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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
In Meet Me in St. Louis, Minnelli takes full advantage of the room opened by the musical genre for adventurous color. But Minnelli's film diverges in at least one important respect from the pattern set by other films at the forefront of the trend. The 1940s color musical had found particular success in a series of features made at Twentieth Century Fox, exemplified by such Betty Grable and Alice Faye vehicles as Moon Over Miami (1941) and The Gang's All Here (1943). In color design, the Fox musicals tend toward conservative harmonies during scenes of exposition, saving bold splashes of color for the large production numbers. Against this generic context, Minnelli and the Freed unit innovated color design by integrating pictorial effects into the film as a whole. Just as Meet Me in St. Louis seeks to incorporate the musical performances into the story, it extends the musical's broader palette and techniques for color foregrounding beyond the confines of production numbers.(6) An overview of the film's strategies for handling color indicates how it takes advantage of the genre's stylistic latitude to achieve a range of effects.
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Based on a series of autobiographical short stories by Sally Benson, the film follows life around the Smith family's St. Louis household from the summer of 1903 through the spring of 1904. When father Lon (Leon Ames) decides to take a job in New York, he threatens the family's happiness and dashes their dreams of attending the World's Fair. Lon's decision is particularly troublesome for two of the Smith daughters: Esther (Judy Garland), the second oldest, and Tootie (Margaret O'Brien), the youngest. Esther develops a romance with neighbor boy John Truett (Tom Drake), who proposes to her three days before she is to move. For Tootie, the move will interrupt a cycle of countless childhood traditions and schemes such as the annual Halloween revelry that she and her sister Agnes (Joan Carroll) undertake. On Christmas eve, after witnessing Tootie's destruction of her backyard snow-people, Lon has a change of heart and announces that he will keep the family in St. Louis "until we rot." The film ends as the Smiths view the opening night of the fair and Esther declares: "I can't believe it. Right here where we live. Right here in St. Louis."
In the custom of the integrated musical, Minnelli roots songs and dances directly in narrative situations. During the film's opening, various cast members pass the song "Meet Me in St. Louis" from one to another as they go about their daily activities. Esther sings "The Boy Next Door" while gazing into John's yard from a ground-floor window in her house. She joins in "The Trolley Song" when John meets her on a ride to preview the fair grounds, and she comforts Tootie on Christmas eve with "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." A party to celebrate Lon Jr.'s (Henry H. Daniels Jr.) departure for college occasions a square dance to a swing version of "Skip to My Lou," and Tootie and Esther entertain the guests with "Under a Bamboo Tree." In this manner the songs, all but one featuring Judy Garland, are interspersed without venturing far beyond the Smith family's domestic world.
