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Color at the center: Minnelli's Technicolor style in 'Meet Me in St. Louis.' - Style in Cinema - filmmaker Vincente Minnelli
Style, Fall, 1998 by Scott Higgins
The image of Judy Garland on a trolley, framed by a circle of singers with brightly colored hats and dresses, has become a popular emblem of the Hollywood color musical. Part of the enduring appeal of this image, aside from its association with one of Garland's most famous songs, must stem from its bold deployment of color. The frame is packed with bright and varied accents of violet, green, yellow, pink, and blue. But this swirl of chroma only helps drive attention toward the star at its center. Garland, clad in black and white with the surrounding hues gently accentuating her auburn hair, commands the graphic core of the composition. Indeed, the image embodies many qualities of classical Technicolor design. Color generates a spectacular setting for the star, guarantees her compositional prominence, and accentuates the ebullience of the narrative moment. Three-color Technicolor, at the time still a relatively new addition to the toolbox of classical Hollywood style, appears thoroughly and gracefully integrated with the image's formal design.
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Meet Me in St. Louis, produced by Arthur Freed's musical unit at MGM in 1944, offers an outstanding example of how color could serve the demands of classical filmmaking. Indeed, the film exhibits an innovative confidence in the way it moves color toward the center of its stylistic system. Under Vincente Minnelli's direction, Technicolor becomes a key contributor to the moment by moment shaping of visual information, making images striking, comprehensible, and affecting. This essay seeks to pinpoint the nature of color in Meet Me in St. Louis through detailed analysis. My goals here are to isolate color's functions and explicate the film's color design against the background of contemporaneous aesthetic trends. By presenting an overview of the film's color strategies and closely analyzing a single sequence, I will illustrate how the production largely conforms to conventions of Technicolor design while also elaborating them to make color a particularly forceful element of film style.
Vincente Minnelli has long been recognized as one of Hollywood's leading visual stylists. In his 1958 review of Minnelli's oeuvre for Film Quarterly, Albert Johnson tagged the director "a master of the decorative image," explaining that he "permits all spheres of the visual and decorative arts to embellish his film" (22). His reputation for relying on color and mise-en-scene for graphic embellishment actually preceded Minnelli's migration to Hollywood. As a director and designer on Broadway's popular musical stage during the 1930s, Minnelli earned praise for his flair with color. One reviewer, after lauding Minnelli's manipulation of contrasting hues for "rich beauty instead of what you would naturally expect," urged his readers to "utter a fervent plea to the deities of the theatre that the bogeymen of Technicolor don't get him for a for a while at least" (Minnelli 79, 80). More to the point, Theatre Arts Quarterly paraphrased the director's views that scenic backgrounds should form a "comment" on the action and emphasize the star's "special qualities," while the alternation of scenes based on high and low color values should ensure "that the show will not fall out of balance chromatically" (Houghton 787). Early in his career Minnelli acquired distinction as a colorist.
Once he was within a major Hollywood studio, reports indicate that Minnelli continued to heavily emphasize the small details of set design and composition. Keogh Gleason, set decorator for An American in Paris (1951) described Minnelli's working method as "very production conscious." Armed with a file of magazine clippings to generate ideas for various color combinations and props, the director would instruct his decorator to "bring this in and move that around" composing the frame in a "studied" manner (Knox 100, 116). In his production history of Meet Me in St. Louis, Gerald Kaufman describes a string of delays as the director fine-tuned the placement of props and details. He
cites a typical interruption noted in the daily report: "3.20-3.26 Wait for perfume bottle (special container with satin lining asked for by director)" (40).
Clearly, Minnelli built a reputation for keen attention to the graphic qualities of his films, and analysis of color in Meet Me in St. Louis often reveals the intricate manipulation of mise-en-scene for pictorial effect. But the director made his choices within the broader context of classical Hollywood Technicolor aesthetics. Rather than view Meet Me in St. Louis as the inspired work of a willful artist, it is more fruitful to examine the film as one response to the potentials and conventions of the 1940s Technicolor musical. Indeed, I argue that Minnelli's production modifies conventions in two important ways. First, while it was standard for Technicolor musicals to offer striking displays of color during production numbers, Meet Me in St. Louis extends these techniques to the film's entirety. Second, the film makes the basic principles of the Technicolor aesthetic more conspicuous because it employs an exceptionally vivid palette and elaborates the methods for guiding attention and underscoring mood with color. Before turning to the specifics of this film's color design, we should take stock of some aesthetic norms that shaped it.
