Higgins, Scott. "Color At the Center: Minnelli's Technicolor Style in Meet Me in St. Louis." Style 32 (1998): 449-471. EBSCO. <http://search.epnet.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=keh&an=3255333>         

            “Color at the Center: Minnelli’s Technicolor Style in Meet Me in St. Louis,” an essay by Scott Higgins, evaluates Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis in terms of its position as a response to the conventions of the 1940s Technicolor musical.  He argues that the film adopts two major devices to this effect.  First, it impressively exhibits color throughout the entirety of the film, as opposed to the vast majority of musicals at the time which only concentrated on color for those episodes which involved song and dance.  Second, it incorporates a wide variety of vivid colors which are used to effectively highlight the tone of each individual scene.  In order to substantiate such assertions, Higgins begins by providing insight into Minnelli’s background as a theatrical stage director and sheds light on the aesthetic norms against which Meet Me in St. Louis is situated.  Conventions originally established by Technicolor which Minnelli elects to modify include the need to coordinate color schemes with dramatic action, the use of natural colors in place of brighter shades, and simplistic arrangements of the mise-en-scene.  Such principles were created as a means of ensuring that the viewer’s attention is never misguided due to coloring techniques.  While they seem to be positive innovations, they are in effect rather limiting, as Minnelli’s advancements reveal.

            Higgins espouses the argument that Meet Me in a St. Louis benefited from its appearance at a time when Technicolor, having secured its status as a monopoly, was beginning to allow studios increased freedom.  In addition, it also reaped advantages from the fact that more color design options had become available just prior to the film’s production.  Regardless, Higgins claims that, “the production ultimately seems indebted to a way of thinking about color as an amplifier of drama, and as such it remains true to the spirit, if not the letter, of Technicolor’s aesthetic guidelines.”  Higgins concludes by pronouncing the film reflective of Technicolor’s corporate rationale—it “could not have been made in black and white at any cost.”

            In “Mass Art as Folk Art”, the first chapter in The Hollywood Musical, Jane Feuer critiques the Hollywood musical as a medium which inherently involves mechanization and alienation.  Drawing influences from Stuart Hall and Walter Benjamin, she posits “one dominant impulse in musical films…the desire to capture on celluloid the quality of live entertainment,” (2) and the corresponding impossibility of live, spontaneous performance onscreen.  Feuer labels musical film a form of popular art, and thereby a source of alienation: “the performers do not consume the product and the consumers do not produce it” (2).  Positioned in front of the film frame, the community becomes an audience, leaving viewers at a loss.  However, the musical is unique in this respect.  It  aspires to return to the intimacy of folk art by presenting communities of its own.  In order to accomplish this goal, the musical adopts four basic techniques; it incorporates allegedly spontaneous effects, masks choreography and rehearsals, privileges amateurism, and builds communities “backstage” (3).

            Meet Me in St. Louis fits appropriately into three of the four categories: ‘Non-Choreography and Non-Rehearsals’, ‘Amateurs and Professionals’, and ‘The Folk Community and the Community Backstage.’  For instance, the “Skip to My Lou” sequence in Meet Me in St. Louis appears to commence without instruction, and yet all the characters know the steps.  As this song typifies the folk tradition, with its fiddle and uklele, the film is imbued with a kind of localized performance.  Likewise, the cakewalk sequence exudes a professional quality; but given that this is something that anyone could do in his or her own home, there is the feeling that the characters and the viewers are virtually one in the same.  This singing and dancing motif clearly takes place offstage as well; because the title song is passed-along during the film’s opening, the audience is left with no doubt that it is simply something that every member of the family knows.  All of this resonates with the viewer at the nostalgic level.  Despite the substantial body of evidence pointing to the movie’s manufactured status, Feuer insists that Meet Me in St. Louis nonetheless possesses features of the familiar and as such is able to overcome the individual estrangement intrinsic to the medium.

            Ethan Mordden’s The Hollywood Musical offers up an in depth survey of the history of musical cinema in America from the introduction of sound to the rock and roll era.  It proceeds chronologically, paying specific attention to the films of the 1930s and the genre’s evolution during World War II.  Being that Meet Me in St. Louis was released in 1944, towards the end of the second World War, it is the latter subject which appears to be of relevance.  Mordden argues that the war influenced the genre in a variety of ways, fostering stories which dealt with military service, patriotic demonstrations, historical reflections on America, and the resurgence of the classic musical revue with its lavish sets and all-star casts.

