Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)

Dir. Vincente Minnelli
Writ. Irving Brecher and Fred F. Finklehoffe, from the novel by Sally Benson
w/ Judy Garland, Tom Drake, Mary Astor, and Lucille Bremer

Meet Me in St. Louis must have been dismissed as a chick flick by the boys of its era; yet, it's not all sweetness and provinciality a love story in a turn-of-the-century American setting might otherwise produce. Self-contradiction sort of muddies the overall hue, as evidenced by its titular song, which gets sung plenty. Most of the "meeting" seems to take place in New York and the risque phrase "hoochie coochie" gets followed by the laughably innocent "tootsie wootsie." In short, it hails from a simpler time, a gentler time, gone forever like the twentieth century.

Coloring the film's events is a strong tendency to define the setting of St. Louis, a city steeped in a long, rich culture of steamboats and gambling, yes, but also of Scott Joplin's ragtime, hushed backwater speakeasies, slavery, and Mark Twain. Despite Techni-color's fully employed virtues, the film is still muted, less saturated than its look. It relies on stereotypes that generally get connected with that era: the spinster housekeeper who has no love of men, and the workaholic father who has no time for fun.

The lighter side showcases dancing and singing and other niceties, like the grandfather who takes his girl to the ball and produces her beau on the dancefloor from behind a Christmas tree. The darker side falls on the youngest daughter, Tootie, who receives the most attention. Hers is an odd child psychology, brought to a peak in a Halloween scene in which she gets released on the town to both trick and treat. The neighborhood children have started a fire out of old furniture, and she adds her bit to the mayhem, exuberating that she is the "most terrible."

Interestingly enough, while this is vintage Minelli, the real heart of the story lies with the little girl about whom the movie really is not. Her role as executioner to her dolls stands out at once as one of the more horrifying and inexplicable sequences in American film history. Could it be that her wee psychosis symbolizes a love-hate relationship with St. Louis itself, or is it supposed to signify a growing unrest considerably more normal to a child about to become nubile? Since her role comes from the autobiographical novel upon which this is based, an answer awaits, but the movie doesn't concern itself with that tiny corridor.

Instead, Meet Me in St. Louis moves on, following the lives and loves of the two older daughters whose stories may be more romantic but are far less earthy, believable, and ultimately explorable than Tootie's. If you watch it, watch it for her primarily, and for Judy Garland second. While it's not always easy to tell what's going on, musical lovers shouldn't be too disappointed, either.

Dodsworth (1936)

When automobile tycoon Henry Dodsworth retires from making his fortune, he decides to please his wife with some globetrotting. If it had worked, this wouldn't be a drama. That's okay, though; we're not supposed to like her. She's a woman come into money by an unexpectedly prosperous marriage to a man she doesn't need. Where's the future in that?

The title character's more worth his salt. Absent-mindedly going about the business of being on vacation, free to do as he will, we see a persistent man - if not a workaholic - with an imaginative bent that really endears him despite his crusty outer persona and hard-nosed mindset. While on a foray in Paris, he rushes around the hotel room, attempting to get things right, grabbing his guide book at the last minute while the taxi driver waits on him.

He's really quite lovable. It's too bad all the other people in the movie have to show up. Few of them are half as interesting. And while the cinematography and script are very solid, since when is that a substitute for a storyline that captures the intellect and inspires the heart? This film nearly pulls that much off, but the ending is a bit too terse. There's a wonderful moment when Dodsworth, having told a woman he really fancies that leaving her was what really hurt, meets with his unfaithful wife one last time.

Could the line "I'm going to town to make reservations" have had any more heat? I think not.
This film definitely lies off the beaten path of American cinematic history. At the very least, it should be remembered as conscious, responsible filmmaking. What helps to set it apart is a total lack of violence and a dedication to the simple understanding of the story itself. There's a separate sort of peace in this film, found somewhere between one man's determination to pursue happiness with as much gusto as he did his fortune and the concept that the pen is mightier than the sword. It isn't frivolous, self-serving, or witty by half of the day's standards.

