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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
Minnelli's interest in carefully organized compositions has led some observers to criticize this sequence for its artifice. For instance, James Naremore quotes critic George Toles, who complains of the "Trapp family prescience" with which the cast members take their places, and "the pictorial harmony of the completed tableau" that takes precedence over the scene's emotional content (78). Clearly, the sequence is indeed rather stylized in the way characters fit themselves into arrangements of harmonized colors. But to dismiss the scene on this basis misses an important aspect of the film as a whole. Throughout Meet Me in St. Louis, Minnelli takes advantage of a level of stylization granted by the musical genre and often channels it toward the embellishment of story material. The musical number conventionally permits a more obvious manipulation of style than straight drama, often in the form of exacting choreography and, for Technicolor, a display of the contributions of color. As this sequence illustrates in an elegantly pictorial manner, Minnelli manages to harness color to the functions of guiding attention and conveying narrative development. The performance of"You and I" gives the director an opportunity to push color forward so that it becomes a central stylistic system. In doing so the film might forsake unobtrusiveness, drawing attention to color design by repeating a narrow set of coordinating and contrasting hues. But, like the song itself, this play of color is integrated into the film's dramatic fabric. More exactly, color behaves like the nondiegetic orchestration that subtly accompanies Lon's and Anna's singing, it gently organizes our perception of the action, rising out of and underscoring the situation.
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For his part, Minnelli claimed that he achieved the color design of Meet Me in St. Louis despite interference from Technicolor. In his autobiography the director recalls: "My juxtaposition of color had been highly praised on the stage, but I couldn't do anything right in Mrs. Kalmus's eyes" (131). Minnelli explains that after Kalmus warned him, "You can't have one sister in a bright red gown and another in a bright green" during the shooting of the Christmas dance, he decided to abandon her advice: "I depended on my own instincts from then on" (132). As my discussion of the film indicates, Minnelli did manage to bend the Technicolor aesthetic toward an unusually dynamic color design, perhaps challenging some of Kalmus's rules along the way. But the production ultimately seems indebted to a way of thinking about color as an amplifier of drama, and as such it remains true to the spirit, if not the letter, of Technicolor's aesthetic guidelines. Situated within the context of the Technicolor musical, Meet Me in St. Louis innovates by forcing the conventions for maintaining harmony and augmenting narrative tone to shoulder an assertive palette. In doing so, the film conspicuously relies on color to carry out an array of stylistic duties. Herbert Kalmus, head of Technicolor, was fond of justifying the price of his process by claiming that the effects of a color film "could not have been done in black-and-white at any cost" (95). Few Technicolor productions would support his assertion better than Meet Me in St. Louis.
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