            As one might surmise, Mordden attributes Meet Me in St. Louis to the strand of development that involved “recalling an older and less embattled America, even a fantastic-folkloric one” (174).  He calls it “as folkloric as a nonethnic, nonreginal realistic white domestic comedy could be…the most nostalgic of the forties costume musicals” (177).  The film paints an attractively sanitized portrait of the American experience.  The characters live in a city that is itself almost a suburb, a place where families maintain close ties and their biggest worry is whether or not to move to New York City.  Although such things might now appear trivial, Mordden contends that this is in fact the film’s aim—to glorify the simplicity of the routine.

            In view of these assumptions, Mordden then articulates larger claims about MGM as a company insofar as its musicals “are obsessed with finding a safe place” (179).  Just as Mordden hypothesizes that, “the Smiths’ [the main characters in Meet Me in St Louis] street…is so ordinary that MGM could recycle it for countless period films thereafter,” (178) it should come as no great shock that MGM in the 1940s preferred that which was dull to that which was radical.  In fact, this is the primary focus of Mordden’s investigation of 1940s musical cinema and a central reason for his greater admiration of the genre’s realization throughout the 1930s, as opposed to later decades.  In his opinion, musical cinema set out with a sense of purpose, only to be reduced to the conventionally banal.

            Allen Woll’s book The Hollywood Musical Goes to War attempts to dispel the popular notion that the sole purpose of musical film is to provide escapist fantasy.  Using the musicals of World War II to validate this contention, Woll maintains that “between 1941 and 1945, the film musical achieved its greatest popularity and its greatest relevance,” (xi) and thus suggests that it is not overly presumptuous to utilize this period in support of his argument.  In contrast to the common conception of the musical as “national cheerleader, buoying the spirits of a society beset by war or economic distress,” (x) Woll argues that musical cinema actually possesses deep political commitments beneath the glamorous costumes and elaborate choreography, and that these elements ought not to go overlooked.

            Woll introduces Meet Me in St. Louis as an intriguing example of wartime musical film’s nostalgic impulse.  While the trend is to believe that musicals produced in this era represented a more innocent and appealing version of reality, Woll asserts that, “No matter how far back in time the musical comedy traveled, it seemed unable to escape the violence of the present day…the nostalgic musical of the wartime period became almost a musical tragedy” (146).  However, he notes that Meet Me in St. Louis, though unquestionably nostalgic, is of a different breed altogether.  The film involves neither war nor bloodshed; rather it operates as a “trip into the family photo album” (151).  Nevertheless, Woll emphasizes that the picture of turn-of-the-century St. Louis painted by the film is not without its unique atmosphere of disorder—the Halloween scene involves mob-induced havoc and the family’s decision to relocate to New York is met with the youngest daughter’s smashing of the ‘snowpeople’ in the household yard.  Although the film culminates with a happy resolution—the family remains in St. Louis—it makes a point of reflecting on the problems of the past.  Therefore, according to Woll’s argument, Meet Me in St. Louis serves as ostensible proof that nostalgic musicals do far more than offer a respite from modern chaos, and as a result citing musicals as a prime vehicle for escape is confirmed as a gross oversimplification.

            “Vincent Minnelli’s Style in Microcosm: The Establishing Sequence of Meet Me in St. Louis,” begins with a brief history of Minnelli’s occupational experiences prior to his emergence as a pre-eminent director of musical film.  Setting up the article’s premise, Genné, the author, then introduces Meet Me in St. Louis, Minnelli’s third film and first Technicolor production.  Using Meet Me in St. Louis as a starting point, Genné explores Minnelli’s ability to artfully combine content with form in his creation of integrated musicals, musicals which involve stories logically told through song and dance.  From there, Genné reduces her focus further—the first three minutes of the film—a move which she feels to be justified given her stance that a film’s establishing sequence can sufficiently encapsulate a director’s filmmaking style.