Casablanca (1942)

Dir. Michael Curtiz
Writ. Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch, from the play by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison
w/ Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains and Peter Lorre

Avoiding partisan conflicts of interest by involving himself in the Allied resistance, Rick runs and desiccates in the Cafe Americain in Casablanca, the point of no return for many wishing to escape the long arm of the Reich and its ill effects. So when old flame Ilsa walks into, "of all the gin joints in all the world," his, she brings more than the warm scents of a Paris springtime, she also brings the memory of everything that he once was and is no more.

You must remember the first time you saw a movie about a doomed love affair, and if it was Casablanca, you may have seen the best. Time and again, it lands a distinguished place on the "best ever" lists that circulate among industry people, filmmakers and critics. Among the younger, less established independent and foreign film lovers, though, a doubt festers that perhaps the film only appeared great in retrospect and that such a latent appreciation may have catapulted its status until it became an irreplaceable classic that wouldn't have been so otherwise. It raises questions, too, concerning the importance of love stories from other countries that haven't been given the same attention.

And yet, Casablanca remains an American film only quixotically. It chases ideals of freedom, the Bohemian notion that we should do as we please, especially when charged by fascists not to. An international cast, a Moroccan setting, and an elightened view of humanity peppers the film's legacy as something beyond not just the gangster films of the state-side '40s, but also beyond the scope of many war films. Practically arbitrary, the positioning of the movie in a town few Americans had ever heard of or thought about spells brilliance. Stuck between the desert on all sides and the fist of the Reich from above, what else would a card-carrying, former freedom fighter do but drink? Well, if you're Humphrey Bogart, you also own the joint so you don't pay extra to drown your sorrows in someone else's whiskey glass.

A deep idea resides just below the surface of Casablanca. In many ways, Rick and Victor are the same man, rather like the summer and autumn of a romance both stem from the same love. Life can't be all champagne, music, and drives in the French countryside, and it's interesting to note that the loner, not the altruist, facilitates the preservation of the free world. Rick goes about the business of tidying away the resistance leaders with class, too. If Victor really loved Ilsa, some have said, he would've gotten on the plane alone. But people driven by ideals don't often notice the tiny hardships their causes can produce; and, if they did, they could not go on fighting, would be in truth very different people with very different lives. More to the point, no one can ever attain perfect altruism any more than a person can claim to be wholly selfish. They have, esentially, by the end of the film swapped roles.

If for some reason the theme of redemption and love conquering all don't sweep you off your feet, consider the film's thousand tiny details: the portulent, fez-wearing owner of the Blue Parrot who lives to make deals and swat flies; the bit in which Bogie plays chess with himself while refusing to have a drink with Peter Lorre; "Yvonne, I love you, but he pays me." Claude Rains as the virile, witty sidekick to Bogart's dour, stoic platitudes also evokes timely laughs.

But perhaps the shining moment occurs when the German officers stand to sing their national anthem, and Victor and Rick order the band to play the French one in response. The Germans eventually can't overpower the armed lungs of the passionate ensemble of customers, but before they disperse, the anthems harmonize, as in rounds. And for a moment, it sounds divine.

Persona (1966)

