Meet Me in St. Louis has been charming audiences ever since its release in late 1944. Its warm, simple story of home, hearth, and family had a special resonance for wartime America. Its appeal is perhaps even more potent today, with its nostalgic evocation of a world and way of life even further from our grasp. This was only Minnelli’s third feature, and his first in Technicolor, but his touch already informs every frame. His stylistic hallmarks are in full flow: a painter’s eye for design and composition; rich use of colour; orchestration of movement, staging, and direction of actors; taste; attention to detail; lyric sense. The masterful opening sequence immediately sets the scene and the characters: the Smith family, their gingerbread American Gothic house, and their hometown, St. Louis (lovingly recreated on the M-G-M lot). It’s the summer of 1903, and everyone’s abuzz about the World’s Fair, opening the following spring. The film is structured in four seasonal “acts”, introduced with family-album postcards brought to life. We spend a year with the Smiths, discovering romance with the boy next door, singing on a trolley, enduring the terrors of Halloween (an amazing phantasmagorical sequence featuring the studio’s pint-sized Bernhardt, Margaret O’Brien), and worrying about the dreadful possibility of having to move away.

Above all, the film is Minnelli’s valentine to its star, Judy Garland. She originally fought against playing romantic teenager Esther Smith, wanting more adult roles. As directed by Minnelli and photographed by George Folsey, Judy literally glows, giving one of her best performances, and introducing the hit songs “The Trolley Song”, “The Boy Next Door”, and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”. Pay careful attention to the quietly beautiful scene of Esther and John extinguishing the lamps in the house: one gets a sense that this whole sequence was staged by a director in love with his star. Minnelli and Garland married the following year.

Catherine A. Surowiec