MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (1944)

I've just completed my semi-annual viewing of Vincente Minnelli's MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS. I've lost count how many times I've seen this film over the years, but it's become something of a Christmas tradition for me, a film I can return to again and again with the same level of joy, admiration, and, frankly, wonder.

Here are ten reflections about this great film.

1. It was Judy Garland's biggest hit. Of course, today Judy is best known and most beloved for THE WIZARD OF OZ, but at the time of its release OZ was an under-performer. (While it did well at the box office, OZ cost a lot to make and distribute, and it didn't actually turn a profit until it was rereleased in the late forties.). MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, however, was a massive hit right out of the gate. It established that Judy Garland--freed from her childhood costar Mickey Rooney--was a box office powerhouse.

2. This was peak Judy Garland, Movie Star. As an icon, there's no greater Garland movie than OZ. As an actor, there's no greater Garland movie than A STAR IS BORN. But if you want Peak Judy, if you want Judy the Star, then there's no greater Garland film than MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS. She's never looked more beautiful in a film--in every Technicolor frame Minnelli is telling us "Here is a movie star". She's also never been funnier in a film. Perhaps because of the pathos surrounding her tragic life, it's easy to forget that Judy was one of the funniest performers of her era. As the whip-smart boy-crazy Esther Smith in MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, she's hilarious. And, of course, the music by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, overseen by Judy's trusted friend and arranger Roger Edens, is some of her best, letting her do yearning in "The Boy Next Door" and melancholy in "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". The joyous "Trolley Song" sequence might be the most exuberant four minutes Judy Garland ever on film.

3. It was MGM's biggest hit to date. The studio had part ownership of GONE WITH THE WIND, but that film was first and foremost the work of independent producer David O. Selznik. It was in no real sense of the phrase an MGM production. MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, on the other hand, might well be considered the ultimate MGM production.

4. Its Christmas scenes are an outlier. Like a lot of people, I usually watch MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS at Christmastime, and the film has become something of a holiday classic due to the incredibly potent Winter section of the film that culminates in Judy singing "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" to Margaret O'Brien. The song would become a standard, forever linking the film to the holiday. The film itself, however, is told in sections, and the Winter section is simply one among four.

5. Somehow it's a perfect Christmas movie anyway. The thing about Christmas is, it's super fake. Fake trees in the living room, fake Santas at the mall, fake nativity scenes in the front yard. And the thing about MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS is, it is a dreamscape, a sentimental vision. Many Christmas songs are steeped in nostalgia for a distant past, a past where treetops glisten and children listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow. MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS is just such a vision of the past, a past where everyone is funny and happy and breaks into song when the spirit moves. A past where a child's greatest concern is that she might have to miss the St. Louis World's Fair if her family moves to New York. The whole thing is as fake, and wonderful, as a great Christmas tune.

6. It's a war film. What's not in the film is any mention of what was happening in 1944 when the production was underway. America was in World War II, and the war was going poorly for the Allies. The film, then, is escapist -- quite literally a way to escape the world and its worries. Yet its most famous scene, Judy's rendition of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" takes on added poignancy when one considers its context. The song is, more than anything else, a prayer that "from now on, all our troubles will be far away." When she comes to the verse "Through the years, we all will be together, if the fates allow" you can practically hear the moviegoers of 1944 wiping away tears. Today, the film remains a joyful celebration of life, but its key emotional scenes retain their bittersweet quality, even if the audience has forgotten their context.

7. The Halloween sequence is one of the strangest things MGM ever put onscreen. There's a stretch of, I don't know, twenty minutes or so, where the film gives over its plot to the Halloween machinations of the youngest daughters of the Smith family, Agnes and Tootie (Joan Carroll and Margaret O'Brien). I'm always shocked that these scenes were allowed to stay in the movie. Because they are weird, really weird. The sequence takes place entirely at night, with the girls donning costumes ("She's a horrible ghost and I'm a terrible drunken ghost") and telling ghoulish tall tales about the neighbors (one neighbor is said to have a "box of dead cats" that he "burns in his furnace at midnight" when he's not "beating his wife with a red hot poker"). The girls assemble with local kids in the streets and burn old furniture and throw baking flour in the face of the reputed wife-beater and cat-murderer (the jolly way the guy takes the face full of flour leads us to suspect that he's been the object of Halloween pranks for a long time). After this strange sequence, the film gets even darker when Tootie turns up bloodied and crying and says that Esther's would-be boyfriend John Truett (Tom Drake) attacked her ("He tried to kill me!"). After a scene where Esther storms over and beats the crap out of John Truett (Judy is wonderfully ferocious), we learn that Tootie simply fell down. She's just a little fibber, and the whole thing is laughed off. What is bizarre, though, is that for something like five minutes of this movie the audience thinks that the romantic lead, the titular boy of Judy's ballad "The Boy Next Door" is something like a murderous child molester.

8. About that boy. God, I hate John Truett. What a dullard. What a boring, boring, boring man. Esther Smith is gonna be in for a long haul married to this blank slate.