One persona, one persona non grata...
Camera work alone propels the basis of this study of psychological escapism. Liv Ullman delivers an eerie actress who will not talk after freezing on stage -- a paralysis, it seems, that was brought on by the sudden impulse to laugh. With a script exercising its every right to pure minimalism and swaths of high-key lighting to give the images a ghosting, reality-bending quality, Persona deserves that attention be paid to its every detail, to every last word.
Bergman infuses bits of his own traumatic childhood into the film by encapsulating the story with the waking nightmare of a young boy. Haunted by elliptical dreams, the boy sits up in bed and tries to focus on the face projected on the wall in front of him. He reaches for the image, perhaps trying to bring it into focus, but the face keeps changing. In the tradition of pure study, the director invites us to wonder, but at no time are we allowed to feel sorry for any of the characters involved.
Bergman jumps right in. Sister Alma (Bibi Andersson) takes the dumb-struck Mrs. Vogel under her wing immediately. The hospice supervisor explains the actress' need for silence and at her suggestion patient and nurse go to her summer house on the shore to get away while Mrs. Vogel awaits a time she'll feel like speaking again. Before long, the nurse has begun to spill secrets that had been kept in too long and shares a fast intimacy with her ward. A genuine bond develops seemingly overnight by breaking the silence. Doubt soon gives way to anger, though, when she discovers a letter in which the actress purports to be studying her nurse. Livid, Alma confronts the actress and demands that she speak; threatening her with scalding water brings her out of her acute belligerence.
What follows deals with the brain's tendency to trick itself into seeing things that don't exist, and the effort required to correct the detouring process. He sheds a harsh light on this particular subject matter, not allowing much leeway for spiritual concerns to take precedence over logic, even though not everything in life can be explained. What Bergman seems most interested in toying with is the idea of an identity crisis as a source of inexplicable superiority over the life and life choices of a growing boy. If anybody in the film were to be considered sympathetic, it would be the boy, but Bergman doesn't seem to want to make himself (or even the most distant projection of his boyhood) pitiable onscreen, no matter how many times his parents locked him in a closet over dogma.
The film cruxes while Alma and Mrs. Vogel sit opposite one another at a table and Alma painstakingly recounts the intimate events of her patient's pregnancy and delivery. The scene is shot twice so that Liv can react to the dialogue in a close shot and then the nurse can be viewed repeating the same lines in a similar shot. The sense of the thing becomes clearer when Mr. Vogel shows up and spoils it: there is only one woman at the seaside cottage. What can then perceived are the final death throes of a debilitating facade that must go away before a real equilibrium can be restored.

Psycho (1960)

Dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Writ. Joseph Stefano, based on the novel by Robert Bloch
w/ Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, and Martin Balsam

"Sometimes Saturday night is a lonely sound. Ever notice that, Lila?"

A shower's one of the few places a girl's supposed to be able to let down her hair. Every frame in Hitchcock's timeless thinkpiece tautly shoulders the next, building the suspense and binding the story together in the most logical succession of scenes. Very few horror movies contain surer, more deliberate construction, even among the master's best. Like other technical directors (Stanley Kubrick) he busied himself with the minutiae of the art form to an imperative degree.

When an actor, feeling snubbed or ignored or generally unable to grasp his character, asked Alfred about his motivation the reply invariably was, "You're getting paid. That's your motivation." Some directors like to keep their players on edge for optimal results.
Dozens of takes finally perfected the famous shower montage sequence. The final shot of Marion's body lying on the bathroom floor required Janet Leigh to lay perfectly still in the nude while Alfred got it right. The resulting death shot plays the centripetal role, resonating on many levels as the quiet eye of the storm. There aren't, you see, a lot of extras in the film. Neither does the script suffer from any excesses of dialogue or action.

When Marion leaves town with money stolen from her employer her motivation is thin but clear. She exits an affair with an unavailable man and an unexciting job. Not a lot of character gets developed, but her choice makes some sense, as does her growing nervousness. She sees her boss on the crosswalk at a red light hours after absconding with the bank deposit and takes off. A policeman notices her car alongside the highway and she responds to him irrationally, not thinking clearly enough to get away from him easily. This leads to her trading in her automobile and taking an obscure stretch of road by accident in the rain. Like a wild animal driven into a trap by blind panranoia, she arrives at the Bates Motel where she meets the charming, boyish proprieter, Norman Bates.

