Cinema Sunday: Meet Me in St. Louis

Today's Cinema Sunday kicks off a series of posts I call May Movie Musicals.  

Just to clarify, these are not movie musicals set in the month of May. 

It just happens to be the month of May and going for an alliterative theme, I'm writing about them now.

Today we're going to start with the classic movie musical Meet Me In St. Louis.  

                                                  

This movie is sometimes regarded as Christmas movie and the movie does provide a classic Christmas standard ("Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas") but only 1/4 of the movie takes place at Christmas.

This 1944 film tracks the life of the Smith family over the course of a year starting in summer 1903 before culminating in the spring of 1904 and the opening of the St. Louis World's Fair.  The family's story is told over 4 vignettes for each of the four seasons.   

The Smith family leads a comfortable upper-middle class life. Alonzo Smith and his wife Anna have four daughters: Rose, Esther, Agnes and Tootie, and a son, Lon Jr. It'a been a few months since Andrea and I watched this movie so I'm a little hazy on the details.  

Basically, the older daughters are in love with guys who may or may not know these young women are in love with them or if they exist.  

Well, by Christmas Esther and John are very much aware each other exists and John proposes to Esther. 

But this is when... tragedy? ...strikes.

Mr. Smith announces his job is sending him to New York City on business and they will all move there after Christmas. The family is devastated by the news, especially with all the romances, friendships and educational plans centering around staying in St. Louis. 

OK, I've been to St.Louis. It's not really that big of a deal. 

But the Smiths facing the prospect of leaving St. Louis? Oh my there is such a mournful wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments and what all.   

Tootie is especially all torn up over this and crying her eyes out about it. Esther puts her arm around her and seeks to calm her by singing a song. 

That song is "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" which prompts Tootie to burst out of the room and go outside to commit.... murder! 

All right, its just a bunch of snowmen but Tootie beats the shit out of them with a baseball bat, leaving beheaded and disemboweled snowmen everywhere. 

All this because Tootie is going to leave St. Louis. 

Really. St. Louis. It's not that big of a deal. 

Pater familias Smith witnessing this massacre of the snowmen decides maybe it might not be a good idea to leave St. Louis.  

I mean, what if Tootie turns that baseball bat on people? 

Christmas wraps up with the family ecstatic they are not leaving St. Louis (!) and more people find love and everything is warm and happy and just pretty damn perfect. 

Except for the dead snowmen. Tootie will not have to answer for her crime.

Then springs 1904 rolls around with everyone festooned in pastels and parasols and stuff.  At the World's Fair, the family gathers overlooking the Grand Lagoon just as thousands of lights around the grand pavilion are illuminated.

Damn if it don't look pretty. 

Even if it is St. Louis.  

Meet Me In St. Louis is considered an essential classic in the history of movie musicals and director Vincente Minnelli is certainly in his particular wheelhouse with beautiful people elegantly dressed and caught up in the passions of their lives.  

Judy Garland with her fiery red hair is a glowing presence in the role of Esther. The show stopping "Trolley Song" is a major tour de force for both Minelli and Garland. 

But that sequence where Esther sings "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" to younger sister Tootie has got to be the most depressing thing I have ever seen in a movie. Homicidal or suicidal, this whole gloomy number is enough to drive someone to think someone has to die.  

Although blaming Tootie's murderous rampage against the snowmen on Esther's super sad song may not be entirely fair. Margaret O'Brian's Tootie is cute, precocious and endearingly weird. But there's the sequence set in the fall of 1903 where a Halloween prank goes wrong and Tootie is going to be in big trouble so to get out of it, Tootie claims Esther's boyfriend John tried to kill her.  

A false accusation of attempted homicide seems a bit much and points towards Tootie being a bit of a psychopath.  

OK, that bit of dark strangeness and Judy Garland singing us into a murderous yuletide rage aside, Meet Me In St. Louis is pretty to look at and an enjoyable ode to a different era where life was simpler and people actually wanted to live in St. Louis.