Meet Me in St. Louis

 

Director Vincente Minnelli on the set with Judy Garland

MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS            A                                                                                         USA  (113 mi)  1944  d:  Vincente Minnelli

You could say Meet Me in St. Louis was terribly sentimental, but it actually tapped into something primal, almost like a fairy tale.  Everything is perfect there, and we all desperately want the perfect family, the perfect house.  And it doesn’t seem arch or false because it’s done with such sincerity and passion.     —Terence Davies, British film director

I don’t want to be just introduced to him.  I want it to be something strange and romantic and something I’ll always remember!    —Esther Smith (Judy Garland)

Among the greatest musicals ever made, AFI listed it at #10, AFI's 100 YEARS OF MUSICALS | American Film Institute, capturing the same turn-of-the century nostalgia as Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), revealing the end of an era before the arrival of the automobile, suggesting times were simpler then, less cluttered and complicated, with most activities generated around the family home.  Released at the height of World War II, during a time when most of the news from the front was not pleasant, with food, gas, and clothing rationed, where for almost four years the U.S. military personnel suffered an average of 800 casualties per day, with 300 of them reported dead.  The American public at the time craved entertainment that distracted them from the incessant drumbeat of war, with this particular film reminding servicemen abroad what was waiting for them back home, creating an idyllic portrait of a happy middle-class family living in St. Louis in 1903, just months before the opening of the World’s Fair, otherwise known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, where the film highlights a time when all the drama is centered around the lives of the children.  What’s particularly noticeable is the powerlessness of women, as only men have jobs and a college education, controlling all the lucrative sources of income, while the role of women, just as it was in the era of Louisa May Alcott’s mid 19th century Little Women (2019), was to find a suitable husband, as a woman’s only means of support was through her husband.  Accordingly, the two older sisters spend the entire film searching for available husbands.  Opening with a different postcard image for each of the four seasons, which magically springs to life, it begins in the sweltering heat of the summer of 1903 (extending to the spring of 1904), with plenty of commotion surrounding the family dinner, wondering if the home-made ketchup is too sweet or too tart, with everyone offering their differing views, with Katie the maid (Marjorie Main) getting more testy with each opinion.  But from the outset, a fluid rhythm is established, as one by one all the children arrive home from their daily activities, each with their own stories to tell, all humming or singing the film’s theme song, and within minutes viewers are completely familiar with the goings-on inside the family home, Meet Me in St. Louis Opening Scene - Judy Garland YouTube (3:47).  Adapted from a short story by Sally Benson published in the New Yorker magazine entitled 5135 Kensington, the family address, there’s really not much of a story to speak of, more of an ensemble character piece, where the father (Leon Ames) at one point announces that he’s been promoted, heading a division of lawyers in New York, with the whole family moving shortly after Christmas.  Rather than the typical excitement he expected, everyone breaks out into tears, as their busy lives will be rudely disrupted, separated from relationships and friends, where they’ll even miss the World’s Fair.  Particularly devastated by the decision are two daughters, Esther (Judy Garland), the second oldest, who develops a romance with the boy next door, John Truett (Tom Drake, who was gay in real life, causing some degree of friction on the set, as an offscreen romance with Garland quickly fizzled out), and Tootie (Margaret O’Brien), the youngest, filled with morbid imaginings, burying her dolls in the garden after inflicting them with imaginary fatal illnesses (“It’ll take me at least a week to dig up all my dolls in the cemetery”), yet who’s become accustomed to countless childhood traditions, but always as the youngest, wanting to grow into an expanded role, surrounded by friends and family (and dolls and snowmen), while also affecting the respective romantic entanglements of older sister Rose (Lucille Bremer) and brother Lon (Henry H. Daniels Jr.), while no one asks the opinion of grandpa (Henry Davenport).  While she’s not too keen on the idea either, the only level-headed response is his wife (Mary Astor), who calmly sits down at the piano and starts playing (after most have fled upstairs aghast at the thought), with her husband eagerly joining in (the dubbed voice is actually producer Arthur Freed), singing the pacifying duet “You and I,” You and I (duet) Meet Me In St. Louis YouTube (3:53), as one by one all the distraught family members return downstairs and gather around as they come to realize they still have each other, which is the essential family ingredient, hoping everything else will just take care of itself.  By the time Christmas rolls around, however, the sadness evidenced in the family household is just too much, with the father changing his mind, deciding to stay in St. Louis, as after all, it’s their home.  Continuing a prevailing theme, anyone who’s ever watched Judy Garland in THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) already realizes “There’s no place like home.”