            As such, she launches into a detailed analysis of this sequence.  First, she provides an overall description: the Smith family is introduced as each sings the theme song “Meet Me in St. Louis.”  The moving camera follows them around the house, defining their relationships in spite, and perhaps because of, the minimal use of dialogue.  Following this sketch, which is itself incredibly comprehensive, she then turns her attention specifically to Minnelli’s expert use of the moving camera, his concern over the décor and frame composition, his lighting arrangements, and his use of color.  Between the presentation of background information, integration of quotes from the film, and the inclusion of still frames, each section is quite intricate and lengthy.  Taken together, one can easily see how Genné makes the case that, “Moving picture and music are indissolubly linked…this careful coordination of music with every aspect of moving picture is a fundamental characteristic of Minnellis style.  In his hands, music and image are made to enhance each other, so that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts” (248).

            Be that as it may, Genné also takes care to conclude with the admission that Minnelli’s style did ultimately change with the development of new technologies, particularly Cinemascope, and with the advent of Surrealism, a school which later became of interest to Minnnelli both as an intellectual and as a filmmaker.

            Gender issues are of the utmost importance in Dianne Waldman’s paper “‘At last I can tell it someone!’: Feminine Point of View and Subjectivity in the Gothic Romance Film of the 1940s.”  The article explores the Gothic romance film of the 1940s with regards to its generic import and its commentary on the historical situation of women in America.  Waldman argues that in spite of the Gothic’s longstanding association with expressions of “feminine fear, anger, and distrust of the patriarchal order” (29), the genre took on a slightly disparate incarnation during the second World War.  In such films, the emphasis was on the “affirmation of feminine perception, interpretation, and lived experience” (29).  Whatever one’s opinion of the Gothic, the subject of Waldman’s paper stems from the suspicion that the film audience at the time was almost exclusively composed of females.  To that end, this return to the Gothic seems logical given that domesticity was again a foremost issue of concern.

This article is relevant to Meet Me in St. Louis insofar as the film stands in direct opposition to this concept of the gothic romance, a truth which Waldman herself deduces.  The Gothic romance by definition despises the home environment; whereas a film like Meet Me in St. Louis, which is also from the same period, exalts the family household.  The attitude towards the Victorian family adopted in Meet Me in St. Louis is one which exalts the intimacy and community found within the home.  Conversely, the Gothic appropriates related feelings and labels them as responsible for “a smothering sense of confinement” (36).  Thus, Waldman’s insights into the Gothic romance reaffirm both Meet Me in St. Louis’s status as a family film ans speaks to the practice of defining items according to their opposites.  With such notions in mind, the necessity of viewing films in relation to their timely counterparts becomes exceedingly evident.  In summation, although “Feminist Point of View and Subjectivity” only briefly addresses Meet Me in St. Louis, it is a fascinating and strangely appropriate read all the same.

            Adopting what would seem to be a rather controversial perspective, Matthew reinvents traditional perceptions of homosexuality in classic Hollywood Tinkom in his essay “Working Like a Homosexual: Camp Visual Codes and the Labor of Gay Subjects in the MGM Freed Unit.”  He recapitulates it as something which has to do not only with a film’s reception but also with the forces of its production.  Instead of theorizing that filmmakers have to escape Hollywood’s grips so as to produce films which eschew the age-old negativity in their depictions of homosexuals, Tinkcom contends that the Freed unit at MGM presents an entirely dissimilar, and much overlooked, situation.  One of the major production units in existence at the height of MGM’s success, the Freed unit both contained homosexuals within its production team and, according to Tinkom, developed films inflected with gay themes.

Tinkom supports such claims by casting new light on the work of Vincent Minnelli, the director of Meet Me in St. Louis, and one of the leading filmmakers within the Freed unit.  Consequently, this article is interesting for the purposes of studying Meet Me in St. Louis inasmuch as it recasts the film’s fairly ordinary story of family values and heterosexual love under the spectrum of polyvalence.  Although Tinkom does not mention the film by name, he nonetheless suggests that it is imbued with a camp subtext despite its seemingly straightforward narrative.  Thus, it follows that Tinkom associates gay style with excess, a term which could be used to describe Minnelli’s use of color, light, and lavish mise-en-scène.

