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

In a more general way, Minnelli organizes color to reinforce broad shifts in mood or tone across the film. This use becomes most pronounced after the Christmas dance, when Lon is convinced by Tootie's emotional outpouring that he should keep the family in St. Louis. After the richly colored dance, the film's palette contracts significantly and then sparingly reintroduces selected hues until Lon's announcement triggers a flood of color. John's bittersweet proposal to Esther is rendered entirely in shades of blue and silver gray. Red is strikingly reintroduced when Esther sheds her overcoat to reveal her ball gown as she attempts to comfort Tootie with "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." But aside from a few coordinating accents, the scenes of her song and Tootie's subsequent rampage are dominated by shades of blue-gray. Indeed, the reduction of chromatic range helps make variations in color even more powerful. The contrasts between Esther's dress and her surroundings, or between the silver-blue snow and a solitary patch of yellow light that falls on the snow-family, appear intensified because of the palette's simplicity.

In this shift in color range, Minnelli accentuates the solemn mood of the Smith house just before their impending move to New York. Both color and dramatic tone are in stark contrast to earlier scenes of celebration in the Smith home. The shift becomes even more apparent as Lon wanders through the house, contemplating his decision. The house is now stripped of the ornaments that had provided dashes of texture and hue in earlier scenes; bare patches on the wallpaper mark the places where paintings once hung. But the moment that Lon rises to announce his resolution to stay in St. Louis, saturated dashes of hue return to the frame. First the green and red shade on a tiffany lamp streaks across the foreground as the camera pans to follows Lon. He pauses to turn up another red lamp and adds a burst of scarlet. When the family assembles in the living room, they return chromatic complexity to the household. Esther's red dress now plays off Rose's blue nightgown, while Agnes and Tootie provide accents of pink. Compositions are framed to include the tiffany lamp, as well as red and green streamers hanging overhead. The range of color expands as the mood brightens.

Several observers have noted the way this sequence uses mise-en-scene to accentuate the resolution of the plot's central conflict (Bordwell and Thompson 329; Casper 113). Indeed, it presents the most emphatic correlation between emotional tone and color values in the film. But it seems important to note that this use of style conforms strongly to the broad Technicolor principle of color scoring. In this instance, the film elaborates the coding of color to narrative situation in a manner that foregrounds the device. As a closer look at the "You and I" sequence will illustrate, Meet Me in St. Louis tends not to diverge from Technicolor's prescriptions for binding color to story; rather it makes these principles more visible by playing them out with an unusually dynamic palette.