It’s important to mention Arthur Freed, the Tin Pan Alley songwriter turned producer whose famed unit at MGM helped reinvent the movie musical in the 40’s, basically setting the gold standard.  Judy Garland signed with MGM Studios at the age of 13, already a professional, performing in vaudeville with two of her siblings in The Gumm Sisters since the age of 2, but it was the studio that was largely blamed for Garland’s addiction to pills and booze, though her mother actually introduced her to amphetamine pep pills to keep her awake for late-night shows, then alcohol or barbituates to help her sleep afterwards.  Her big break was the lead role in THE WIZARD OF OZ when Garland was only 16, but she was constantly overworked by the studio with hopes of turning her into a superstar, promoting her as a triple threat, able to sing, act, and dance, yet behind the scenes were constant rumblings about not being pretty, constantly subjected to unwanted pressures about her looks, ordered to go on diets with regularity, where she was never viewed as a glamor girl, with studio head Louis B. Mayer referring to her as his “little hunchback.”  Finally turning 21, Garland was done playing child roles and wanted to play an adult, and was initially adamantly against her role in this film, but it was the director Vincente Minnelli who insisted, believing the role needed a certain maturity, in particular vulnerability, as she’s a bridge between childhood and adulthood, offering her a chance to showcase her beauty, where the camera’s love affair with her eyes is unforgettable, perhaps never looking so alluring, yet also needing the skill to dramatically perform the songs, which she could easily handle, introducing three songs that remained associated with her for the rest of her career, the a joyously upbeat “The Trolley Song,” the epitome of a young woman’s yearning for love in “The Boy Next Door,” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” an extraordinarily tender rendition that just reverberates with sadness and heartache, where it’s hard to keep a dry eye in the house.  Unlike the Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly musicals that tap into the male mystique, this film is defined by strong women, which was particularly relevant due to the absence of men who were off fighting the war, with women taking many of their vacant jobs in factories and shipyards, helping to produce needed munitions and war supplies, embodied by the symbol of Rosie the Riveter.  Perhaps responsible for nostalgia films like Fellini’s AMARCORD (1973) or Woody Allen’s Radio Days (1987), but also the plotless character studies of Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) and Gosford Park (2001), it’s impossible to talk about this film without mentioning the utterly spectacular use of Technicolor, where the director was an absolute master in capturing the aesthetic artistry of color during musical production numbers, with elaborate costume design, but in this film it continues throughout the entire film, a fantasia that explodes with unending luminosity, matching mood with vivid color designs.  No scene is more memorable than after a family party, just before John Truett returns home, Esther invites him to accompany her in the dimming of the household gaslights, moving from room to room, finding themselves engulfed in more darkness, with their closeness and the prospects of romance only magnified, where Minnelli’s gliding camera follows an overtly seductive Esther as she cajoles his polite assistance in carrying out the simple yet erotic task of turning off her house lights.  The sensuality of the moment is beautifully expressed, elevating all expectations, only to come crashing back down to earth an instant later by a dimwitted remark when he identifies the perfume she’s wearing as the same brand his grandmother wears.  In this film the color palette is utterly spectacular, bringing an extraordinary appeal to what we’re watching.  The director’s style tends towards longer takes, exquisite camera movement, including mesmerizing close-ups, while also accentuating distant framing, with cinematographer George Folsey given a free hand to glorify the flamboyant use of color, which feels bolder and more vibrant here than ever before. 

