Tag: Judy Garland

Meet Me in St Louis (1944)

Technicolour musical delight in this unashamedly nostalgic and feel-good Minnelli musicial

Director: Vincente Minnelli

Cast: Judy Garland (Esther Smith), Margaret O’Brien (“Tootie” Smith), Mary Astor (Mrs Anna Smith), Lucille Bremer (Rose Smith), Leon Ames (Mr Alonzo Smith), Tom Drake (John Truett), Marjorie Main (Katie), Harry Davenport (Grandpa), June Lockhart (Lucille Ballard), Henry H Daniels Jnr (Lon Smith Jnr), Joan Carroll (Agnes Smith), Hugh Marlowe (Colonel Darly), Robert Sully (Warren Sheffield), Chil Wills (Mr Neely)

“There’s no place like home” is the message lying behind two of Judy Garland’s most iconic films. While it might be at the heart of Wizard of Oz, that longing may be even stronger in Meet Me in St Louis. From the Arthur Freed production stable, this technicolour delight is relentlessly gentle and optimistic. It went down a delight in a year when so many Americans dreamed of the end of a war that had separated families and kept soldiers from their home and remains a delightful paean to a lost America (that perhaps never even was).

Set, of course, in St Louis in 1904 during the build-up to the World’s Fair (the gleam of the electric lights turning at the exhibition are the film’s final shot), Meet Me in St Louis follows the lives and loves of the Smith family. Patriarch Alonzo Smith (Leon Ames) is a lawyer (or something, the film doesn’t trouble itself too much), his wife Anna (Mary Astor) a devoted home maker. They have four daughters: Rose (Lucille Bremer) hopes for a proposal from Warren Sheffield (Robert Sully), youngest children Agnes (Joan Carroll) and especially “Tootie” (Margaret O’Brien) are perpetually in trouble and Esther (Judy Garland) is just starting to make eyes at next door neighbour John Truett (Tom Drake). But their contented life could all turn upside down when father announces they will be moving to New York. Surely, they can’t leave St Louis behind?

In many ways Meet Me in St Louis is an inverse The Magnificent Ambersons. While Welles’ film brilliantly charted the decline of a family of wealthy snobs (the Ambersons would certainly recognise the Smiths as equals) with technology an intruder, upending everything they understand about the world, Meet Me in St Louis is a gloriously entertaining celebration of nostalgia with new technology either a source of jokes (scrambled long-distance calls, jolly cable-car songs) or wonder (that closing light-show). Both have stylistic comparisons: from their use of title cards to their fluid camera showcasing sumptuous sets and costumes. But only one of them is about cheering you up.

Meet Me in St Louis only barely has a plot, so concentrated is it on charm and whimsy (father’s announcement, which introduces the real drama, arrives over half-way through). Adapted from a series of short stories by Sally Benson, it’s an episodic film built around events – parties, cable-car rides, a Halloween adventure and a Christmas Eve ball – with a few threaded plotlines of flirtation, principally between Esther and John. Freed sprinkles in a series of songs from his collected rights holdings (including the title song) with a few additional tunes from writers Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane, the most notable being The Trolley Song (a ludicrously catchy-number you can’t get out of your head) and the iconic Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas (although their original far more depressing lyrics were hurriedly re-written).

These last two are performed with astonishing bravura by Judy Garland in possibly her finest hour (until A Star is Born). Garland’s singing is almost effortlessly graceful and beautiful, and she matches it with a very warm, feisty and engaging performance. Esther lands perfectly between two stools: she can be rebellious, impatient and judgemental but also caring, sensible and forgiving. Garland is reassuringly collected, funny and luminous through-out – so much so it’s striking to read what a nightmare the shoot was, with the star frequently absent as she succumbed to the mental and physical ailments that would plague the rest of her life.

Part of the success of her performance was the closeness that developed between her and Minnelli – the first director to really treat her as an adult and collaborator (they started an affair during the film). Minnelli, in only his third film and first in colour, directs with the assurance and visual beauty of an accomplished pro. Meet Me in St Louis was his first Freed musical and it might just be his best. The sumptuousness of the visuals and design were to a large part due to him – you can see the influence this had on the later work of Visconti among others, particularly the ballroom scene – and Minnelli worked labouriously with the actors to build a sense of family between them.

This pays off in spades throughout the film, where the close chemistry between the actors only helps create a nostalgic glow for happy days gone by. Ames and Astor have a relaxed ease of a long-married couples, while the four sisters interact with each other with an easy, unstudied naturalness – sharing chairs, food from their plates and time together with an unfussy ease. In particular Minnelli helped guide Margaret O’Brien to the one of the most delightful child performances on screen: the Halloween sequence, where “Tootie” confronts a scary neighbour is a masterclass of childish excitement and fear, matched later by O’Brien’s affecting distraught tears at the prospect of leaving St Louis.

