Meet Me In Saint Louis
Posted by J on December 12, 2007
How’s this for surreal? While singing “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” Judy Garland holds two crazed-looking toy monkeys and croons to her kid sister, Tootie. This is the same Tootie who proudly announces that she’s been burying her animal toys in the local cemetery, who cross-dresses during an extended Halloween scene, and who gets injured while trying to throw a fake body in front of trolley (leading one of her sisters to announce, “My, you could have killed somebody!”).
Well, okay. It’s not that Meet Me in Saint Louis is deliberately bizarre, like the nightmare sequences in Oklahoma and Singin’ in the Rain. It’s just that from the vantage point of sixty years later, it’s weird. The lone plot point, in a movie set in St. Louis circa 1903, centers on a father’s complete disconnect with his family. They don’t seem to communicate with him, and he doesn’t communicate with them. He, for example, doesn’t know that one of his daughters is being pursued by a young man, in a noteworthy scene where that young man calls long-distance during dinner. His family also doesn’t know ahead of time that the father has taken a cushy lawyer job in New York City. They don’t want to move, Judy Garland doesn’t want to move due to a love interest, and that’s the entire story.
It seems that just when the family looks disconnected, they start singing songs, which make their problems go away. That works well in the world of musicals, but one can see quickly why this syrupy genre faded away: it was too hoaky for a culture knocking at the door of southeast Asian countries and the attendant, all-too-real cultural and political problems with barging in through that door. Meet Me in Saint Louis is too hokey for today’s world too, though all the cutesiness of musical performances is here, ready to be appreciated for their own sake.
Entertainment: 5
Intelligence: 0
Morality: 6 (nothing bad, but you wouldn’t want to emulate anybody in the movie either)
