By Megan Bianco
The way most adults feel about Frank Capra’s timeless It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) during the December holiday season is how I feel about Vincente Minnelli’s MGM movie musical masterpiece Meet Me in St. Louis (1944).
Both films are brilliant in their own rights, but surprisingly, it took me until high school to first watch Wonderful Life and appreciate it, while I basically grew up watching St. Louis as a holiday tradition. Mostly through my grandmother introducing me to MGM musicals as a kid and because Judy Garland was my favorite actor in my youth. St. Louis lives on as Garland’s second most famous film behind The Wizard of Oz (1939), and has just as much Technicolor magic as her earlier film.
The movie takes place in St. Louis in 1904 throughout the summer, fall and winter seasons of the Smith family’s lives. Seventeen-year-old Esther (Garland) is in love with the boy—John Truett (Tom Drake)—who just moved next door. Eighteen-year-old Rose (Lucille Bremer) is waiting for her boyfriend away at college to propose; 19-year-old Lon (Harry H. Daniels, Jr.) has just been dumped; and 10-year-old Agnes (Joan Carroll) and 5-year-old Tootie (Margaret O’Brien) are just interested in causing trouble.
Leon Ames, Mary Astor, Marjorie Main and Harry Davenport make up the rest of family as the parents, cook and grandfather. Minnelli’s musical is famous for a lot of firsts. It’s the first time the director and leading lady properly worked together after meeting on the set of Babes on Broadway three years earlier, and the two would eventually get married and produce daughter Liza. It was the first time Garland sang her hit songs “The Boy Next Door” and “The Trolley Song,” and the debut of holiday standard “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” It would also be the last time the one-time child star played a teen on screen.
Meet Me in St. Louis not only made a big effect on movie fans and musical aficionados, but also influenced future filmmakers. The Halloween sequence with Tootie and Agnes would inspire the color scheme of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), and Woody Allen would update the six-month family tale to 1996 Manhattan in his own movie musical Everyone Says I Love You.
Only about 25 minutes of the film takes place during Christmas, but it is one of the best holiday sequences in cinema history, and Garland proves every time that she is the definitive singer of “Merry Little Christmas.” Meet Me in St. Louis is just as charming now as it was to me as a kid, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys musicals, Christmas and old Hollywood.
Megan Bianco is a Southern California-based movie reviewer and content writer with a degree from California State University Northridge.