Minnelli shoots the film with a technical confidence and imagination that quickly makes you forget it’s simple plot. That Halloween sequence is an eerie wonder, shot with a low-angled, tracking shot unease that leaves a haunting impression. He and cinematographer George J Folsey deigned a gorgeous gaslight dimming sequence as Esther and John go through her house dimming the lights, the camera moving in a single, complex, take up-and-around them while Folsey adjusts the set light in sync. Later there is a brilliant shot that seems to pass through a window to lead us straight into the ball, which seems years ahead of its time in its technical accomplishment. The ‘Trolley Song’s sequence uses framing and costumes perfectly to turn a cable car into something that feels as large as a small theatre. It’s an exceptionally well-made film.

You could argue certainly that it is a conservative and unchallenging film. It’s a celebration of small-time life, an argument for staying where you are and embracing the status quo. It never crosses its mind to consider that it’s a lot easier to do that if you have a huge house and servants. Not a moment of anger or serious disagreement is allowed to enter the picture. Everyone is unendingly nice all the time. But does that matter? Sometimes you need a film like a warm hug. And, when you do, don’t you want it also to be a masterclass in filmmaking with a star like Garland at the top of her game? Of course you do.

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)

Maximilian Schell on a misguided attempt to salvage his country’s dignity in Judgment at Nuremberg

Director: Stanley Kramer

Cast: Spencer Tracy (Judge Dan Haywood), Burt Lancaster (Dr Ernst Janning), Richard Widmark (Colonel Ted Lawson), Maximilian Schell (Hans Rolfe), Marlene Dietrich (Frau Bertholt), Montgomery Clift (Rudolph Peterson), Judy Garland (Irene Hoffmann), William Shatner (Captain Harrison Byers), Howard Caine (Hugo Wallner), Werner Klemperer (Emil Hahn), Joh Wengraf (Dr Karl Wieck), Karl Swenson (Dr Heinrich Geuter), Ben Wright (Herr Halbestadt), Virginia Christine (Mrs Halbestadt), Edward Binns (Senator Burkette)

“I was just following orders”. It’s a statement you instantly associate with people who know they are doing the wrong thing, but cling to the idea it’s not their responsibility because they’ve been told to do it. The Nuremberg trials – which started with the major surviving war criminals, but then investigated every level of German society from the army to industry to doctors to the judiciary – exploded this as an excuse. But the trials also raised wider questions, ones that Judgment at Nuremberg explores: how do you make judgments for individuals when, arguably, nearly everyone in the country holds some sort of moral responsibility? What happens when justice collides with political reality? What price is put on getting justice for the few against the need to move on?

These, among others, are fascinating questions explored in Stanley Kramer’s engrossing – if at times a little dry and on-the-nose – film. In 1948 Judge Dan Hayward (Spencer Tracy) arrives in war-torn Nuremberg to judge the trial of four senior German judges. The most prominent of the accused is internationally renowned Dr Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster). Janning’s passionate advocate Hans Rolfe (Maximilian Schell) believes the trial is about the Allies punishing the Germans and wants to show “we were not all like them”. Prosecuting laywer Colonel Ted Lawson (Richard Widmark) wants the trials to continue until all the guilty have been punished. But with Cold War tensions rising – and Berlin already under blockade by the Soviets – the politicians back home want the trials to wind down, particularly as the Germans could be key allies against the USSR. How will Hayward balance these pressures as the trial progresses?

Kramer’s film is a brilliant reconstruction of the detail of the trials. He had wanted to film the entire thing on location – but, when the trial room was unavailable, Kramer had the trial room rebuilt in exact detail in the studio (the production design is absolutely spot-on by Rudolph Sternard). The film stages all the issues of simultaneous translation, headphones and trial procedure in loving detail. His technical direction is well managed – even if the camera perhaps once too often pans around those involved in the trial while they speak. The trial drama is structured around three key witnesses (rather than documents), and brings out impressive performances from the entire cast.

Abby Mann’s screenplay wisely focuses in, not on the primary Nuremberg trials, but one of the many sub-trials. Little known, this works so well dramatically, because they both delve deeper into how every facet of German life was corrupted by Nazism – that in this case, leading judges condemned those they knew were innocent to death – and also allow an exploration around the purpose of the Nuremberg trials themselves. Were these trials crucially about justice at all costs and should continue indefinitely – as some characters clearly believe? Or were they meant as representative affairs, demonstrating the guilt of a selected few, at which point their purpose was done?