Minnelli continued to work at MGM for a quarter century (longer than any director in the studio’s history), specializing in musicals, romantic comedies, and melodramas.  Some may attribute a distinct “gay sensibility” to the film, as the director remained closeted his entire career.  Knowing he was gay, Garland happily married him anyway a year later, producing a daughter Liza who became the love of their life and a star of her own.  For such lighthearted material, there are subversive underlying tones of darkness, released the same year as film noir notables Double Indemnity (1944) and Laura (1944), actually expanding the shadowy interior of the large Victorian house, with much of the second half of the film taking place at night, yet dealing with the impending anxiety of moving to New York seems to uproot the safety net surrounding these characters, now more than ever needing to form romantic relationships, as nothing is guaranteed in the future except distance and instability.  For a lavishly decorative musical of its era, there’s a surprising amount of existential dread that adds emotional weight to the film, yet the mesmerizing talent of Judy Garland is indisputable, where no other performer, before or since, could provide the same range of expression, culminating with Garland’s melancholic singing on Christmas Eve of Meet Me In St. Louis (1944) – Judy Garland – Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas YouTube (3:12) in an attempt to console her younger sister Tootie, whose world is simply turning upside down, emphasizing their despair, as the entire house is dark and empty, stripped of its intimate decor, with stacks of boxes lying on the floor, with Tootie running outside afterwards to destroy the snowmen she so carefully and proudly constructed, representative of their happy family, simply breaking down into tears.  The movie was released in late November 1944 as Allied troops were approaching Germany, with the Battle of the Bulge occurring just a few weeks later, the last major German offensive on the Western Front.  No one could anticipate what might happen, anxiously awaiting who might prevail, whether the tide of the war would turn, and certainly no one knew who would perish and who would return home safely to their families.  This great unknown is what the song so beautifully anticipates and why it resonates with so many people, offering the lyric, “Someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow.  Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow.” The song was especially popular with American troops, and it’s the dramatic turning point of the film, with their father witnessing the discomfort and unhappy emotional turmoil the move to New York is having on his youngest daughter, and really the entire family, so he changes his mind and opts for stability, exactly what was needed at that particular moment in America.  It should be pointed out that Sally Benson, author of the literary source material of the film, also co-wrote Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), released a year earlier, which may as well be the polar opposite of this film, filled with sinister implications and devious acts of evil in the form of Joseph Cotton as a murderous uncle, with Hitchcock relishing how easily his vile behavior is submerged under the optimistic charm of small town America, as if pretending it doesn’t exist.  Interesting the way these two films are intertwined, where happiness and evil are both part of the historical reality of the nation’s character.  Easily the most euphoric musical number is The Trolley Song - Meet Me In St. Louis - 1944 - Judy Garland YouTube (3:59), which is also a reflection of changing moods, with Esther showing her disappointment when John Truett isn’t there with the others to take a trolley ride to visit the construction site of the World's Fair.  Disconsolate and sitting alone, her mood quickly changes upon seeing him run to catch up, suddenly joining the happy festivities by singing along, beautifully capturing a mood of pure unfettered joy.  The exaggerated size and dazzling style of the women’s hats match the brightly coordinated costumes, creating a colorful pastiche of Americana.  In contrast, the wistful nature of yearning for love is beautifully captured early on before she even meets John Truett, but already has her heart set upon him in Meet Me In St. Louis (1944) – The Boy Next Door YouTube (3:41).  This picture of dreamy hope has a kind of innocence captured in THE WIZARD OF OZ ('39): "Over the Rainbow" (2:39), yet the performer has blossomed into a mature young woman, black and white has transitioned into glorious Technicolor, and Garland has never looked more radiantly appealing on film, offering what she felt at the time was the finest performance of her career, surpassed a decade later in A Star Is Born (1954).  

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Lana Turner and John Garfield on the set with director Tay Garnett (right)

The director (left) with Turner and Garfield

Turner and Garfield on the set

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE                      A-                   

USA  (113 mi)  1946  d:  Tay Garnett

With my brains and your looks, we could go places.

—Frank Chambers (John Garfield)

