Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

Official trailer

Meet Me in St. Louis is Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 American musical depicting the upper-middle-class Smith family in St. Louis from summer 1903 through the spring 1904 opening of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, with the father’s announcement of a forced move to New York producing a Christmas-season family crisis.

Judy Garland plays Esther Smith. Margaret O’Brien plays Tootie Smith. Mary Astor plays Anna Smith. Lucille Bremer plays Rose Smith. Leon Ames plays Alonzo Smith. Tom Drake plays John Truett. Irving Brecher and Fred F. Finklehoffe wrote the screenplay from Sally Benson’s New Yorker short stories collected as 5135 Kensington. MGM released the film in November 1944 to enormous commercial success, becoming the studio’s biggest hit since Gone with the Wind.

For me this is pure pleasure, the warmest musical MGM ever made. Garland glows, O’Brien is a delightful little terror, and Minnelli’s color makes every room look like somewhere you’d want to live. My one quibble is the John Truett romance. It’s the thinnest thread in the whole picture.

The film is a Christmas film only by accident. The Christmas season occupies less than a third of the running time, but Garland’s performance of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ to comfort Tootie before what they believe will be their last St. Louis Christmas has become a hugely important Christmas song in American popular music. Minnelli’s structure follows the seasons instead of a conventional plot.

Each season gets a chapter card showing a tintype of the family home in that season’s weather, and the film’s emotional arc tracks the rising stakes of the family’s potential displacement against the cyclical reassurance of holidays returning each year in the same house.

Judy Garland’s ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’

Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane wrote the song originally with darker lyrics than the released version. The first draft included ‘Have yourself a merry little Christmas / It may be your last / Next year we may all be living in the past’. Garland refused to perform those lyrics, calling them too sad to give Margaret O’Brien’s Tootie. Martin revised the lyrics for the film, and the song became a Christmas standard.

Garland sings the song to a weeping Tootie sitting on her sister’s bed, with the family’s future uncertain and the Christmas tree shimmering through the window.

The entire film’s emotional weight rests on the performance. Minnelli holds the shot, leaves the scene to Garland, and resists every cutting opportunity. The restraint is the scene’s craft.

That scene undoes me. Garland sings straight to a crying little girl, Minnelli refuses to cut away, and I can’t think of a Christmas song performance I’d rank above it.

Margaret O’Brien’s Performance

Margaret O’Brien was seven during production. Her Tootie is one of the great child performances in American cinema. The character must hold both the family’s youngest-child charm and a much darker undercurrent visible in Tootie’s obsession with her dolls dying, her plans for funerals, and her terrifying solo expedition through Halloween night to throw flour at a feared neighbor.

The Halloween sequence is the film’s strangest and best passage.

Tootie crosses neighborhood lawns alone, screaming through a costume, throwing flour at the door of the local boogeyman, and running back as the neighborhood children declare her the bravest. The sequence has no real plot function. It exists because childhood fear is real and Sally Benson’s source stories remembered it. O’Brien received a juvenile Academy Award for the role.

The Halloween sequence is my favorite thing in the film. It’s creepy, funny and a little unhinged, and I’m delighted that Minnelli let a seven-year-old’s terror take over a glossy MGM musical for a whole stretch.

Minnelli’s Color and Composition

Meet Me in St. Louis was Minnelli’s third film and his first major Technicolor production. The color design draws on tintype photography and turn-of-the-century commercial illustration. Each season has its own palette. Winter’s deep blues and reds for the snowman destruction scene work as both seasonal accuracy and emotional registration.

Minnelli used the Technicolor process to push warmth at the edges of compositions instead of only at centers. The Smith family kitchen, dining room, and front parlor all glow in ways that distinguish the production from the harsher Technicolor of period musicals shot at other studios. The visual signature would carry through Minnelli’s later career and informs the look of his later films including An American in Paris and The Band Wagon.

I think this is the best-looking musical of the 1940s. Those glowing kitchens and parlors are why the threatened move feels like a real loss, because Minnelli has made the house itself a place I’d hate to leave.

Does Meet Me in St. Louis still hold up?

It’s a 9 for me, and the missing point is the romance.

It never holds my interest the way Tootie’s funerals for her dolls or Esther’s song for her little sister do. Everything else sits close to perfect: the seasonal structure, O’Brien’s strange and brave little girl, Garland at her warmest, and Technicolor that makes St. Louis glow. It’s a real Christmas film through that one song, and a primary text for the American musical.

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