166. Meet Me In St. Louis (1944)

Directed By Vincente Minnelli

Synopsis

Family lives in St. Louis, they like St. Louis, they like boys. Father wants to move to New York. Girls like St. Louis, father relents. They stay in St. Louis. Girls like that.

Review

Oh Judy, Judy, Judy. Gay icon Judy Garland does it again, starring in pretty vapid musical with admittedly big production values. I'd go on pills too. Well at least it is a change from Visconti and good films in general. She will eventually do better films, however.

The reviewer in the 1001 Movies book has a very dark interpretation of the film, and despite an effort by me to see that I couldn't. I would see it if they ended up going to New York, and I could see it in the destruction of the snowmen, but the film doesn't have an arch of any kind, more of a circle, it ends up exactly where it starts with nothing of consequence happening in the middle.

No one dies, no one gets married, no one has sex, nothing. And there are plenty of good films like that, but this isn't one of those, because nothing else happens. Yes, it entertains, the music is good and Judy has a great voice, but that doesn't sustain the whole film unfortunately. Unless you are musical/Garland obsessed I'd give it a miss.


Final Grade

6/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The film was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Color, Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture, Best Music, Song (Ralph Blane and Hugh Martin for "The Trolley Song") and Best Writing, Screenplay. Margaret O'Brien received an Academy Award for Best Juvenile Performance for her work that year, in which she appeared in several movies along with Meet Me in St. Louis.

The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. In 2005, Time.com named it one of the 100 best movies of the last 80 years.

In 2006 this film ranked #10 on the American Film Institute's list of best musicals.

Trolley Song: