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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<\/a> the night after White Christmas<\/a><\/em>. <\/p>\nOkay, 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<\/a><\/em>; 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/em> 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<\/em> in a way that kids these days would not.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>. Perhaps it’s the familiarity with Kent’s versions that make me prefer them over Garland’s.<\/p>\n