A prime example of a parasitic upbringing, Norman immediately feels guilt over spending time with the pleasant, new lodger; it isn't, however, until Marion presents a threat to his dubious state of mind that his mood darkens, and it's possible that had she not tried to sympathize with him concerning his daunting mother that he wouldn't have felt the need to kill Marion. No one can ever come between Norman and his mother, and no bloodletting can ever rid him of the effects of her constant, insidious abuse. Of course, he puts her in cabin number one where he can keep a close eye on her anyway, and we are left to wonder if her fate hadn't already been sealed.

The similarities between these two characters strikes a chilling chord, bringing the story into focus and tossing them together in a down-to-earth light in a discussion of private traps. In Marion's case, she'd like to be free. She'd like to be rid of the $40,000 barrier she uncovered in Phoenix, where she'd been working for ten years in a trustworthy position with security. Norman, intent on never leaving the maudlin darkness which has held him in limbo for the same span of years, can not let her leave. Suggestive symmetry begets the suspiscion that, although their crimes differ in type and degree, there is little else that separates these two potential mental cases.

But for conscious choice, that is. Marion had made up her mind to leave the Bates Motel and set the record straight. Norman did not.

The Awful Truth (1937)

Dir. Leo McCarey
Writ. Vina Delmar, based on the play by Arthur Richman
w/ Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Ralph Bellamy, and Cecil Cunningham

Cary Grant (as Jerry) and Irene Dunne (as Lucy) exchange lithe glances and glib tongues with such chemistry that nearly all the other actors may as well be house plants. Often an impossibly formidable leading man, Grant knows not to step on anyone else's toes. Thanks to Dunne's innate talents, he doesn't seem to have to worry about it. She pops in and out of sets like calm in a garden after a cool dust of hail. Her gentleman callers do the same, and there we've got our hot potato. The couple decides to file for divorce and the antics ensue.

What's so mind-boggling about a comedy like this is that you're never really sure what's going on, it doesn't really matter that you aren't, and yet surprises and delights abound where usually a loose plot would unravel, get stale, and lose you. But between the two leads and Howard Hawkes' effervescent sense of the fun of the film, everything stays put, even if it hangs by a mere thread from time to time. Of course, it helps if you have an aging Aunt Patty wiling to shimmy in a knee-length to attract the attention of a bartender, and a dog that loves to play "find the hat" no matter how high he has to climb.

In a scene that would be gratuitous were it not for the era, Lucy and her new beau, Dan, sing Home on the Range together as she plays the piano. It's so awful that you expect the director to come running in dressed in a wifebeater and boxer briefs to yell, "End scene!" That's the epitomal humor that makes this flick work. A lesser director would have had a chandalier crash or maybe a button pop on a matronly dress, but Hawkes just lets the natural disaster take its course.

The film's comedic exhale arrives when the pair get pulled over by motorcycle policemen and Lucy connives to ditch the car. Being nice policemen, they give the couple rides to Aunt Patty's drafty cabin. Where else would a divorcing couple want to spend their last night of wedded bliss than a cantankerous wooden hovel in the middle of nowhere?

A lot of joy to watch, the best part is knowing that Cary Grant hadn't even really hit his heydey when this came out. He had, in truth, hardly begun to clear his throat.

White Heat (1949)

Dir. Raoul Walsh
Writ. Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, from the story by Virginia Kellogg
w/ James Cagney, Virginia Mayo, Edmond O'Brien, and Margaret Wycherly

"We are increasingly working in an environment where producers are...not supporting the crew and that filters through. I saw a documentary the other day about James Cagney who founded the Screen Actors Guild. He said he and his friends set it up because they were being asked to work 12, and sometimes 13, hours a day. And I was going: 'You lucky bastard' because I've been doing 15 to 16 hours a day. And it's all down to money and producers, and there are very few truly creative ones."

--Ewan McGregor on modern American filmmaking attitudes, Caledonia, Vol 3, No 8, August 2001.

Crime boss, Mama's boy, and epileptic Cody Jarrett takes no chances in this gangster's tale of train robbery, double-crossing, and revenge. His eyes are on his men, none of whom he trusts, and his mother's eyes are on his moll, who really can't be trusted. When he winds up in prison, he begins a grassroots plan of escape and reckoning masterminded by and carried out thanks to his tremendous clout while on the inside because nobody messes with Mama's little boy.

