NR | 1 h 53 min | Musical, Comedy | 1944
A friendly intercity rivalry between Kansas City, Kansas and St. Louis, Missouri is the stuff of Midwestern folklore. But a cinematic tie binds them, too.
Audiences had fallen in love with Judy Garland’s gorgeous 17-year-old singing voice in her 1930s hit “The Wizard of Oz.” Then in the 1940s, “Meet Me in St. Louis” made her audience fall in love again, when she was only 22 years old. Set in Missouri, the film echoes the same heartwarming theme: Home is where family is.
Nominated for four Oscars and set in 1903 before St. Louis’s 1904 World’s Fair, the film is an unashamed tribute to Garland that centers around the old-world charms of Midwestern family life. It re-creates a time when a home bubbling with courtships, marriages, and children and their pranks were all that families needed to be happy.
The children of lawyer Alonzo Smith (Leon Ames) and his wife, Anna (Mary Astor), include eldest daughter Rose (Lucille Bremer), her younger sister Esther (Judy Garland), and brother Lon (Henry H. Daniels Jr.). As they come of age, they turn desperate for suitors. Much younger siblings Agnes (Joan Carroll) and Tootie (Margaret O’Brien) find the ups and downs of these courtships amusing, and don’t mind soaking in all the fun.
Rose fancies Warren Sheffield (Robert Sully), Esther is interested in the family’s neighbor John Truett (Tom Drake), and Lon seeks favor with family friend Lucille Ballard (June Lockhart). Even six months before it opens, they’re swept up in the excitement around the fair, which at a cost of $50 million is billed to be America’s biggest at the time.
A lot is soon to happen. Tootie must enter school and Agnes move on to a higher grade, while Esther becomes a senior and Rose graduates. Suddenly, Alonzo’s firm decides to move him to New York to head their office there. That throws the family into a tizzy over leaving and losing the places, possessions, and people they love in St. Louis.
Morality Play
The opening song, “The Boy Next Door,” reveals Garland’s enviable poise, delivery, and timing. With barely any embellishment, it’s a songwriting masterclass from Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. It advances the story, reveals Esther’s emotions, and sweeps audiences into her inner world. They repeat that magic with their melancholic hit later on, counterintuitively titled “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” In every note and pause of that track, Garland depicts her foreboding over the impending move out of St. Louis.The duet “Meet Me in St. Louis,” composed for the 1904 fair, is here performed by Garland and Bremer (in her feature debut). Throughout the film, both actresses portray the pleasures and pains of courtship. As girls who hurry around in private, they suddenly slow down and walk ladylike when in public, and worry about who their next dancing partners will be. Suffocating from her first corset, Esther jokes: “I feel like the ossified woman in the sideshow!”
Margaret O’Brien, at only 7 years old, won an Academy Juvenile Award for her sensitive portrayal of the pain that children feel when left out of adult festivities.
Director Vincente Minnelli’s camera follows Esther through the lower and then upper deck of the tram ferrying local youth to the fairgrounds. First, when John doesn’t show, she’s silent and sullen. When he does, she joins the jolly crowd singing “The Trolley Song.” Minnelli captures the bittersweet chaos of long-distance calls as Rose expects Warren to propose on the phone, while the family at dinner eavesdrops by default, sharing every bit of her delight and dejection.
For all its lightheartedness, Minnelli’s film offers sobering lessons. Marriages and families teach individuals to think beyond themselves. They teach boys and girls, men and women to adjust, to compromise, to negotiate with each other’s likes and dislikes, leaving just enough room for themselves and those they love. Not too much, but enough. Husbands and wives, children, and grandparents grow as people precisely by jostling with each other, just as communities do—among themselves. Chivalrous Warren, John, and Lon showcase respect and restraint as authentic hallmarks of masculinity.
After tempers have flared, Anna plays the piano while Alonzo sings. When one pitch proves too high for him, she stops, then starts again, “I’ll put it down in your key.” The song’s words “You and I, together forever” imply someone having to adjust to another’s “key” every week if not every day. This theme reverberates in another song’s lyrics, “One live as two, two live as one, under the bamboo tree.”
