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Meet Me in St Louis
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A little girl named Tootie (Margaret O’Brien), crying and angry,
breaks domestic rank and runs outside to the front yard. There, she sets to
destroying her beloved snowpeople – symbol of everything that is stable and
reassuring in her familial existence – with a vigour and a venom that is
extremely disquieting. Who would ever have thought that Judy Garland singing
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” could have such a devastating effect on
a child’s delicate psyche – or, indeed, on ours?
Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me
in St Louis is one of the most unusual and highly charged musicals in
Hollywood’s history. As many critics have noted, it blends the two genres at
which Minnelli was most adept – musical and melodrama – and even, in its most
unnerving moments (such as a sequence devoted to Halloween terrors), edges
toward being a horror movie.
In
Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes (1992), Minnelli’s ecstatic musical is one of the bright-and-rosy memories of a
nostalgic childhood bathed by the Hollywood screen. And no wonder: the
blushing, barely containable energy of Garland, the magnificently choreographed
scenes of harmonious family interaction, the evocation of long-lost, innocent
Americana – are all seductively captivating.
Yet
there is a darkness in Minnelli’s canvas, and it is located directly in the
performance of that sublime little hysteric, Margaret O’Brien. Just see if you
can remain calm when Tootie cries and screams and hacks apart those happy old
snow creatures who have come to symbolise, for her, everything that is achingly
wrong with this American family.
Meet Me
in St Louis is a film that, then as now, offers itself up to be read in
starkly contrasting ways: either as a perfectly innocent and naive celebration
of traditional family values, or else a brooding meditation on everything that
tears the home unit apart from within. Put another way: is it a comforting,
safety-valve entertainment that admits to just enough that is problematic in
order to smooth out and reinforce the status quo, or is it – almost despite
itself – a subversive gesture at the heart of the Hollywood system, a howl of
unrepressed rage?
Yes, I am talking about the same film in which Garland moons and
croons “The Boy Next Door” and – in a showstopping highlight, in fact a true
summit of cinema – sways with a pack of colourful passengers as she belts out
“The Trolley Song” (“Zing, zing, zing went my heartstrings …” ). Minnelli’s
project is quietly, unostentatiously ambitious: not merely to tell the story of
a lovably average family – and the challenges it stoically faces – but to also
sketch the history of a bold new, 20th century society defined by
events such as the World’s Fair. Modernity arrives by trolley car, whether we
want it to or not … (on this level, it makes for a great double bill with
Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons [1942]).
Minnelli’s artistic sensibility – whether he was gay is either an
open question or an open secret, depending on which Hollywood history you
consult – responded well to female yearning and male anxiety, and it is an
excess of both that makes this musical unfailingly melodramatic. Patriarchy
comes in the cuddly, grumpy form of Leon Ames, valiantly trying to assert his
authority in the face of an overwhelmingly female household. The parade of
boyfriends for the girls have, likewise, to be prodded, manipulated and
informed of their rightful, mating destiny.
In terms of the aesthetic challenges of the musical genre,
Minnelli and his collaborators went a long way here towards integrating singing
and dancing into a whimsical, fairy-tale flow of incidents and scene changes.
Songs begin as throwaway phrases, spoken or hummed out in the street or at the
door; they suddenly die away as a plot intrigue kicks in.
Let’s step back into “The Trolley Song” for another
moment. It shows us that Judy Garland was a master at acting distracted or,
rather, concentrated: she’s in the midst of a group scene, and she’s
part of the communal rhythm of its action, but simultaneously her character is
elsewhere, inside herself, listening and thinking hard about what precise
gesture to best produce in the coming seconds. (Johannes Binotto has made an
illuminating audiovisual study of Garland and such in-between, intensely focused “intervals” of her
performance in Cukor’s A Star is Born [1954].) As Esther here on the
trolley car, Garland embodies many emotional states; but none are so captivating
as when she stops singing for 15 seconds and inventively pantomimes, as if
spontaneously, the lines sung by the chorus.
But, besides the magnificent star performance, beneath the elegant
display of filmic style and the civilised, comic veneer of manners, it is truly
only Tootie who can express emotions that are savage and untamed – as her
exotica duet with Judy, “Under the Bamboo Tree”, jovially indicates.
MORE Minnelli: Brigadoon, Madame Bovary, The Pirate, The Band Wagon, Some Came Running, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever book review Minnelli: Directed by Vincente Minnelli
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