Kramer’s film is an educative piece, which explores this. Crucially several German characters are introduced, each of them unsure as to how much the national guilt should apply to them. Should Hayward’s household staff consider themselves guilty? As Hayward points out, Dachau was only about 20 miles away: not to know of its existence at all, was surely be wilful ignorance. Marlene Dietrich (excellent as an austere widow), is bitter that she has lost everything after her husband (a German general) was executed (an execution that many of the characters feel was harsh). He never liked Hitler, and he wasn’t a Nazi: how bad could he have been? He only did his duty right?

Meanwhile, firebrand lawyer Hans Rolfe believes that he must salvage some sense of German identity from the trial: he needs to show that “we were not all like that”. And rescuing the reputation of Dr Janning as “the Good German” is crucial to that. An Oscar-winning Schell (the part is perfect for his grandiose style) superbly captures the agonised guilt that has transformed into anger in this man: the desperation to protect his country that leads him to undertake the same brutal interrogations of witnesses during the trial that his clients are accused of doing. Repeating the same actions of the past that he hates, with a misguided goal of restoring pride to his country.

And why does Dr Janning become the focus of this desire to show not everyone was bad? One of the interesting things the film raises is questions of class. Rolfe sees him as the model Good German and Hayward struggles to see why he was involved in miscarriages of justice, because he is very much “one of us”. Ramrod straight, he’s no fanatic (like one of his fellow accused), he’s a noble, world-renowned lawyer. Lancaster’s Janning, with his rigid physicality, clearly thinks himself a world above his fellow accused. He has touched pitch, but feels he’s not really been defiled at heart: that there were clear reasons why he did the things he did. He has no sympathy for the crudity of Nazism, but still feel ashamed that he allowed himself to get tied up with it. He starts the trial trying to be above the entire process, as if not engaging will somehow stop him from feeling corrupted, even while his haunted face drips with shame.

It’s a nobility that many on the US side find appealing. It appeals to the same minds that deems Richard Widmark’s combatative Colonel Lawson as not quite gentlemanly, but vindictive. Never mind that Widmark’s lawyer wants justice done, regardless of the cost. It’s the same sympathy many now feel for Dietrich’s dignified widow, who feels so classy and noble that she can’t really be implicated in any nastiness. Janning unnerves Hayward and others, because if he can fall so can they. It also makes him a perfect candidate for rehabilitation. And, with the Soviets closing in on Berlin, many among the Americans want such a fate as much as Rolfe does, so that Germany can be rebuilt as a bulwark against Communism. But are we kidding ourselves? Janning may be the face of decency, but how decent can he be when he decided justice was an optional extra in his courtroom?

The film carefully explores these questions of politics being the art of compromise: of the need perhaps to end one era in order to start another. They’re attitudes I think the film acknowledges as legitimate, but also questions: “What was the war for?” Widmark’s character asks. When you have horrors such as those in the camps – and the film plays one of the key films to powerful effect during the trial – surely politics as normal can’t be allowed to continue? (Interestingly the film allows Dietrich and Schell’s characters to both, legitimately, question the inclusion of this evidence as too emotive and not relevant to the actual crimes of the accused.) Hayward himself comes under pressure to deliver light sentences which will be better for the country. Will he do so?

How can he when the evidence of suffering is so clear to him. The two key witnesses bought into the film are a man with learning difficulties and a woman who had been accused (falsely) of being seduced by a Jewish neighbour. The roles are played by Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland – and a lot of the emotion of these scenes partly comes from the tortured vulnerability of these two actors. These are people whose lives have been shattered – unjustly – and have paid terrible personal prices. Yes it might be expedient for us to look past these stories, but is it right?

Yes, you can argue Judgment at Nuremberg is a little preachy, but I think there are many more interesting ideas thrown up here than Kramer (usually denounced as a simple right-and-wrong director) gets credit for. The performances are superb: Schell is of course marvellous, but Spencer Tracy perfectly channels his ability to project morality as the unsettled judge who finds his easy assumptions challenged. And the film finally boils down perhaps to the simple question of right and wrong.

Even at the end Janning, while admitting the justice of his sentence, and the wrongness of his actions, is still desperate for everyone to know he wasn’t really one of them. That he never knew it would come to those horrors. As Hayward says “It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death who you knew to be innocent”. Perhaps that the message of the film: justice is complex but needs to be done – and it doesn’t matter about your motives or thoughts, only the things you do.