Rarely has an author hit the Hollywood trifecta like the success mystery writer James M. Cain had in successive years with Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Michael Curtiz’ Mildred Pierce (1945), and this lurid adaptation of his first 1934 novel in 1946, largely inspired by the infamous Ruth Snyder murder case in 1927 (Ruth Snyder | Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers).  These films were vehicles for major movie star heroines like Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford, who won an Oscar after she was unceremoniously dropped by MGM, the studio known for producing lavish musical spectacles, now putting their weight behind blonde bombshell Lana Turner in one of her most memorable roles.  Turner had a highly publicized yet disastrous personal life marred by tragedy, married 8 times, yet none of her marriages lasted more than four years, so the salaciousness of the material only whetted the public’s appetite both for her and the film.  Due to censorship fears from the overwhelming influence of the Hays Code, (Hays Code: Rules, Censorhip and Hollywood Movies ***), it took more than a decade for MGM to bring this film into light in the United States, no doubt influenced by the success of the earlier Cain depictions, this one adapted by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch, with versions released elsewhere first, including Chenal’s hard-to-find LE DERNIER TOURNANT (1939) in France and Visconti’s celebrated neorealist OSSESSIONE (1942) in Italy, with MGM blocking all prints from American release, where Visconti’s film wasn’t seen in the United States until 1977, and then in an abbreviated version.  Excellent modern era versions exist as well, including Berlin-school director Christian Petzold’s Jerichow (2008), but this American version is the most accurate rendition to the literary source, one of the more important crime novels of the 20^th century, often viewed as the definitive postwar noir, showcasing the distinctive features of the genre, where a femme fatale along with an alienated and tragic antihero conspire to murder her husband, driven by lustful desires and animalistic instincts, creating a murky aesthetic of amoral confusion, revealed in a narrated voiceover recalling past events.  One aspect of the book that was never translated into the film release was its connection to the Great Depression, as it was written during nationwide bank failures, where it was commonplace for people to be out of work.  The effect this has on Lana Turner’s character is profound, yet it’s easier for viewers to get wrapped up in her own fall from grace.  What distinguishes this fatal attraction from typical noir films is their lack of sophistication and complete unfamiliarity with criminal mentality, making them just ordinary people doomed by poverty, lack of opportunity, and self-delusion, emblematic of the lower-middle class misery and the urgent desire to get out of it by taking an easy path, suggesting how easy it is to lose one’s bearings to modern day temptations.  John Garfield’s drifter, Frank Chambers, was a Depression era survivor, using a combination if street smarts and charm along with a handful of useful skills, as he was used to adapting to circumstances to fit in wherever he went.  Having grown up in the slums of New York, Garfield was familiar with hard times, going on to make films like Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947) and Abraham Polonsky’s Force of Evil (1948), both reflecting the fallout from the downward spiral of capitalism, with Garfield playing cocky, self-assured loners who are outside the mainstream of society, the kind of guys that break the rules in order to get ahead, often disregarding the interests of others, where Garfield was viewed as a working class hero, a kid literally from the streets who became a success in Hollywood bringing a rough-edged authenticity to his characters.  But he was also a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Red Scare that created a Hollywood blacklist on November 25, 1947, where his real crime was growing up poor, with socialist organizations part of ordinary life, offering a form of social protest against the disillusionment caused by the social and economic hardships of the Depression in the 30’s.  The Committee, however, hounded Garfield to his premature death, as after his original testimony, he learned they were reviewing the transcripts for possible perjury charges, where he died in 1952 at the age of 39 of a heart attack, allegedly aggravated by the stress of the blacklisting.  Garfield is the prototype for the young, rebellious characters of the 50’s like James Dean, Marlon Brando, or Montgomery Clift, young men trying to make sense out of the uncertainties of the atomic age when the world around them made little sense, often feeling mixed-up with no moral footing.  Garfield was doing the same during the Depression era, where survival was always the first order of business.   

With Cain’s novel serving as a source of inspiration for the 1942 Albert Camus philosophical masterpiece on existentialism, The Stranger (L’Etranger), Garfield narrates his own story as drifter Frank Chambers, where we immediately sense the existential rootlessness of his transience, moving from place to place with ease, having no place to really call home, “It was on a side road outside of Los Angeles.  I was hitchhiking from San Francisco down to San Diego, I guess.  A half hour earlier, I’d thumbed a ride.”  Stopping at a roadside diner and gas station with a giant Help Wanted sign out front, both the film and the novel bookend the story with district attorney Kyle Sackett (Leon Ames), who has offered Frank a ride into the town of Twin Oaks in the foothills just outside Los Angeles, where he is greeted by the kindly middle-aged proprietor Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway) who instantly takes a liking to him, showing him around the place and offering him the job.  But the intrigue begins when Frank is left alone while Nick serves a customer, allowing Lana Turner as Cora Smith to make her intensely erotic entrance, a voluptuous platinum blonde dressed all in white, wearing snugly fitting white shorts and a halter top, with a turban on her head, where she has the kind of raw beauty pulp fiction writers clamor for, probably inventing the term male gaze to describe the way the camera leers at her, following the outlines of her body, immersing viewers in Frank’s voyeuristic point of view, becoming the most sexually charged moment of the film.  Frank’s voiceover narration is bluntly revealing, describing her as the kind of sultry woman a man immediately craves, hooked just by the sight of her, hypnotized by her smoldering sensuality with the face and figure to drive a man into doing anything to have her, leaving him helpless without her, where he’s willing to stop at nothing, even killing a man just to possess her.  Frank can do little else but stare, certain he has found the woman of his dreams as she slinks away, but his jaw drops in bewilderment when he discovers she is Nick’s wife.  What he quickly discovers is the predicament she’s in, as Frank owns the restaurant, the car, and all other assets, while he also expects his wife to work for no compensation, which she does, feeling powerless and exploited, tired of forever being treated as insignificantly small, forever smothering her larger ambitions to be something more.  Dressed in her white cook’s uniform, with the restaurant name prominently appearing on the sleeve, she resembles hired help, doing what the boss tells her to do, incapable of establishing her own identity.  It’s a loveless marriage, as she never loved him from the outset, but felt economically safe and secure, which she felt at the time was the best option, where Nick always felt she’d come around, but not in the current circumstances where she’s humiliated and devalued on a daily basis.  With Frank entering the picture, his virile masculinity unleashes her pent-up sexuality and offers her a choice she previously didn’t have, feeling confined, even imprisoned, rarely ever leaving the premises, quickly establishing a sizzling romance, somehow avoiding the book’s graphic depictions of violence, sexuality, and sadism, instead relying upon late night drives to the beach in Nick’s car.  Nick is the odd man out in this three-way affair, older, with a tendency to get tipsy, missing the obvious signs taking place right in front of him, even encouraging the young couple to dance together, to laugh and have fun, with each one devising ways to remove him from the picture.  While saturated in a pervading mood of hopeless fatalism, accentuated by movie posters that screamed “Their Love was a Flame that Destroyed!,” what stands out is the sympathetic portrayal of their criminal acts, as the respective viewpoints of Frank and Cora remain the centerpiece of the film, both before and after crimes are committed.  This takes us into Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment territory, lending itself to cause and effect psychoanalytic interpretation even as the perpetrators themselves refuse self-reflection and are in absolute denial of the psychology, with viewers fully aware of their guilt, yet still somehow pulling for them.

