I forget where I recently read that this film introduced the song “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” (perhaps it was not on a blog, but on the front of the box). So I decided to pop in this film which I bought last month the night after White Christmas.
Okay, so it’s a little romance with singing (although it includes a dance number to “Skip to My Lou”). Judy Garland plays the middle daughter in a family of five children. The oldest son is going off to college; the oldest sister is hoping that a boy going to Yale is going to propose to her; the older younger sister is played by Joan Carroll who in the next year would have a meatier role in The Bells of St. Mary’s; the youngest is five years old and definitely gives off a creepy vibe as she says her dolls have fatal diseases and then has funerals for them and buries them. They live with their folks in a nice (real nice) house in St. Louis. And the bulk of the film is Judy Garland singing about the boy next door. Their father announces that he will be running a new New York office for his law firm, throwing the family in disarray.
The movie covers almost a year in the life, with a section for each season starting with summer 2003 and going to the opening of the World’s Fair in 2004. The winter/Christmas scene seems longest and does, in fact, serve up a wistful “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” as the youngest daughter laments leaving St. Louis. But, as a romance, it all wraps up with happy couples in the end staying in St. Louis.
Not an unpleasant couple of hours; probably better if you’re into the genre. You know, I lived in the St. Louis area for, erm, 20+ years on and off from 1983-2009, and World’s Fair memorabilia was still a thing at that time. The centennial was a bit of a big deal. But I was too young to get into it. I’m sure this film grafted some of that onto a new generation in 1944 and beyond. This film was a period piece when it came out; it’s doubly so now, being an artifact of its time as well as an idealization of the time it depicted. I mean, if they made period pieces now set forty years ago, they’d be set in the 1980s. Oh. But the times have not changed quite as much in the last 40 years as in the period between 1904 and 1944. But perhaps I am merely old enough to have that perspective, being that I remember not having cell phones and social media as normal in a way that kids these days would not.
The movie also introduces two new songs which have become American Songbook standards: “The Boy Next Door” and “The Trolley Song”. I associate them with Stacey Kent as they both appear on her album The Boy Next Door. Perhaps it’s the familiarity with Kent’s versions that make me prefer them over Garland’s.
Alright, alright, alright. Now, do I dig out The Bishop’s Wife or go right into the action-oriented Christmas movies? Stay tuned!