A Star Is Born (1954)

James Mason and Judy Garland deal with ups and downs in Hollywood in A Star is Born

Director: George Cukor

Cast: Judy Garland (Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester), James Mason (Norman Maine/Ernest Gubbins), Jack Carson (Matt Libby), Charles Bickford (Oliver Niles), Tommy Noonan (Danny McGuire)

A Star is Born’s story had effectively been told twice already in Hollywood – once under the same title in 1937 and once before that as What Price Hollywood?, directed by none other than George Cukor. But Judy Garland’s husband Sid Luft saw the project was perfect for her. Luft thought the volatile Garland needed a director who could draw the best from her – and who better than Cukor, who worked with actors perhaps better than any other director in Hollywood. Cukor had been worried about repeating himself – but the chance to direct his first musical, first technicolour epic and work with Garland was too tempting.

The story is of course familiar. Esther Blodgett (Judy Garland) is an aspiring singer who – with quick thinking and performance nerves of steel – saves drunken Hollywood star Norman Maine (James Mason) from humiliation by involving him in a musical number at a charity event. When he sobers up, Maine goes to visit Esther to thank her – and is blown away when he hears her singing. Convinced she will be a major star, Maine arranges for a screen test with studio head Oliver Niles (Charles Bickford) and later pitches heavily for her to be considered as a last-minute replacement on the studio’s big new musical when the star drops out. Esther – or Vicki Lester as the studio renames her – becomes a major star when the film is a smash hit. But as her career goes up and up, Maine’s alcoholism and unreliability start to catch up with him and his own career hits the skids.

Cukor’s A Star is Born is a big, charming, impressive film that mixes emotional desperation with moments of joyous celebration. The film was not the box-office bomb it’s often believed to be (although it did do disappointing business) but, worried about its length, the studio cut the film several times during its release. The film we have today is a slightly neutered version, with several scenes reassembled by film historian Ronald Haver using audio, the odd clip and still photographs (it adds an impressionistic section of the film which you can’t imagine Cukor would have cared for) – but Haver did locate several missing musical numbers which add to the film’s impact.

Garland sings all the numbers, and some of her best work ever is in this film. Her late night bar rendition of The Man That Got Away (the performance that wins Norman’s heart) is superb. I love the affectionate spontaneity of Someone at Last, Esther’s recreation to amuse Norman of the sequence she has spent the day filming in the studio. This scene is playful, sweet, funny and has a freshness not all the numbers have.

Some of the other numbers go on too long – and it’s hard to escape the feeling that they are in there solely because of Garland and not because they serve the plot. Because this isn’t really a musical as such, more of a romantic tragedy with the odd tune, with each number a performance. It works superbly because Cukor’s sympathetic direction draws some of her best work from Garland – and a truly superb performance from Mason.

Cukor works particularly effectively with Garland who, in real life at this point, was far more similar to the destructive Maine (she delayed the film frequently with her absences and fluctuations in health). Garland is of course too old for the part – but it doesn’t really matter as she brings it such freshness, naturalness and emotional openness that you can persuade yourself that she’s a young ingénue at least ten years younger than she looks.

Garland was also surely helped by being paired opposite Mason. Not the first choice – that was Cary Grant – or indeed the second, Mason was hired as his professionalism and expertise could deal with Garland’s erraticism. Under Cukor’s direction he gives his finest work on screen here. His turns Maine into someone decent, charming, kind – but overwhelmingly self-destructive. His slightly slurred speech and ability to turn on a sixpence to anger makes for some of the best drunken acting you’ll ever see. But it works especially as we are desperate for Maine to kick the bottle. Because when he’s sober he’s the perfect husband and gentlemen. But Mason uses that to mine the deep tragedy of the character, his intense shame and self-loathing. The later sequences of drunken misbehaviour are heartbreaking (Maine’s drunken interjections at Esther’s Oscar-winning speech are almost unbearably painful to watch), and it’s all powered by Mason’s humanity in the role. It’s a truly great performance.

The film itself is perhaps a little slow and uneven around these performances. The musical numbers – whisper it – frequently slow the action down or grind the plot to a complete halt (none of them add anything to the story at all, and exist to showcase Garland). The film is so tightly focused on its two leads that it never develops any sub-plots to contrast with the main action. There is some light satire on Hollywood studios and their rapacious desire for more money – but not too heavy as the villain here is the odious press man (a weasly Jack Carson) while the studio head is a kindly, affectionate, fatherly figure who would never make a call based on business. The matter of fact way both stars have their names changed (the moment when Esther discovers Norman’s real name is a hilarious throwaway moment) is a neat gag. But the film takes a long time, frequently stopping for another Garland set-piece.

Perhaps the studio instincts were right that the film needed to be tighter – and some of the dialogue sequences reinserted by Haver hardly add much too the plot. Cukor’s direction is calm but assured though and the superb performances of the two leads make the film what it is. It looks fabulous with its technicolour depth, and it carries a genuine emotional force that pays off dramatically by the film’s conclusion. A Star is Born is uneven at times and overindulgent but it has more than enough going for it to reward the viewer.