There's no place like home

Meet Me in St. Louis

(1944)

A blood-curdling tale of parental abuse about a family whose father who wants to uproot them from St. Louis and pack them off to--shudder--New York! The most traumatized of the children acts out through acts of assault with baking goods, mass transit vandalism, and neigehomicide, but in the end, everyone muddles through somehow.

Vincente Minnelli directs his wife to be, taking great care not to let audiences forget her signature role from 5 years earlier: the central theme is the same, and several of Esther's lines (and Garland's readings of them) echo Miss Gale's--not least the final appreciation of the World's Fair, delivered with familiarly breathless wonder: "Right here where we live--right here in St. Louis!" Margaret O'Brien plays Esther's delinquent little sister and, like the ketchup the housekeeper is making at the start, cuts the cloying cuteness with enough vinegar to be digestible. And three of the songs--"The Boy Next Door," "The Trolley Song," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"--have a rightful place on any collection of Garland's best.

One oddly ironic line: Mr. Smith early in the film jokes about quitting his job and pitching for the Baltimore Orioles. In 1903, when the character speaks, the Orioles were a minor league team, and that was still the case when the film was made. But if the film had been made 10 years later, that line would have been a cruel allusion to the American League team that had been the St. Louis Browns until moving east in 1953. What did Minnelli know? . . .