HotToastyRag It's sentimental favorite time here on Hot Toasty Rag. I'm sure everyone has their own favorite Judy Garland impersonator, but at my house, there's no comparison to my mom. And while she has been known to wave her hands in the air during "The Man That Got Away" or "I Could Go On Singing," it's "The Trolley Song" from Meet Me in St. Louis that is her signature Judy Garland performance. Years before watching the movie for the first time, I knew the "Clang Clang Clang" song by heart because of my mom. Therefore, my review for Meet Me in St. Louis is going to be unapologetically biased. Ironically, she doesn't even really like the movie! I'm the one who insists on keeping our VHS copy.Judy Garland, Lucille Bremer, and Margaret O'Brien are sisters in an all-American family in the early 1900s. Judy and Lucille have romantic problems to worry about, and Margaret doesn't always play nice with the other neighborhood kids. Add in Marjorie Main, the family's grumpy maid, two other children, a father-in-law, and a new invention called the telephone, and both parents, Leon Ames and Mary Astor, have their hands full! The film is chock-full of songs, with old-fashioned standards like the title song and "Under the Bamboo Tree," as well as new songs for the film, including "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." While the movie is upbeat and fun, it's also a little sad; Judy sings the Christmas song to a sobbing Margaret who has just destroyed her own snowman. I always feel sorry for Leon Ames's character in the film. Not only is he overrun by females in the house, but he's constantly put down, stifled, criticized, and left out of important family discussions. At that time, the turn of the 20th century, men were believed to rule their own roosts, but maybe they didn't. Meet Me in St. Louis is such a heartwarming piece of Americana; maybe it was realistic for the father figure to have less of a say in his house than the overwhelming majority. In any case, my heart still goes out to Leon, a character actor who was normally overlooked.I love this one, despite the sadness, because there were so many famous moments I was taught as a kid and looked forward to seeing for the first time onscreen after years of build-up. This might not wind up be your favorite Judy Garland movie, but you can rent it and see if you like it.

lasttimeisaw The film now best remembered as a matchmaker that ignited the romance between Ms. Garland and Mr. Minnelli, and spawned two distinguished show-tunes: THE TROLLEY SONG and HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE Christmas. MEET ME IN ST. LOUISE, a Garland-starrer aims to mollycoddle audience with its Technicolor floridity, tuneful schmaltz and provincial self- importance, is undeniably a hoot to watch, but also inexorably suffers from a similar distaste non unlike many a its contemporary when comes to connect with new audience decades later, hobbled by its own antiquated ethos of middle-class complacency and facile "perfect family" propaganda. One year prior of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904, St. Louise, the local Smith Family will experience some shifting sands during the film's one-year span, but please rest assure that everything will be fine, in fact, a little bit too idealistically fine. Alonzo Smith (Ames) and his wife Anna (Astor) have four daughters and one son, and Garland plays the second daughter Ester, a girl- next-door type who has a yearning for their new neighbor John Truett (Drake), a straight-up young man, unlike her elder sister Rose (Bremer), she will not just sit and wait for her suitor to initiate the move (a long distance call from New York is quite a novelty then), but proactively and tactfully lures her object of desire under her charm, at then, a petite Garland still possesses a child-like countenance but it unfortunately does glaringly contrast her mature and mellow voice, however wonderful it is.As a former child star sinking her teeth into breaking the girlhood mold, Garland finds a mirroring presence in the brood, Margaret O'Brien, the then seven-year-old singing-and-acting prodigy as Tootie, the youngest daughter of the family, indulges in a somewhat queasy persona as a pampered princess who could be a prototype ghoul girl, on top of her innocuous affectations. That set piece where she willfully razes their snow sculptures into the ground solely because she doesn't want to anyone else to have them except herself, is alarmingly disagreeable with the sweepingly genial atmosphere (what a petulant, spoiled brat, not to mention the mischief and blatant lies she has chalked up at her risk-prone whims, one cannot help thinking...), and the whole business to elicit her emotion comes near to an unwholesome exploitation of a child in hindsight. If there is any positively edifying message from this saccharine tale, surely it is that parental competence is so important for those procreation-prone families, otherwise, please check out Mervyn LeRoy's THE BAD SEED (1956) for a possible outcome. Among others, Mary Astor's stern but sensible mother is a rare breeze among the childish state of flux and Leon Ames is beguilingly affable as a chafed father bristled with humor and frustration, although the former is betrayed by a blooper of fake-fingering the piano and the latter is barely able to clinch that the-eleventh-hour changeover without veering into cavernous incredulity. For all its obsolete making-merry and conventional worldview, what this small-town fanfare can still impress us is Mr. Minnelli's outstanding command in his director's chair, freewheels amongst variegated demands: family symphony, larking musical, cheesy romance, Halloween scares and jovial festivity, and most significantly he also safeguards Ms. Garland's screen transformation into adulthood, although their eventual wind-up would ruefully overshadow this stage of inchoate rapport.

Charles Herold (cherold) Meet Me in St. Louis is a rather ridiculous "good old days" movie. Told episodically, it focuses on a family's problems, which mainly involve daughters trying to get husbands and decisions on where to live.While silly, the movie has charm to spare, supplied mainly by the always riveting Judy Garland and by Margaret O'Brien, giving her best performance as an anti-Shirley Temple.O'Brien's performance is surprising. While most of the movie is artificial even by the standards of the times, O'Brien offers a surprisingly id-based child obsessed with death and provocation. It is far more real than the simpering children who inhabit most 40s films.While the story is slight, the movie gets buy on tremendous moments, all involving Garland and O'Brien, as when Garland's heartbreaking rendition of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas is followed by O'Brien's surprising reaction.While it's no more realistic than Sleeping Beauty (even though Republicans often act as though this white, patriarchal, upper middle- class world is a thing we could actually "return" to), it is utterly charming.

moviemattb This review won't be long because I do not have too much to say about this movie. So here it is. "Meet Me in St. Louis" is about the Smith family that are living in St. Louis at the time of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition World's Fair in 1904. I don't find anything groundbreaking about this movie, because of the amount of praise it gets. Don't get me wrong, I like the movie but I don't think its a masterpiece or anything like that. For what it is, I think its fine and it is indeed watchable. The cast in this movie are good, especially for Judy Garland; although I like her more when she was in "The Wizard of Oz." I do love the film's cinematography and its setting. I really do enjoy the atmosphere of St. Louis as you go on out and have a wonderful time. The movie is also well directed and well written. The movie itself is not really a Christmas movie, but at the end, it does somehow leave you that Christmas feeling as Garland sings wonderfully with the song "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas;" the songs in the film are fine too. Again, there is nothing groundbreaking about it but I do think it is a fine relaxation of a movie as you just want to enjoy the atmosphere of St. Louis. So that is what I thought of "Meet Me in St. Louis," and I give it an 8 out of 10.