Judy Garland, Margaret O'Brien, Mary Astor, Tom Drake. Dir. Vincente Minelli, MGM, 1944
A couple of years ago I came upon a paperback anthology of stories written by William Saroyan for the New Yorker, a fictionalized series of adventures based on his own childhood in Central California. At first, I found the stories' sweet nature and fondness for childhood charming. By the end of the volume, however, I had grown bored. What I took for sweetness was nostalgic sentimentality, a heavy gloss slopped across each tale, preventing any independent movement by characters toward meaningful conflict or darkness of thought. No danger, no mystery, no ambiguity existed in any of Saroyan's stories, just an eternally gentile, bucolic charm - the literary equivalent of Randy Newman's faux-ragtime songs like "Dayton, Ohio 1903."
If Vincente Minelli's legendary 1944 musical, Meet Me in St. Louis, suffers from anything, it's the same surfeit of sentimentality. A gorgeous, unreservedly romantic evocation of turn-of-the-century Midwestern life, Meet Me in St. Louis offers everything BUT ambiguity, mystery, or even a whiff of something like conflict. Even when a character is injured, frightened, or heartbroken, we sense roses and parties lie in their future.
Even in 1944, this material was sachharine-sweet. Judy Garland, tired of playing dewy young girls, started into the picture with an ironic approach and director Minelli, her soon-to-be husband, stopped her and said the movie didn't work without a 100% investment in the character and the material. She did, he did, and the result is a movie dripping with honeyed innocence, a deliberate exercise in nostalgia offered up to an America on Hitler's doorstep, an America months away from detonating the first atomic bomb. 1944 wasn't the sunniest time in America, so Hollywood sold it escape in the form of Meet Me in St. Louis's unreconstructed sentimentality.
It's difficult to hate any musical which contributed so much to the Great American Songbook. It's hard to hate any film this unapologetic in its earnestness, or this lush in its production design and cinematic in its staging and choreography. As in so many cases, it's a legend for good reason. I've seen a lot of movies in my life and it's hard to think of another as achingly sincere as Meet Me in St. Louis. It's cheery even by the standard of the MGM musical.
There couldn't have been an unpleasant telegram? A neighborhood dog run down by the ice truck? Some kind of bummer? It would probably help a current audience to have some sort of antagonist, some kind of obstacle to overcome, though musical audiences are far more forgiving than I. Still, knowing there's nothing, at all, ever, to fear or fret robbed some of the film's charm in the second half. Wonderful staging of wonderful song about life's simple wonders followed by more, and more, of same weighed me down, like a little too much holiday fudge.
Like some confections, Meet Me in St. Louis tends to be sweeter, denser, more gooey than I ideally prefer. I am enough of a sugarholic, however, to know sometimes sweet is sweet and that's what matters. Meet Me in St. Louis delivers everything we want in a Technicolor MGM musical. Faulting it for its lack of darkness, while not inaccurate, feels at least a little irrelevant. As Minelli told Garland, you have to commit to this material 100%. If you do, it works. If not, you'll end up spitefully hoping Mary Astor falls and skins her knee, as I did.
Don't be me.
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