Defining Favourites: Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)
Vincente Minnelli’s first film in colour is one of the best Christmas films ever made.
Welcome to my Defining Favourites, a section dedicated to essays about films that I feel confident in calling favourites in some way or another — akin to Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” reviews. These essays are for paid subscribers, so if you would like to read more beyond the free preview, please consider subscribing.
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
Screenplay by Irving Brecher, Fred F. Finklehoffe, from the novel by Sally Benson
Produced by Arthur Freed
Starring Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien, Mary Astor, Lucille Bremer, Tom Drake, Marjorie Main
Premiere Date: November 22, 1944
Running Time: 113 minutes
The song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” has become a perennial favourite over the years during the Christmas season, and how could it not? When you hear Judy Garland sing it, it’s a song that celebrates being happy during the season we call the most wonderful time of the year. And yet, seeing it in the context of the film where it comes from, it’s just heartbreaking. After all, when you hear the titular song, it’s a song all about the good memories we build for ourselves once upon a time. Yet given the semi-autobiographical nature of Sally Benson’s novel, it’s also where Vincente Minnelli finds the perfect text to make one of the great musicals of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Being a film that’s built from memories, perhaps the musical genre finds itself becoming the perfect encapsulation of the ability to cling onto what we love most in our lives. In this film’s case, it may very well be the St. Louis fair.
Meet Me in St. Louis is, first and foremost, a film about family. And there’s no better way to make a film all about these joys we cling onto in life than seeing the joys put front and center through the years that the Smith family spends in St. Louis. The Smiths are in the upper middle class, and everything about their life seems comfortable – especially with how close they are to something that makes them so happy. Yet that’s where Meet Me in St. Louis becomes one of the most heartbreaking films of this period, considering how much of it is built around what would eventually be lost to time. As children, we’re often told that an essential part of our growth is moving on from the past so that we can embrace the future. Nonetheless, the experience of watching Meet Me in St. Louis is one to be treated like revisiting a defining point of our life as an adult: and looking back at how these memories shaped our view of the world.