What’s apparent in the landscape is the restricted universe, the ever-retreating space of the American West, with an expanding urban sprawl in an oppressively sunny Southern California that constricts all open space, where the setting could be anywhere, as the two have simply reached the end of the road, leaving no other way out, where nothing else matters except the two of them, obsessed by overcoming their circumstances, becoming all that matters to each other, as everything else is blocked out and of little consequence.  Frank’s mobility in moving from place to place has led him nowhere, where his freedom has been a mirage, as it’s all been an escape from the harsh realities that envelop him.  Cora is driven by an ambitious desire to be somebody, to make something of her life, to come out from under Nick’s shadow and no longer be saddled by wearing a cheap uniform, the same dreams and desires that drive Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce, both exhibiting a fierce individuality.  While Crawford is motivated by economic freedom and success, Cora’s views are shaped by being deprived that opportunity, always feeling imprisoned, even by her good looks, fighting off men since she was fourteen, as she’s always had to escape the unwanted attention of men.  Freeing herself from the suffocating social restrictions leads her to turn in desperation to Frank, who offers the illusion of freedom, where it’s the two of them against the world, yet they’re both in the same predicament, where all they have is the drudgery of work, which brings no happiness at all and no chance whatsoever in obtaining anything more.  Smoldering in frustration, they devise multiple plots to remove Nick from the picture, first escaping together on the road, quickly realizing they have no money to build a better life, then devising crude murder plots.  The first is unsuccessful, but lands Nick in the hospital in a close call, drawing the attention of Sackett.  Their second bite of the apple is disastrously ill-advised, surely there’s a better way, with hundreds of movies offering better murder options, but this film is not about the perfect murder, instead it’s about the willingness to venture into the depths of a moral abyss to obtain what you desire, crossing the line, knowing it’s wrong, but doing it anyway, irrespective of the consequences.  The courtroom sequences with an always suspicious Sackett and the deviously underhanded methods of defense attorney Arthur Keats (Hume Cronyn) are less than impressive, generating little interest, despite the weird legal maneuvers involved, bringing their whirlwind romance to a dead stop, only to be resurrected again in short order, with Nick now out of the picture, but the two can’t help themselves, as they’re too devious, losing all faith in one another to make it work.  Their jealous and stiflingly distrustful instincts bring out the worst in each other, both feeling bitter and pessimistic, engaging in spiteful retribution that borders on emotional paralysis, spending all their efforts stymying the other, going nowhere fast, becoming an unsentimental and unglamorized portrayal of lust, murder, betrayal, and justice, guided by the allure of unbridled sex, yet drowning in disillusionment, adhering to the novel’s central themes of good and evil or sex and power, discovering how easy it is to confuse the issue.  Striving for freedom from protracted social and economic constraints, hoping to eradicate the suffocating noose around their necks, their questionable decisions all but insure the noose is only pulled even tighter.  While thoroughly entertaining, Garnett has never been a first rate director, and the overall melodramatic cinematic style is fairly conventional, filled with a smattering of contrivances, including an excessive amount of moralizing at the end, lacking the stylistic edge, dark shadows, and sharp camera angles of film noir, yet the novel’s bleak cynicism and lurid subject matter takes us into the dangerous realms of film noir territory, with powerfully impactful performances from the two leads who literally bare their souls, especially Garfield, who exhibits such a carefree style, but the staggering beauty of the film is in the power of suggestion, where there is a strong, palpable atmosphere of sexual tension, created almost entirely through dialogue and performance, yet the bold sensuality onscreen is by implication, nearly entirely non-verbal, inviting viewers to fill in the salacious details.