12 Movies of Christmas: Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) - The Quality Street of Festive Musicals
Like many families in the UK, we would always have a cupboard full of goodies and sweets ready for Christmas that we absolutely must not touch before the Big Day. Invariably, one of the offerings would be a massive tin of Quality Street chocolates. The design on the tub is pretty bog standard these days but, when I was a kid, the artwork evoked vintage times with a scene featuring a fine lady in a gown and a handsome soldier strolling along a street lined with grand old houses.
Perhaps thanks to this, I always thought of Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis as the Quality Street of movies when it came around to choosing our Christmas viewing each year: A quaint period piece filled with Technicolor-wrapped treats inside, and you’d probably gorge on them until you felt a bit sick. But I never actually sat down and watched it, thinking it looked a bit too twee and old-fashioned for my taste.
For our 12 Movies of Christmas series, I decided to take the plunge and see why it is still regarded as one of the greatest festive films of all time. And let’s make no mistake right from the get-go: It is about as old-fashioned as Hollywood movies get, a buoyant musical brimming with wholesome sentiments and chocolate box charm. But it is also one haunted by its star and infused with an unshakeable sense of melancholy in the last act.
Based on Sally Benson’s 1942 novel of the same name, which in turn stemmed from the author’s series of nostalgic vignettes for The New Yorker magazine, Meet Me in St. Louis takes place in the year leading up to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a.k.a the World’s Fair, held in the titular city in 1904. Season by season, we follow the fortunes of the Smiths, a large well-to-do family living in a rambling Victorian-style mansion in the suburbs.
The Smiths are a lively and personable bunch, and we know straight away that they’ll be good company for the duration. Mother Anna (Mary Astor), oldest son Lon Jr (Henry H. Daniels Jr.), and housemaid Katie (Marjorie Main) bicker over the ketchup recipe in the kitchen. Tomboy Agnes (Joan Carroll) reminds us what the movie is called by kicking off a rendition of the title song, which is picked up by eccentric Grandpa (Harry Davenport) as he chooses a fez from his collection of wacky hats.
The two oldest sisters, Esther (Judy Garland) and Rose (Lucille Bremner) concern themselves with potential suitors: Esther has her sights set on their handsome neighbour John (Tom Drake) while Rose is anticipating a proposal from her beau Warren (Robert Sully) via long-distance call from New York. They’ve all come together with a ruse to eat dinner an hour early so Rose can have the telephone to herself in the dining room.
Lastly, we meet the youngest sibling Tootie (Margaret O’Brien), a precocious five-year-old with a cheerfully morbid imagination, and father Alonzo (Leon Ames), the kindly but stuck-in-his ways head of the household who works as a junior partner in a law firm. Due to dad’s insistence on having dinner at the correct time, Rose’s call doesn’t quite go as planned, but it’s all smiles because the family clearly love one another and enjoy each other’s company without a whiff of dysfunction.
This long introduction to the Smiths sets the tone for the rest of the film, moving through the seasons at a leisurely pace with regular intervals for musical numbers. The songs are a mix of existing ditties from around the time of the real World’s Fair in St. Louis and original pieces written for the movie by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. The latter are the big highlights knocked out of the park by Garland, who by this stage had matured into a major young leading lady after her star-making turn in The Wizard of Oz five years earlier.
Reportedly, Garland wasn’t keen on doing the film in the first place and she had some reservations about the screenplay, but you wouldn’t necessarily tell from her performance. Her voice is captivating as she delivers “The Boy Next Door” with yearning coquettishness and “The Trolley Song” with wide-eyed gusto, before closing out with the one tune everybody knows from the film even if they haven’t seen it, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
The former child star’s troubled personal life is well-documented: Among other things, she was hooked on drugs to help cope with her punishing schedule as a teen idol; criticised about her looks; suffered sexual harassment; forced to have an abortion; and had the studio interfering with her love life. That was all before Meet Me in St. Louis when she played her last teen role and was allowed to reveal her true beauty thanks to make-up artist Dorothy Ponedel, who ditched the prosthetics that MGM head Louis B. Mayer had previously insisted that Garland wear. Perhaps I’m just projecting knowledge of her tragic story onto the movie, but there seems to be some genuine sadness behind her eyes that gives her performance such a haunting quality.