When an actor invests as much of himself in a role as James Cagney does in Cody, it would be remiss not to appreciate such energy. The SAG founder more than filled out a role with some of the most threadbare dialogue, bringing power that very few actors of the time could have dredged up. Even high-billing stars with predilections for for over-the-top performances pulled from the gut could have easily fallen short of Cagney's mad-eyed interpretation and execution.

The cohesive intercast relationships work like epoxy. To be sure, the script's riddled with stock mobster lines, just in case anyone wasn't aware of the genre; but, the action -- headed by Cagney and Margaret Wycherly as the formidable Ma Jarrett -- refortifies the traditional belief that what an actor does speaks volumes more than what an actor says. Both are completely believable as they conspire to rise to "the top of the world," and tracking their progress proves scintillating.

Innovative fighting sequences and a fresh approach to suspense make for a refreshing film from Raoul Walsh, who brought Hollywood its first outdoor talkie, In Old Arizona (1929) during which the director lost an eye. Watching the interplay in White Heat, it's not hard to imagine a cast spurred to greater heights by a director wearing an eye patch, as if a vitally macabre pirate ship tone ruled the set. Cutting edge for 1949, the production values ring brassy, entertaining, but no sacrifices get made to quality, which places it among old Hollywood's finest reels.

If more crime dramas emphasized character and situation over effects, it would be a different movie-going workd out there; for, unlike most, this classic tends to get better with each viewing.

The Lone Revue Archives:

A


The Awful Truth

B


Bande à Parte

Brokeback Mountain

C


Camille

Casablanca

Citizen Kane

City Lights

City of God

Closely Watched Trains

D


Double Indemnity

E


E.T. The Exraterrestrial

El Laberinto Del Fauno

8 1/2

F


Flags of Our Fathers

G


Gone with the Wind

H


Howl's Moving Castle

I


Inside Man

J


K


King Kong

L


La Grande Illusion

La Strada

Little Miss Sunshine

M


Man with a Camera

Meet Me in St. Louis

Modern Times

Modern Times Revisited...

N


O


Out of the Past

P


Psycho

Pyaasa

Q


R


S


Saraband

The Searchers

Sommarnattens Leende

The Sweet Smell of Success

Swing Time

T


Talk to Her

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada

Tokyo Story

U


Ugetsu Monogatari

V


W


Waking Life

Water

White Heat

X


Y


Yes

Yojimbo

Z

The Lone Revue Articles:

FILM:


Audience Meet Screen; Screen Meet Audience [Adorno, Audience]

Changing Sphere of Journalism, The [Journalism, Politics]

Local Filmmaker Dishes on Hard Knocks [Chris Ivey, Documentary, East of Liberty, Indie Filmmaking]

Love & Loss, Jane Campion-Style [Film, Loss, Lovesick Blogathan]

Low Key Lighting in a Billy Wilder Noir [Bordwell & Thompson Series, Film, Noir]

Maternalism & The Female in My Favorite Wife (1940) & Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) [Bordwell & Thompson Series, Film, Musical, Screwball Comedy]

Modern Times & The Post-Industrial American Dream [Bordwell & Thompson Series, Chaplin, Film, Politics]

Sound & Sympathy in Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973) [Bordwell & Thompson Series, Malick]

Things Happen: Reversals of Fortune in Ford's Stagecoach (1939) and Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1956) [Bordwell & Thompson Series, Film, Ford, Sirk]

Time in Akerman's Je, tu, il, elle... [Akerman, Contemplative Cinema, Feminism, Film]

Unspoken Cinema: Music & Expectation as a Narrative Force [Audience, Film, Music, Non-Narrative]


POLITICS:

Communicative Activism in E. V. Debs' Statement to the Court [Debs, Habermas, Politics, Socialism, Rhetoric]