Meet Me In St. Louis may be the greatest movie ever damned by an unending chorus of faint and elaborately qualified praise. Its frank appeal to sentiment and its view of the everyday domestic sphere as an arena of profound import could not be more out of critical fashion. Aljean Harmetz, in her wonderful book about the making of The Wizard Of Oz, puts it this way: "Meet Me In St. Louis . . . is almost embarrassing to watch today with its wholesome sentimentality capped by a tooth-decaying performance by seven-year-old Margaret O'Brien." (In fact, O'Brien's performances is one of the most extraordinary in the history of cinema.)
The problem is that Meet Me In St. Louis is the story of a functional family -- a concept which modern critics simply don't have the intellectual tools to engage. They're like art critics who are physically repulsed by the color brown trying to write sensibly about Rembrandt.
The core of the film to me is a scene of family crisis in which all the other members turn against the father, unite in opposition to him, for actions they see as oppressive and destructive. So far so good -- this is a scene of family dysfunction and patriarchal tyranny which is a convention of modern drama and which many of us probably know well from personal experience.
But then something strange happens. There is an intervention of grace. The mother joins the isolated father in the parlor, sits at the piano and begins playing a song -- one they used to sing at the beginning of their relationship. The father sings the words to it, in an unprofessional voice but with a straining effort to make it sweet. In the final chorus, the mother joins in, adding a harmony part.
The sound of this has drawn all the other members of the household back to the parlor. The crisis remains but the rancor has dispersed. The image of the bond between the parents has banished the terrifying specter of the family's emotional dissolution.
The song the parents sing, "You and I", sounds like an old standard from the period the film is set in, around the turn of the last century, but it was written in 1944, the year the film was made, with lyrics by the film's producer, Arthur Freed, and music by his long-time collaborator Nacio Herb Brown. (That's Freed at the piano in the picture above, with Brown taking notes, in an earlier period of their songwriting career.) The actor playing the father didn't have a good enough voice to sing the song, but the filmmakers didn't want a voice that sounded too slick, too professional -- so Freed sang it himself, voicing the actor in a simple, pleasing, earnest way.
It's remarkable the lengths to which critics have gone to avoid dealing with the emotional and psychological meaning of this scene. Describing it in the BFI monograph on the film, Gerald Kauffman says that the mother "forces" the family to accept the father's actions, ignoring the fact that she doesn't address any of them directly and that they have not accepted the father's actions. In his chapter on Meet Me In St. Louis in The Films Of Vincente Minnelli, James Naremore quotes with apparent approval the critic George Toles's observation that the children's return to the parlor is so beautifully choreographed that it's clear Minnelli cares more for the "pictorial" elements of the scene than for its emotional undercurrents.
Toles goes on to describe the children's return as a function of "prescience" -- rather than curiosity about and emotional attraction to the novelty of hearing their parents harmonizing at the piano. Toles seems to have abandoned reason entirely here, not least in failing to recognize that the "pictorial" and choreographic elements in a cinematic musical constitute, along with the songs, its primary means of conveying emotion.
Critical embarrassment notwithstanding, Meet Me In St. Louis remains Freed's masterpiece -- it speaks and sings with his voice, in this case quite literally. Take a look at it again sometime, and if you find it embarrassing to watch -- get over it.