The 1944 Smackdown is coming, so Chris looks at that year's musical masterpiece...
They don’t get much more timeless than Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me In St. Louis. It’s a musical about the family unit, and fittingly almost all of the numbers take place in the home. Whether in party revelry or the everyday household ubiquity of the title song, music is as much a definitive tradition of the Smith family as anything else. Grandpa may screw up the words, and it may be past the youngest’s bedtime, but music is one of the things that bind them. It also helps when one of the daughters is Judy Garland, I suppose.
Though St. Louis has relatively few musical numbers (unless you count umpteen reprises of that title song), its percentage of classics is nearly as high as its joy levels. “The Trolley Song” is the kind of showstopper that wins by the charm of its performer and its carefree whimsy. The “chug chug chug” silliness is exactly the kind of giddy uplift you have when falling in love, especially when you are in a musical. No matter that it’s actually kind of a strange metaphor for Garland’s Esther to use about her crush. Of all the love songs in Judy Garland’s singular repertoire, it is the sweetest...
Yes, St. Louis is a love story but not in the traditional sense. Much as our hearts soar at “The Trolley Song” and late night candle dimming, the real love story is for its Smith family.
St. Louis seems almost quaint by today’s standards when it comes to the cultural mores it embodies regarding marriage and tradition. But in that reverence is an authenticity that is quite moving - this family doesn’t follow nuclear norms because of the culture, but are bonded by genuine love. While “The Boy Next Door” and even “The Trolley Song” are more rosy in their vision of wide-eyed affection, the family is ruled by a more egalitarian, steadfast love anthem in “You and I”.
But the musical’s most rich song comes from sorrow rather than joy. While it’s debatable if St. Louis qualifies as a Christmas movie, it did give us the quintessential sad Christmas song. “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” is both an enduring holiday standard and Garland signature tune, brimming with the melancholy that affects a lot of us as the year comes to a close. To me it has always sounded like holiday well-wishing from someone with a heavy heart, an attempt to lift their own spirit through kindness when the joy of the season seems so far away. It calls on the traditions of the season, the feeling of togetherness and optimism, but doesn’t it all sound so far away in the barely contained sadness of Garland’s immaculate vocals?
Garland’s Esther has a heavy heart indeed. What makes the song so emotional in the context of the film is how the family is marking the end of their own chapter, the idyllic family vision they’ve held now becoming a thing of the past. In the midst of her family’s upheaval, she finally has the affections of the boy next door but that means she will add to the pain by leaving them. Tootie listens and weeps, knowing the subtext in her big sister’s words.
One of the miracles of Garland’s vocals is how she channels the specific heartbreak of Esther’s predicament into a universal feeling, how the separation she sings about becomes whatever it is that ails the listener. This is evident not only in the enduring nature of her version of the song, but in how it has been used in countless other films to capture the Christmas blues. This is what timeless sounds like.
Previous Soundtracking Favorites:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Evita
The First Wives Club
A Mighty Wind
Sister Act
...all installments can be found here!