9. Judy almost didn't do the film. At first, the star actually turned down MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS (the first project she ever turned down at MGM, in fact). She wanted to make her mark as a mature leading lady, and she thought the part of Esther was too close in nature to the kind of thing she'd been doing with Mickey Rooney. Plus, she suspected that little Margaret O'Brien, as the hilariously demonic little Tootie, would steal the movie. Judy was partly right. O'Brien was indeed a sensation in the film and even won a special Oscar for the part. But director Vincente Minelli took care of his star, so that the film became a showy debut for Margret O'Brien AND the perfect showcase for Judy Garland.

10. Minnelli and Garland fell in love during the making of the film. The marriage of the great star and her great director has always been an object of fascination. Minnelli was gay, but then again so was Garland's beloved late father, and while it may be Freudian shorthand to suggest that Judy fell in love with Vincente because she was looking for a father figure, it's also almost certainly true. What better father figure could there be than the kind and soft spoken director who guided her to her biggest (and most glamorous) hit? What exactly Minnelli saw in Garland has always been more of a mystery, though, because Minnelli was as much a closed book as Garland was an open one. What we know for sure is that for the next few years, the couple was in the business of being a couple. They worked together on THE CLOCK, ZIEGFIELD FOLLIES, TILL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY, and THE PIRATE. None of these projects could duplicate their success on MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, though the THE CLOCK is a moving romance with an excellent performance by Judy, while the uneven THE PIRATE has become something of a cult classic. Aside from Liza Minnelli, though, MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS remains the pair's greatest accomplishment. It is beautiful and buoyant, a hymn to human emotion. 

THE CLOCK (1945)

I think Judy Garland might well have been the greatest performer in the history of motion pictures. We all know she was a great singer, but she was also a superb dancer (Gene Kelly rated her as his most gifted partner) and one of the great underrated comic actors of classic cinema. She was also, not incidentally, a fine dramatic actor. She didn't do many non-musicals, unfortunately, but her work on pictures like A CHILD IS WAITING (1963) and JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG (1961) nicely demonstrates that as an actor she could draw on the same depth of feeling that made her a great singer. The best example of this is probably found in George Cukor's 1954 musical drama masterpiece A STAR IS BORN, which called on every skill that Judy Garland had, to glorious results.

But Garland's most underrated dramatic role was the one she gave in Vincente Minnelli's fascinating 1945 war drama THE CLOCK. Judy plays Alice Mayberry a young secretary in New York who meets solider Joe Allen (Robert Walker) who is on a 48-hour leave before he'll be shipped off to war. The two walk around the city together, flirting and fighting and falling in love, until they decide to get married in a rush. In the end, Alice sees Joe off at the station as he returns to war and she returns to her life.

With this kind of material, one would expect the romance to be lush and light and thick with sentiment. Yet the script by Robert Nathan and Joseph Schrank, from the story by Paul and Pauline Gallico, grounds things in a kind of reality. Alice holds Joe at arms length, afraid of being "picked up" by a solider, and thus being thought of as "that kind of girl." (The film hints that this is a constant danger of single young women in the city.) Their whirlwind romance is marked by uncertainty about the future, and their rush to get married is hampered at every turn by a bored bureaucracy that regards their love affair as just another pile of paperwork. This lack of sentiment is a Minnelli specialty. Even in something as heartwarming as MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, the mood is complicated by dark humor and sudden flashes of anger and violence. In THE CLOCK, the romance between Alice and Joe is placed in a decidedly unromantic context. This juxtaposition has the effect of making the romance all the more moving.

Garland and Walker are excellent. Judy gets to play a street smart young woman, a nice change of pace from all the doe-eyed innocents she had to play for MGM. She's eminently believable in the role, perhaps because Judy herself was far from a doe-eyed innocent in 1945, despite her public image. She was, in many ways, a shrewd working girl, closer in spirit to Alice Mayberry than to OZ's Dorothy Gale. Walker compliments her nicely because there's an edge to his performance. Walker was going through a painful divorce during the making of the film (his wife Jennifer Jones had already left him for producer David O. Selznick), and he gives Joe an unsettled quality. He's not just a nice kid from Indiana. There's something slightly dangerous about him. Watching him here, you can see why his most famous role would be as a psycho in Hitchcock's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN.

The most fascinating element of THE CLOCK is the unsettled quality of the romance between Alice and Joe. You can believe that they fell in love and you can believe that they got married in a fever, but you can also believe that the marriage might not work out in the end. There's a lot unresolved at the end, and not just because Joe is shipping off to war. There's the fact that Alice and Joe seem to want different things. She seems very happy working in the city and doesn't seem in a rush to have kids, while he wants to go back to where he came from. The ending is sweet but restrained, with the newlywed couple telling each other, "See you soon." Then Joe boards his train and Alice turns and walks into the crowd at Penn Station, merging and disappearing in the crush of people.

In its quiet way, THE CLOCK is one of the best romances of the wartime period. It's not epic like CASABLANCA, but it's also more nuanced and, in some ways, more mature. It's about two small people whose love affair is insignificant to the outside world. They marry out of love and fear and a sense that time might run out on them. It's the kind of movie where you can be happy for the crazy kids while not being altogether sure that they're going to make it as a couple. If you can appreciate the fragile beauty of their love affair then THE CLOCK takes takes on real resonance as an artifact of World War II.