Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

Movie musicals don't get any better than this! In "The Wizard of Oz" Judy Garland's character, Dorothy, opines, "there's no place like home." In "Meet Me in St. Louis" we are treated to a depiction of exactly what an ideal home, a home to cherish and nostalgically remember, is.

The Smith family lives in a sprawling and lovely house in the nicer part of St. Louis. Three generations of the family live together: Grandpa Smith, Lon (a prosperous attorney )& Anna Smith and their five children: Lon Jr. (off to Princeton), Rose (smitten with Warren Sheffield), Esther (getting to know "the boy next door") and the two youngest girls, Agnes and irrepressible "Tootie" (always up to mischief). Family drama unfolds! The brilliantly talented Vincente Minneli has created in this film an irresistible homage to home and family circa 1903/04 with the added piece de resistance of Judy Garland singing some of her most well-known and beloved songs: "The Boy Next Door," "The Trolley Song," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." Beautiful!

Garland is the supreme entertainer of her generation and possibly for all time. She can relate a song to her audience and make them feel what is in her heart. Nowhere in St. Louis is this more clear than in her rendition of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas - a carol with obvious tear-jerking sadness and poignancy. However, the film's most exuberant display of joyous passion remains 'The Trolley Song'.

At any rate, enjoy! This is one film that never gets old and Judy Garland was never more beautiful than she was right here.

Fmovies: A lot of the Hollywood studios during the War years made these nostalgic films about a simpler time when no foreign foe threatened our way of life. MGM's contribution to these films was not bettered served than by Meet Me In St. Louis. It's a simple story about the Smith family in 1904 St. Louis eagerly awaiting the World's Fair that would take place in their town. And to my knowledge no other World's Fair had as enduring a theme song as the one written for this fair, serving as the title song for the film.

The Smith family consists of parents Leon Ames and Mary Astor and their five children, son Henry Daniels, Jr. and daughters in descending order, Lucille Bremer, Judy Garland, Joan Carroll, and Margaret O'Brien. Grandfather Harry Davenport lives with the clan and so does live-in maid Marjorie Main who functions like Alice in the Brady household. A good meal and an occasional wisecrack to keep everyone in line.

Everyone's excited about the upcoming fair, St. Louis's rival city Chicago had one a decade earlier and Buffalo did three years earlier, but this one promises to be the most extravagant of all. Ames gets an opportunity in business and wants to move the family to New York, but one by one the family has or develops obligations and ties to St. Louis that makes them reluctant to leave. Not to mention they don't want to miss the fair.

Vincente Minnelli directed Meet Me In St. Louis and it was his first opportunity to work with Judy Garland whom he would marry after the film was finished. Judy got to do three of her most identified songs from the Hugh Martin-Ralph Blane score that was blended with some traditional music of the times. The Boy Next Door, Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, and The Trolley Song all come out of Meet Me In St. Louis and were staple items at Garland concerts for years. One of the Oscar nominations that Meet Me In St. Louis received was for The Trolley Song for Best Original Song. It lost to Bing Crosby's Swinging On A Star that year. The other nominations were for musical scoring, color cinematography, and screenplay.

Margaret O'Brien did a remarkable job in this film, this was probably her best role while a child star at MGM. Not that she was the youngest and most appealing of the kids, she was that. But Minnelli did a great job in directing her. She had all the fears and trepidations of a child growing up and not wanting to leave all she's known and loved in St. Louis. Her acting reached its zenith in the scene where she destroys the carefully made snowmen in her yard and in the Halloween scene where she is induced to play a practical joke on a neighbor the rest of the kids regard as scary. Her number with Judy Garland, Under The Bamboo Tree is a gem.

Meet Me In St. Louis was one of the earliest and best films coming out of the Arthur Freed unit at MGM. It was films like these that gave the Freed unit and MGM its reputation for turning out the best in musical film entertainment. It can never be duplicated because you don't have studios with all that talent under contract.

In its way the film itself is as nostalgic as the time it celebrates. I guarantee your heart strings will go Zing Zing Zing as you hear Judy Garland sing the score from Meet Me In St. Louis.

BEWARE OF FALSE REVIEWS & REVIEWERS. SOME REVIEWERS HAVE ONLY ONE REVIEW TO THEIR NAME. NOW WHEN ITS A POSITIVE REVIEW THAT TELLS ME THEY WERE INVOLVED WITH THE MOVIE. IF ITS A NEGATIVE REVIEW THEN THEY MIGHT HAVE A GRUDGE AGAINST THE FILM . NOW I HAVE REVIEWED OVER 300 HOLIDAY FILMS & SPECIALS. I HAVE NO AGENDA

The backdrop for Meet Me in St. Louis is St. Louis, Missouri in the year leading up to the 1904 World's Fair.

