Meet Me in St Louis (U)

Mrs Smith, an amiable, unflappable woman played by Mary Astor, is making soup with her live-in maid Katie (the sardonic Marjorie Main). Katie tastes the brew and scowls: “Too sweet.”

It’s a charge that could so easily apply to the film. A paean to family values, complete with cute kids and soppy teenage romance, this MGM musical threatens to deliver syrupy dollops of sentimentality. Instead, Meet Me in St Louis genuinely beguiles; it’s as airy as candy floss and as warming a Christmas treat as mulled wine. Esther (a perky, impossibly charming Judy Garland), 17, has a crush on John (Tom Drake), the nice lad who’s moved in next door; she’s trying to fix up her older sister Rose (Lucille Bremer) with various gentlemen suitors, and is looking forward to the St Louis World Fair of 1904 with excitement.

That’s about it in so far as plot, but then the beauty of this movie is the way it creates magic from such seemingly incidental details. The question of whether a potential beau will or will not telephone Rose provides the main tension of the first 20 minutes. And the film’s version of a big climactic showdown is Esther’s argument with Tom over the whereabouts of his tuxedo. But then family life – its frustrations, its joys – is an accumulation of these tiny events, and the movie inhabits the world of the Smiths so completely that you really care about the little things upsetting Esther and her sisters.

With its great songs and brightly coloured recreation of more innocent times, this film is the best kind of feel-good experience. It is a movie about happiness, or at least finding a state of family and romantic contentment, but it’s wise enough to know that these things are fragile and precious – a sentiment that must have resonated with contemporary wartime audiences. So when Esther’s dad plans an end of the St Louis idyll by moving to New York, the proposal carries with it the weight of a real calamity, to his family, and to us.

“There’s no place like home,” Garland said a few years earlier in that other MGM classic The Wizard of Oz. That same idea lies behind this lovely film. It reminds us to cherish those nearest to us – our family, our friends. What better time to reflect on this than at Christmas.
Director: Vincente Minnelli