Meet Me in St. Louis was produced by Arthur Freed and directed by Vincente Minnelli, and they both knew a thing or two about mounting a Technicolor musical. Freed was one of the voices fighting to keep “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz before he went on to mastermind Singin’ in the Rain and worked with Minnelli on two Oscar Best Picture winners, An American in Paris and Gigi. For his part, Minnelli started his career designing elaborate window displays at Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago, and his opulent Hollywood musicals gave him the opportunity to delight in intricate sets, lavish costumes, and eye-popping colour.
The film meanders amiably along before taking an unexpected detour into gothic horror when we reach Halloween. Evidently it was a very different affair around St. Louis back then with kids going feral in their costumes, burning furniture in the streets, and “killing” unsuspecting neighbours by throwing wet flour in their faces. This segment is a real showcase for six-year-old Margaret O’Brien, who steals just about every scene she’s in anyway as Tootie. I’m not normally a big fan of Hollywood moppets but she’s terrific, delivering a big-hearted performance that is delightfully unvarnished.
Around this time, Meet Me in St. Louis belatedly finds a dramatic thread. Mr. Smith announces that he plans to take a career-boosting move to New York and uproot the whole family. Everyone from Grandpa to Tootie is aghast at the idea; they’re all quite happy with their lives in Missouri and the prospect shakes them to the core.
Now, we know full well that the Smiths will be just fine if they go to New York. A middle-class family moving on to build an even more comfortable lifestyle in the Big Apple is pretty high up on the list of first world problems. But by this stage, we’ve become so invested in their small dramas and the family are so idealised that it feels like remaining in their beloved home in St. Louis is fundamental to their existence as individuals and as a unit. As such, a sense of trepidation and sadness grows as Christmas approaches and they pack up the house ready for the unwanted move.
Of course, moving home can be really tough on kids and it’s Tootie we feel the most sorry for, especially when we finally get to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” As I’m sure you have, I’ve heard the standard repeatedly over the years around the festive period, but it was absolutely heart-breaking seeing it in the proper context of the film for the first time.
Without spoiling it too much, time is running out for the Smiths in their home and Esther tries to comfort Tootie with a song. It’s the standout moment of the movie, so beautifully lit as they sit sadly in the window looking down at their family of snowmen in the front garden. As Esther sings, Tootie breaks down in despondent tears – you’d have to be a very hard person not to get choked up during this scene.
Old Hollywood legend tells that Minnelli provoked such a convincing reaction from the young star by getting her to imagine the death of a dog, which was incidentally how Wes Craven elicited such believable distress from Drew Barrymore in the opening sequence of Scream. O’Brien scotched that rumour in 2019, however, when she revealed to the Los Angeles Times that she managed such a feat of tearfulness because she was in competition with a fellow child actor to become the best crier at MGM. Either way, watching her forlorn face during the number is a killer, and it surely sealed O’Brien’s Academy Juvenile Award at the Oscars.
The “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” scene is so powerful that the eventual happy ending does little to shake the melancholy from the film, and it must have been especially poignant when it first hit theatres a month before Christmas 1944. It’s a nostalgic movie about the importance of home and family, which surely struck a chord while so many young men were still fighting thousands of miles away in World War II.
Meet Me in St. Louis is an old-fashioned film in the best possible sense, a gorgeous and charming treasure from Hollywood’s golden age that unapologetically plays on our emotions. There’s no problem with that at all – what do we watch movies for if not to have our feelings manipulated? Its universal themes still tug at the heart strings at a time of year when most people’s attention turns to hearth and kin, providing luxurious cinematic comfort food for the holiday period. Crack open that big tin of Quality Street and dive right in!
