnelli’s approach works perfectly in to provide a rich, seductive nostalgia for a simpler and better time which, if it didn’t exist, perhaps should have.