Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

The Smith family lives in idealistic 1903 St. Louis, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have problems. Serious problems like how can Ester (Judy Garland) get the boy next door to propose if they haven’t even been introduced? And can sister Rose get her boyfriend to propose over that new-fangled tele-phone contraption? Also, where has Tootie buried all of her dead dolls?

Meet Me in St. Louis is a nostalgic, feel-good, high production piece of fluff. Therefore, it was a huge success. The big song is Judy’s Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas which, unlike the others, has real meaning in the story. Here also is where The Trolly Song comes from, later made famous by the Sweeney Sisters.

The inciting incident comes past the halfway point. With a variety of personal issues in play, dad announces that they will move to New York City. Why live in a gorgeous Victorian in picturesque St. Louis when you can live in a Manhattan tenement? It’s a great opportunity, after all. Everyone must come to terms with this change while celebrating their last Christmas in St. Louis. This is the context of Judy’s song. Tootie doesn’t respond well.

Mary Astor plays Mom and she was hard to recognize, both in appearance and manner. Marjorie Main (Ma Kettle) played the maid. She wasn't hard to recognize. June Lockhart and Hugh Marlowe had tiny roles, but we must talk about Tootie.

Margaret O’Brien at 6 was already an established child star, so her momager decided the studio should pay her accordingly. The studio immediately responded by announcing that the part would go to the daughter of an electrician. The O’Brien’s held out and ended up with the contract they wanted. The electrician responded by dropping lighting equipment from a catwalk near where Margaret was standing. Hollywood is such a warm and inviting place.

The investment in O’Brien certainly paid off for the studio. She just about steals the show and was awarded a juvenile academy award. The same movie framed around her character would have been very interesting. The Halloween segment was, well, quite unexpected. The kids of the town are left to their own devices where they build a bonfire with stolen patio furniture, and throw flour in the face of adults they hate. The talk of hate and blood and murder from the youngest two Smith daughters was delightfully out of place.

But this is Judy’s film and a big hit for her, despite her hairstyle looking like she is hiding horns. And her acting ... wasn’t terrible. Perhaps the lack of gravity in her performance was masked by the mannered style of period costume dramas. The film has only slightly more realism than Oz. Her difficulty on set is an early example of the pill problem that would eventually take her life. At 22 the lines in her face were starting to appear. In the end she pulled out some pretty good performances and would go on to marry the ugly director, twice her age.

Meet Me in St. Louis is the kind of film that it is. Everything is perfectly lit, the colors supersaturated, and all characters, regardless of the circumstance, are impeccably costumed, styled, and made up. But the morbidity of the two youngest sisters is shockingly out of place. Out of place, but oddly not unwelcome. Were it all glitzy confection, it would have less appeal. As such, AMRU 4. It is a delightful piece of fluff.

“It'll take me at least a week to dig up all my dolls in the cemetery.”