Color at the center: Minnelli's Technicolor style in 'Meet Me in St. Louis.' - Style in Cinema - filmmaker Vincente Minnelli

Style, Fall, 1998 by Scott Higgins

By turning Technicolor's basic prescriptions into evaluative criteria, American Cinematographer squared specific films with institutionally endorsed ideals of color use. In doing so, the reviews presented a picture of diverse color styles coexisting within the borders of an overarching set of aesthetic principles. Though American Cinematographer had discontinued its monthly reviews by 1944, these discussions help us understand the aesthetic concerns of motion picture professionals during the period. As a musical, Meet Me in St. Louis might be granted greater latitude to develop a complex, "pictorial" palette, but the production's color design would ultimately be held to standards of harmony, unobtrusiveness, and subordination to narrative.

Color in Meet Me in St. Louis

MGM produced Meet Me in St. Louis at a time when Technicolor was allowing studios greater freedom in the use of their process. By the mid- 1940s the major studios had proved their allegiance to the company, allotting color a comfortable niche in their production schedules. This newfound stability may have encouraged Technicolor to relax its system for overseeing color production. No longer so concerned about proving the worth of their system to Hollywood, the parent company could afford to modify its protective posture.

This easing of supervision affected the Technicolor package. From the 1930s, Technicolor required that studios hire not only a consultant from the Color Advisory Service, but a special Technicolor cinematographer as well. Beginning in the early 1940s Technicolor began allowing some studio cinematographers to handle shooting on their own. By 1943, most productions were shot by unsupervised studio camera operators. An editorial in American Cinematographer suggested that some professionals felt the Technicolor cinematographers, by "avoiding innovations in lighting and similar techniques," had been "too conservative in their approach" ("Through the Editor's" 424). The shift in policy put more control in the hands of studio artists and may have encouraged more experimentation in color cinematography. For example, in Meet Me in St. Louis, cinematographer George Folsey could freely indulge his penchant for the extremely diffused "bounce lighting" that he helped pioneer in the 1930s.(5)

More importantly, the easing of Technicolor strictures during the 1940s was manifested in an expansion of color-design options. The number of Technicolor productions increased from just over twenty features between 1935 and 1939 to nearly fifty between 1940 and 1944. Several commentators have noted that the 1940s brought bolder and more vibrant palettes to Technicolor productions (Basten 102). The carefully restrained style characteristic of many 1930s productions gave way to more aggressive designs that foregrounded color as a forceful element of visual design. Within this aesthetic environment, the musical emerged as a staple Technicolor genre, capable of motivating this kind of display.

In Meet Me in St. Louis, Minnelli takes full advantage of the room opened by the musical genre for adventurous color. But Minnelli's film diverges in at least one important respect from the pattern set by other films at the forefront of the trend. The 1940s color musical had found particular success in a series of features made at Twentieth Century Fox, exemplified by such Betty Grable and Alice Faye vehicles as Moon Over Miami (1941) and The Gang's All Here (1943). In color design, the Fox musicals tend toward conservative harmonies during scenes of exposition, saving bold splashes of color for the large production numbers. Against this generic context, Minnelli and the Freed unit innovated color design by integrating pictorial effects into the film as a whole. Just as Meet Me in St. Louis seeks to incorporate the musical performances into the story, it extends the musical's broader palette and techniques for color foregrounding beyond the confines of production numbers.(6) An overview of the film's strategies for handling color indicates how it takes advantage of the genre's stylistic latitude to achieve a range of effects.