Directed by Vincente Minnelli
Written by Irving Brecher and Fred F. Finklehoffe
Based on stories by Sally Benson
Starring Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien, Mary Astor, Lucille Bremer
USA, 1944
THE ABANDONMENT OF OLD HOLLYWOOD
Last summer I wrote an essay on the films of actress-singer Judy Garland and I told one of my Internet friends about it. He replied, saying, “Sorry, but that sounds kind of funny.” He’s a bit of an elitist, I suppose, though I don’t mean that in a negative way, so I assumed he was referring to how much he disliked Hollywood musicals. I wrote a long paragraph in an email to him about how much I love musicals and how not all Hollywood pictures are to be dismissed and how much pleasure I derived from good, trashy American art. He never discussed the topic with me again. It was only months later that I discovered what he probably meant when he told me that the idea of an appreciation of Judy Garland sounded funny. I learned that when a guy shows any interest in an entertainer like her, he is automatically suspected of being gay.
Garland had a huge gay following when she was alive; she was bisexual herself, her father was a homosexual, and so was her second husband and frequent collaborator, MGM director Vincente Minnelli. I guess she still has that following in the gay community, but it perplexes me how and why certain stars become the idols of a certain group of people, and why this should indicate anything about people who enjoy their work but are not of that same group. One assumes that the wretched parts of Judy’s life and her mournful singing spoke to the downtrodden emotions of gay men; a lot of them could surely relate to something like The Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy feels neglected and misunderstood at home, or The Clock, in which she’s a lonesome girl in a big city. But haven’t we all felt that way at one point or another? Madonna is like the underestimated chick who uses her sexuality as a weapon; I suppose only the “oppressed” can feel anything for her music and antics (I praised her documentary/self-advertisement Truth or Dare). I don’t quite understand this lumping our performers into categories. I thought art transcended these things.
People seem to respond only to hype nowadays. Yesterday I attended a charismatic Christian church service and God and the Holy Spirit were being hyped up; I guess people think that’s the only way the kids will respond to something like religion, which is supposedly intellectual and untouchable. If you say you love Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday, you have to deal with both the suspicions of your sexual orientation and people thinking you’re jumping on the Ken Burns bandwagon. People think a man’s gay if he likes Judy Garland or Madonna or Streisand or Rufus Wainwright (the gay guy in Clueless is identified as such because of the music he listens to and what he wears) because that’s how those artists are classified in American culture- they’re femininely mellow, or femininely strong. And this hype and these oversimplifications have shoved old Hollywood movies into a category equivalent to easy listening music (Garland records are put into that category, and so, often, is Ella, whose improvisational workouts are more exciting and energetic than, say, the snooze-inducing rap-metal whines of KoRn or Linkin Park). People have to be hit over the head to be entertained, or to get a message, and the concept of ostentation is heightening in noise and exhibitionism. Rita Hayworth stripping off her black gloves or Mae West mumbling innuendoes was enough to turn on audiences back then, we’re told, but now we have Britney Spears yanking off her clothing on primetime television. Who’s going to listen to cool jazz like Chet Baker and who’s going to watch Vincente Minnelli movies anymore?
Minnelli was pretty subtle and sophisticated for a musical director; he was such a wonderful visual stylist and, yet, you never really fall head-over-heels for his style as much as you did for Stanley Donen’s (the images he creates, in Singin’ in the Rain, Funny Face, and It’s Always Fair Weather, are so blatantly astonishing that you’re immediately at his mercy). At least not in this day and age in which watching a movie classic is abnormal and such viewing is mostly done on TV. In my revival-house-less city, I got the opportunity to see Minnelli’s movie with Judy Garland, 1944’s Meet Me in St. Louis, in an old, vandalized movie palace that was raising money for renovation. It was a glorious print, even though I’m not sure if it really did present to us the way the movie was seen when it was first released, and the pastel colors gave me chills. Watching it on the Turner Classic Movies channel, you never feel that way about the luscious Technicolor. It’s dulled out; it’s lost its richness. On the big screen, the film returns to its spectacular, awe-inspiring dimensions, and that’s how Hollywood movies should be seen because on a television the characters are smaller than you are when they should be luminous and dominant. The theater screen is the moviemaker’s canvas.