It is summer 1903. The Smith family leads a comfortable upper-middle class life. Alonzo Smith (Leon Ames) and his wife Anna (Mary Astor) have four daughters: Rose (Lucille Bremer), Esther (Judy Garland), Agnes (Joan Carroll), and Tootie (Margaret O'Brien); and a son, Lon Jr. (Henry H. Daniels, Jr.). Esther, the second eldest daughter, is in love with the boy next door, John Truett (Tom Drake), although he does not notice her at first. Rose is expecting a phone call in which she hopes to be proposed to by Warren Sheffield (Robert Sully).

Esther finally gets to meet John properly when he is a guest at the Smiths' house party, although her chances of romancing him don't go to plan when, after all the guests are gone and he is helping her turn off the gas lamps throughout the house, he tells her she uses the same perfume as his grandmother and that she has "a mighty strong grip for a girl".

Esther hopes to meet John again the following Friday on a trolley ride from the city to the construction site of the World Fair. Esther is sad when the trolley sets off without any sign of him, but cheers up when she sees him running to catch the trolley mid journey.

Even though the there is barely a story-line the film works. IT gets a tad slow here and there but Margret O'Brien steels every scene she is in. Judy Garland however is always a delight to watch. If you like her in this then make sure to see "In the Good Old Summertime".

This film was beautifully filmed. If you can watch it on a Blu-ray.

Meet Me in St. Louis fmovies. A film that is firmly ticking all the boxes for those looking for a family classic to admire and tap your feet along with. This delightful musical deals with one family and their struggle to deal with the changing of the times at the turn of the century. When the Father is requested to move to New York permanently with his job, the rest of the family are not that keen to leave their memories and their beloved home in St. Louis, and in to the mix is the varying degrees of blossoming love involving the elder daughters and their respective beaus.

This film is just so gorgeous on many fronts, the colour beautifully realises the tremendous scope director Vincent Minnelli brings with his recreation of the era, the attention to detail is quality supreme. The story is good and earthy, a sort of tale to have the viewer hankering for the good old days before the world got itself in one big hurry. The songs are crackers, enjoy standards such as The Boy Next Door, The Trolley Song, and the simply precious Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas. The cast are across the board doing good work but it is of course Judy Garland who carries the movie firmly on her slender shoulders, and here she has never been prettier, and her voice is practically as good as it ever was in her career.

A film for all the family to enjoy, a film that is from the top echelons of musicals, and a film that simply demands you relax and enjoy.

Right, I'm off to get a piece of cake... 9/10

One of the greatest movie musicals, and thus one of the greatest American movies, "Meet Me in St. Louis" tells a story that may appear insultingly inconsequential: a happy family living in turn-of-the-century St. Louis considers moving to New York, but decides against it. Yet Vincente Minelli, working with a wonderful cast and unusually intelligent songs, takes this story and makes it the one really convincing screen refutation of Tolstoy's claim that all happy families are alike, and indeed perhaps the only fully rounded and persuasive representation of a happy family in the history of movies. From the small family conflict over the quality of homemade ketchup that begins the movie, to the agony over moving at the end, the Smiths are a collection of distinctive, vibrant and at times almost incompatible characters bound together not only by love but by a contagious, and very particular, sense of fun.

Minelli's genius for musical numbers in interior spaces--most notably the great party in the Smith home near the beginning of the movie--is complemented here by two unforgettable outdoor sequences, Judy Garland's matchless "Trolley Song" and Tootie's Halloween adventure in the neighborhood, where she shows such vulnerability, such courage,and in the end such diabolical lack of conscience that no one can fail to love her. These outdoor scenes protect "Meet in St. Louis" from the claustrophobia that so frequently limits the power of "family" dramas.

Tootie, at five, is the youngest of the five Smith children, and as played by the great child actor Margaret O'Brien, she is also the center of most of the fun. Her relationship with her older sister Esther (Judy Garland) is captivating in its joy, complexity, and ultimately in its sadness. For even though the catastrophe (!) of moving to New York is narrowly avoided, Esther will still leave home for life with the boy next door, and the powerful unity of these lucky people will ultimately give way to other claims of new love, new suffering and new duty. The happiness the Smiths knew while living together will only increase the pain of each parting. We're blessed, though, to have glimpsed their particular brand of happiness at its glorious peak.

If there was no other reason why Judy Garland married Vincente Minnelli, then this film supplies the reason for how he won her hand. It's a valentine to her talents and, as an example of MGM's gilt-edged manufacture, it's a sold gold entry.

Yes, Tom Drake was a bit wan as Judy's love interest but everyone else in the cast, maybe even including the too-glamorous Lucille Bremer, are just right, especially the inimitable Marjorie Main. Mary Astor, already deep in the throes of her extended bout with alcoholism as the family's matriarch shows nary a sign of her illness, such was the wizardry of the makeup artists, costumers, hair dressers and the cinematographer. And Judy, too, already addicted to the medications that her tyrannical studio bosses used to keep her nose to a very demanding grindstone, looks as wholesome and lovely as one could wish, particularly in the "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" number.

It's one of those Golden Age classics that always repays a return viewing and its naysayers are in a rather lonely minority, in my opinion.