Heimweh nach St. Louis

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

It's summer 1903. The Smiths live comfortably in St. Louis. Esther Smith (Judy Garland) has a crush on the new next door neighbor John. Tootie Smith (Margaret O'Brien) is the youngest of four daughters. Rose Smith (Lucille Bremer) is desperate to get married. The family and their friends are eager to see the World's Fair. Then father has news. He's getting a big promotion in New York City, but it seems nobody else is happy with the move.

This has an old Hollywood glow about it. I'm not just talking about the glowing Technicolor. It's the songs with a couple big iconic all-timers. It's the old fashion family film. It's the sincere energetic golly-gee performances of Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien. It's the overall sense of goodness. It doesn't have one mean bone in its body. I do like the Halloween section where it turns a bit spooky, but it always has its sweetness. It's so darn sentimental.

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.

This is such a sweet, wonderful movie - a slice of 1900's America that probably was never so perfect, but we would like to think that it was. The storyline is not a love story between Esther (Garland) and "The Boy Next Door" (one of the three timeless classic songs found in this movie). The storyline is really about the whole Smith family, based on an actual family who lived in St. Louis at the turn of the century. The real-life "Tootie" Smith (played by Margaret O'Brien) wrote stories of her life for the NewYorker. These stories were bought and compiled into this classic musical.

"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" originated here, and has become a classic yuletide song. It has been sung a thousand times by a thousand artists, but no one could ever capture the heartfelt emotion expressed by Judy Garland. If it doesn't bring a tear to your eye as you listen to her sing the song to little Tootie, I would have to wonder if you have a heart at all.

The most fun song is "The Trolley Song" - you can even see that Judy herself had a ball singing it. That scene was done in one take.

Judy Garland never looked better in any of her films as she did in this one. Perhaps it was one of the happiest times in her life? It is well-known that she married director Vincent Minelli after this picture.

Beautifully directed, depicting with accuracy the passing of the seasons of one year in the life of the Smiths of St. Louis. What a fun, charming, movie. I could never tire of it.

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.