You Could Do Worse, and Likely Would, Than Choosing Meet Me In St. Louis To Watch Once or Twice Every Year.

Chan was in North Carolina visiting his family for a few days, so I watched Meet Me In St. Louis twice in the last 2 days (not that he wouldn't have watched it with me, but probably not twice). If for some reason I could only watch one film for the rest of my life it would be this, and I wouldn't be mad about it. I've seen it a dozen or two times and I see new things every time (like I never noticed her striped stockings halfway through this song before yesterday).

Every singer should study Judy Garland. What made her special was not just the power of her voice but her absolute commitment to every word, sentence, image, the story, every single time -- what made her special was her acting. What other singer can make you believe a lyric like "And though I'm heartsore, the boy next door affection for me won't display"?

The other thing about this movie: I will go to hell for asking this, but how did Margaret O'Brien not win all the Oscars for this performance? Judy is so radiant and it's her story, so I guess it's easy to overlook what O'Brien does in this film, which is astonishing.

In obvious ways, it’s a reactionary film — MGM knew its audience — but this paean to small town values and the patriarchy is shot through with the ambivalence and anxiety of its director Vincente Minnelli — about family, about the Midwest, about marriage, about men — who knows that most of those patriarchal families were actually run by charismatic women. Speaking of which, his adoration of Garland illuminates every frame. No wonder she fell in love with him.

This next clip is only the second half of a longer sequence that is one of my favorites in any film. I wish I could find a video of the whole thing, which starts with their father coming home from work to announce that he’s taken a job offer in New York and they’ll be moving right after Christmas. Everyone is shaken by this news, they love living in St. Louis, they have friends and boyfriends, attachments, the World’s Fair is coming. They argue, shout, cry, and eventually everyone runs off to their rooms, except Mom and Dad, who sing this song which brings everyone back, and then they have cake. Besides showing Minnelli’s genius as a storyteller, it’s a lovely example of how he uses music in this movie, which is not really a musical — the songs are a mix of traditional songs, popular songs from the era the story is set in, and a handful of songs written for the film. Nothing is resolved in the scene, the disruption of their lives will still be painful, but family is everything. I find it heartbreaking.

(The other genius and Midwestern gay man whose work underpins lots of these great golden era MGM musicals is Roger Edens. Besides composing, arranging, supervising, and producing, he worked closely with Judy Garland from the beginning of her film career as a voice teacher and coach. All her greatest film performances are collaborations with Edens.)

I love this moment (starting at 2:10) at the end of the film, when John Truett delivers a line I can’t for the life of me make any sense of, and Judy’s reaction seems to show she’s similarly puzzled. What is he talking about?

There’s all kinds of other stuff that someone should write about, or maybe someone has? For a film with such a simple story, some say no story at all, its preoccupations, themes, resonances are expansive. It’s about urbanization and modernity, “traditional values,” race and colonialism (can we talk about that cake walk scene and all the African themed decor in the house?), it’s about America. It’s a wartime film, made in 1944, when the world order seemed to be spinning apart, and it’s set in and ostensibly about, a simpler time, but somehow the final sequence at the World’s Fair doesn’t bring to mind stability. It feels like a last gasp.