In some ways, Arthur Freed was perfectly placed to carry the Hollywood musical into the future. A product of the vaudeville era, he became a very successful lyricist, supplying songs, mostly in collaboration with Nacio Herb Brown, to every kind of musical entertainment offered on American stages.
He had a deep sentimental attachment to the traditions of American show business, especially vaudeville, but he was also a visionary, who knew that the traditions he loved could only survive in new forms that appealed to a new generation.
The key to his vision was Judy Garland, a kid but also a second-generation vaudevillian. Five of the first seven musicals he produced were vehicles for Garland, and in three of these she starred with Mickey Rooney, another kid with roots in vaudeville. All of Freed's Garland-Rooney musicals -- there were four all told -- were backstage ("Hey, kids, let's put on a show!") stories, and they each paid conscious tribute to the vaudeville tradition, but somehow Garland and Rooney made it all seem new. Partly this was because of their own youthful personae and partly because they made their bows to the past with an affectionate irony.
But Freed was just getting going. I don't know how consciously Freed was inspired by the art of Fred Astaire, whose sublimely expressive dancing suggested a whole new range of expression for musicals, showing how a down-home American sensibility could be conveyed in a supremely elegant form. However direct the influence, Freed got the message somehow.
The Garland-Rooney musicals have a down-home flavor. Garland and Rooney may play aspiring show business performers, with a virtuosity far beyond their years, but they are also icons of the American boy and girl next door. The musical films they did together combine melodrama with the more traditional elements of romantic comedy, as had the non-musical Andy Hardy films they made before they worked with Freed. There was corn-pone sentiment, about teen love and the family, mixed up with the nostalgia for vaudeville and the newfangled Hollywood razzmatazz.
Astaire and Rogers, in most of their films, play ordinary Americans slumming amongst the very rich in café society. In the Garland-Rooney musicals, home is the defining environment. Freed was feeling his way towards a new kind of domestic musical, which would reach its apotheosis in Meet Me In St. Louis.
Parallel with this new development, Freed remained true to the variety format, in films such as Ziegfeld Follies (above), a revue directed by Minnelli, who was also the director of Meet Me In St. Louis. And he continued to make backstage musicals like The Band Wagon and Singing In the Rain (actually a backlot musical), though even these had a more naturalistic tone than the surreal spectacles of Busby Berkeley in the 1930s.
Yet for all their relative naturalism, these films were highly stylized on a cinematic level. Freed hired Berkeley to direct the Garland-Rooney musicals, in a somewhat more muted style than he was known for, and in Minnelli he found an even more elegant and subtle cinematic magician. Freed realized that old-fashioned show-biz exaggeration, a dash of sublime hokum, had to be applied to the visual style of a musical, even as it explored the simpler virtues of life.
Freed created something new under the sun out of bits and pieces of things recovered from the attic of his fondest show-biz memories. He realized that the more show business changes, the more it remains the same, and he negotiated the paradox with impeccable flair.