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

Based on a series of autobiographical short stories by Sally Benson, the film follows life around the Smith family's St. Louis household from the summer of 1903 through the spring of 1904. When father Lon (Leon Ames) decides to take a job in New York, he threatens the family's happiness and dashes their dreams of attending the World's Fair. Lon's decision is particularly troublesome for two of the Smith daughters: Esther (Judy Garland), the second oldest, and Tootie (Margaret O'Brien), the youngest. Esther develops a romance with neighbor boy John Truett (Tom Drake), who proposes to her three days before she is to move. For Tootie, the move will interrupt a cycle of countless childhood traditions and schemes such as the annual Halloween revelry that she and her sister Agnes (Joan Carroll) undertake. On Christmas eve, after witnessing Tootie's destruction of her backyard snow-people, Lon has a change of heart and announces that he will keep the family in St. Louis "until we rot." The film ends as the Smiths view the opening night of the fair and Esther declares: "I can't believe it. Right here where we live. Right here in St. Louis."

In the custom of the integrated musical, Minnelli roots songs and dances directly in narrative situations. During the film's opening, various cast members pass the song "Meet Me in St. Louis" from one to another as they go about their daily activities. Esther sings "The Boy Next Door" while gazing into John's yard from a ground-floor window in her house. She joins in "The Trolley Song" when John meets her on a ride to preview the fair grounds, and she comforts Tootie on Christmas eve with "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." A party to celebrate Lon Jr.'s (Henry H. Daniels Jr.) departure for college occasions a square dance to a swing version of "Skip to My Lou," and Tootie and Esther entertain the guests with "Under a Bamboo Tree." In this manner the songs, all but one featuring Judy Garland, are interspersed without venturing far beyond the Smith family's domestic world.

As with the music, Minnelli weaves color into the production's basic texture. He uses some script elements, such as the name of eldest sister Rose (Lucille Bremer), retained from Benson's original story, to help to highlight the role of color in the world of each character. As she dresses for a party, for instance, Esther contemplates her auburn hair, speculating that if Rose were a brunette "nothing could have stopped us." Characters who acknowledge and discuss color help to foreground it, reminding the viewer that the film's environment could not be rendered in black and white. Color is also employed to reinforce the film's broad structure. Minnelli recalls that he planned colors to accentuate the seasons into which the film is divided:

Summer saw the damp, wilted white of women's dresses and men's suits, the brilliant yellow of beer wagons [....] fall brings bright-colored leaves whisked from trees, the deep orange of pumpkin heads at the windows on Halloween, [...] Our winter sequence finds the same scene blanketed in snow [...] holiday colors are reflected in the silver bells of horse-drawn sleigh. (Fordin 114)