However, the fact that Meet Me in St. Louis is omitted from Tinkom’s explicit scrutiny is certainly worth mentioning.  It is conceivable that this film, unlike others directed by Minnelli, is not as entrenched in homosexual messages, though it is still of course the product of homosexual labor.  In any case, this idea clearly revolutionizes one’s feelings about Minnnelli and his films as well as those of the Freed unit as a whole.  In fact, it brings the entire cinematic institution into question and urges viewers to think more critically about sexual orientation and its relationship to genre.

            In “The Films of Vincente Minnelli,” Albert Johnson explores Minnelli’s career as a film director, particularly through the lens of his stylistic choices.  From the beginning of the article, Johnson establishes that Minnelli’s work is not that of a craftsman but that of “director-as-artist.”  In an attempt to explicate the strange paradox that is Minnelli’s career—Minnelli is renowned for his accomplishments as a director of musical films and yet many of his films, specifically those of his later career, diverge from the song-and-dance genre—Johnson commences with a brief history of Minnelli’s early work as a theatrical set designer and concludes with a lengthy discussion of his films.  According to Johnson’s argument, Minnelli “belongs neither to the old school nor to the new, but remains in a special position of accomplishment, one which permits all spheres of the visual and decorative arts to embellish his films…he is a master of the decorative image” (22).

            Meet Me in St. Louis typifies the type of work for which Minnelli is renowned.  Completed during the early part of his career, the film is his “masterpiece” (24).  Moreover, its enormously successful “lyrical evocation of an era” (24) compounded by its status as a “labor of love” (24) result in a film that is highly indicative of Minnelli’s strengths as a filmmaker.  Yet, as Johnson notes, it is interesting that Minnelli himself admitted that the motivating factor in his decision to direct Meet Me in St. Louis was the Halloween sequence, a short episode in which the children dress up in adults’ clothing and throw flour as a means of ‘killing’ people.  The scene is at once stylized, terrifying, and exciting; it is a throwback to the triumphs experienced throughout one’s own youth and thus provides an uncanny appeal to the American spirit.  Although this installment differs strikingly from the rest of the film, it works effectively in conjunction with the other events showcased, especially in relation to Judy Garland’s transformation from adolescent to adult.  Altogether, the image created is charming and humorous, making it once again difficult to believe that Minnelli would eventually have such an eclectic directing career.  The wonder of the film increases the article’s chief conundrum—why would someone who creates such successful musicals resist categorization?  Ultimately, Johnson’s article reaches no real conclusions to that end.

            “Coming to Terms With Color,” an article by William Johnson, consists of a detailed examination of the use of color in film.  It begins with a brief history of tinting and painting’s role in black and white film and then proceeds to discuss the development of Technicolor and Eastmancolor, as well as the initial reactions to these techniques.  Johnson makes a point of mentioning that any intellectual debate concerning color must recognize the following: “Until the early 1950s, the chief disagreement [about color] was between the public—which generally flocked to color movies—and the critics—who generally dismissed color movies as garish, pretty-pretty, or otherwise inartistic...the public, of course, no longer flocks to color as in the past; it merely stays away more from black-and-white” (2).  Given this disparity between popular and critical views, the question then becomes does screen color have any real purpose and if so what is it?  To answer this question, Johnson catalogs color effects and thematic schemes, citing various films as examples.  He concludes by recognizing the reality that color is often regarded as insignificant by viewers and attempts to imbue color with importance typically isolate it from the image.  Nonetheless, he is clearly optimistic about the future, which is a sensible attitude to adopt considering that the article, a fascinating historical study, is itself somewhat dated.

            As it is an early example of Technicolor, Meet Me in St. Louis is used frequently as an example throughout “Coming to Terms With Color”.  Johnson touches on both its positives and negatives, with greater emphasis on the former.  However, he does stress that at times the use of color does “get out of hand…lead[ing] not to clarity but to confusion” (8).  Still, he recognizes that color’s effects can be profound.  For example, he calls the scene when the two sisters play the piano reminiscent of a “painting” inasmuch as the scene, with its soft composition and narrative import, “fits both visually and dramatically with what precedes and follows” (12).  Finally, he applauds the film’s incorporation of black-and-white in the shots of the family photo album: “These touches of black-and-white add poignancy to the film’s gentle nostalgia, reminding the viewer that the action he is watching is set in a past which has long been fixed and has since been drained of color” (14).  Clearly, Johnson views Meet Me in St. Louis, even with its few missteps, to be a model for cinematic colorization.