I am not a big fan of Minnelli’s because he often didn’t have the good stories to back up his skills as a director. An American in Paris was such gorgeous eye-candy but its screenplay, involving a love triangle, was a disgrace. But, come to think of it, Stanley Donen’s musical Funny Face, except for a few moments of satirizing elite, artsy European thinkers, wasn’t much more substantial, and the film turned out to be very charming. I don’t think Minnelli had much of a talent for making us forget the inadequacies of the script, like Donen did, and his movies sometimes come across as Kool-Aid to Donen’s juice. Easter Parade (*) , another Judy Garland movie, was insignificant fluff, and so was the melodrama The Bad and the Beautiful. His movies seem hollowed-out, flimsy. And that’s why Meet Me in St. Louis works so well, because it doesn’t have to deal with a solid plot. It revolves around something as simple as the title city and a happy family whose sole conflict is the father’s job, which forces them to move away from their beloved hometown. I’m not sure if mobile modern kids can even relate to that. What we can all latch onto is the sense of unity we get from the actors who play the Smiths and, perhaps, the quaintness of early 1900’s simple living, a time when people made their own ketchup.
Minnelli’s brilliant light touch doesn’t dilute anything; it brings out the nuances, the human interaction, the way the characters behave in their dazzling habitat (the girls, played by Garland and Lucille Bremer, are not unlike teenagers of today; it’s just that their sexuality isn’t as embarrassingly loud). The splendid sets and cinematography don’t seem striking because they are each expertly made one of those many nuances, not the entire meaning of the movie as they usually are in the greatest of MGM extravaganzas. The visual aspects are just extensions of the feel of the story. The film’s a lovely evocation of time and place and a jovial mood, but the film’s setting, despite being depicted in all its resplendent details, is like a theme park. Minnelli’s tribute to American life (based on Sally Benson’s stories for The New Yorker) doesn’t ignore what is integral in the best movie musicals: fantasy, idealism, and cotton-candy emotion. There’s something that holds all this atmosphere together though; An American in Paris failed to incorporate the shifting, beautiful emotions of the Gershwin suite, and The Pirate, besides featuring one of the worst Cole Porter scores I’ve ever heard, was all flourishes and no weight. Brigadoon’s half-baked fantasy is so dumb it drowns out Minnelli’s mediocre compositions, and both the visually breathtaking Band Wagon (a movie that makes him look like he’s imitating Donen, his own follower) and the Oscar-winning Gigi suffer from absolute lack of chemistry wrapped inside glossy casing. I’m not sure what this glue is that holds Meet Me in St. Louis together but, because the movie isn’t devoted to furthering an emaciated plot or trapped in a skeleton structure, like other Minnelli movies are, it doesn’t fall apart because it isn’t stuck together with water. This lets Minnelli do something that he loves to do: wander around the fantastic, self-contained world he’s created.
Judy Garland, one of last century’s greatest singers (even though she wasn’t the most creative, at least she didn’t overembellish like, say, Sarah Vaughan or Celine Dion), uses the crystal-clear elocution she lost in her later years to full effect on the Ralph Blane-Hugh Martin score, and she doesn’t rely on belting the way she did when she was older. There’s a mature purity to her performances of “The Boy Next Door” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and she dashes through “The Trolley Song” with effortless style and childish pep. Her young, precocious co-star Margaret O’Brien is downright creepy in the demented Halloween sequence. The movie comes together almost perfectly without any fussy messages, except for a rehash of The Wizard of Oz’s “there’s no place like home,” and I think a miracle like this should be appreciated, what with all the “thought-provoking messes” in today’s cinema, though, sadly, I can’t imagine it being cherished by coming generations.
Old movies are all on the same boat, regardless of their differences. But I don’t see the difference between Vincente Minnelli’s The Clock and recent movie romances, besides the fact that the former is much more compelling and skillfully made, and less lazy. When young people rave about the latest movie love story and then say they find old movies boring, I wonder what old movies they’ve seen. The Clock, which James Agee recommended with reservations and Pauline Kael mentioned in a list of mediocre, entertaining Hollywood movies, is, I think, so underrated. It was Minnelli’s fourth movie, directed right after Meet Me in St. Louis, and his first non-musical. Judy Garland plays Alice, a secretary in New York, who bumps into a soldier played by Robert Walker. They end up strolling through the park, talking in a museum, and falling in love. Her roommate urges her to forget the guy; in an interesting reversal, Stanley Donen’s copycat musical On the Town- another movie, made four years later, about soldiers who pick up girls in the city- seems like the trifle and the cheat while Minnelli’s film is surprisingly true. The world-weary working girls know what these boys in the Army do; they serenade you, screw you, then leave you. (The Clock is also a copycat, following in the footsteps of The Sky’s the Limit and, I’m sure, several others.)
How unrealistic that Robert Walker’s Corporal Joe should be a yearning, small-town native romantic. But with this film Minnelli isn’t stuffy, like he was with The Bad and the Beautiful and the worst of his musicals, and like he wasn’t with Meet Me in St. Louis; he lets his material breathe, allowing his DP and editor to get us caught up in the action, and wandering in awkward, poetic ways through the crowded, extremely lonely city. He leaves room for ambiguities; we are never quite sure if this scarily unknowable Corporal Joe is a great guy, if he’s not really trying to use Alice, and the depressing, vague ending also leaves us uneasy. In his review for The Nation, Agee wrote about the scene of Alice and Joe’s first kiss. It’s a very weird and delicate few moments, and it’s more atmospherically inconsistent than anything else in the movie. It’s as if the film tripped and fell into a trance. I’m not even sure Garland and Walker have that much chemistry going on; I think it’s a haunted chemistry, and the lively connections Judy had with Mickey Rooney and Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire is certainly absent, replaced with something that’s like a precursor to her on-screen relationship with James Mason in A Star is Born. When they’re together, we don’t get the security that we feel when Judy’s with one of her other beaus, because we know, somehow, Robert Walker’s going to have to break her heart. Minnelli injects some of that bizarre tension that was at the end of 1954’s The Long, Long Trailer, a Lucy-Desi vehicle I expected to be cheery. He married Judy the same year he made The Clock, and he frames her here in ways you wouldn’t expect: she is sometimes standing alone, without anyone’s arms around her, unprotected, and Minnelli doesn’t even bother to come in for an embracing close-up.
There’s more to say about The Clock than Meet Me in St. Louis because its feelings are more tangible; it’s an unusual romantic melodrama, and it stabs you by building suspense and slowly unfolding truths. It’s Love Affair and An Affair to Remember without the sweet bliss of the reunion. The soldier and the girl are separated by what has become a New York movie cliché- they get lost in a crowd cramming into a subway. What’s more romantically dreadful than that? They search and search for each other, not knowing each other’s last names, and they finally find each other and decide they must get married. And so they go through the long process of getting blood tests, running through the city with a single goal. When they finally make their vows, which are barely audible through the sounds of oncoming trains, they are shocked to discover how unmarried they feel, how strangely unsatisfying the climax was. When Joe must return to the Army and they must part, we’re still not sure if they love each other or if they were infatuated because they were both alone. Once the need is fulfilled, they’re scared and small; they knew each other, or liked more what they thought they knew, when they weren’t married, but marriage has ended the excitement and made something chaste out of explainable, rushed excitement. Time has pushed them into making hasty decisions. They seem distant, distressed, as if they were suffering postcoital disappointment or regret.
The Clock and Meet Me in St. Louis are, I think, the best movies of both Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland’s careers, and the contributions of the great producer Arthur Freed are not to be ignored, though I don’t know what he actually did contribute. They’re cinematic poems as moving as any Abbas Kiarostami movie I’ve seen, and far less studious. They’re also so subtle compared to the romances and musicals of today that I’m not sure how people my age who are only familiar with MTV pacing will react; they might be confused by their gloomy emotions at the end of the former, and to the latter, they might say, “What was the point of it?”
A friend of mine complained a few days ago that America doesn’t have any culture. I replied, “We have the lazy culture,” but I wonder what’s so amazing about those of other nations. The grass is always greener on the other side. How can we claim that we’re a boring country when we have such a rich artistic history that we’ve so willingly abandoned? Some of my teenage peers complain, “I hate black-and-white movies,” when a teacher shows one in class, and they proceed to lay their heads down for a nap. The Clock and Meet Me in St. Louis don’t epitomize American movies, and that’s what’s so exciting- that we have such a diverse cinema that, while hampered by Hollywood’s usual lack of thematic ambition, should not be cast aside. We don’t need to take these movies seriously; they were meant to be enjoyed, and that’s their art- the art of entertainment. Sticking them with labels like “gay” and “old” and “unchallenging” is like saying only the gay and the old and the ignorant know how to enjoy the most popular art of our nation. And if that’s so, God bless America.
By Andrew Chan [JULY 28, 2001]
(*If this sounds like Easter Parade's a Minnelli film, it's not. It was directed by Charles Walters. My mistake. Shame shame.)