WORLD TOUR Day 13 - St. Louis, Missouri
BEFORE: Cedar Rapids is pretty close to Chicago, but I'm going to head down South for a few days, and I'll get to Chicago in a bit. Tonight I'm in St. Louis, which is called "The Gateway City", so you've got to figure that as the gateway, the city's also got pretty broad shoulders as well. You can tell my original link from California to the Midwest was going to be from "A Star Is Born" to this film, but then the two Natalie Wood films got added to the list. The World Tour is actually going to feature quite a few pairs, like the two James Dean films, the two Judy Garland films, etc. That's partially because I try to fit two films with something in common on to each DVD, so one film usually suggests a companion piece.
Speaking of two films, I'm going to get back on track today by watching a Saturday afternoon matinee of sorts, and then after midnight I'll get to Sunday's film, and I'll be all caught up again.
Linking from "Cedar Rapids" is quite tricky - but Kurtwood Smith was also in "Star Trek VI" with William Shatner, who was also in "Judgment at Nuremberg" with Judy Garland (last seen in "A Star Is Born"). That seems a bit odd.
THE PLOT: In the year before the 1904 St Louis World's Fair, the four Smith daughters learn lessons of life and love, even as they prepare for a reluctant move to New York.
AFTER: First off, a note to the programmers at Turner Classic Movies. I must have been having trouble with my cable when this ran, because I recorded it from TCM's HD Digital channel - the film is not just letterboxed, but also pillarboxed - meaning there are black bars on the top and bottom of the screen, and on both sides as well! The film was nearly reduced to postage-stamp size in the middle of my TV! I understand wanting to preserve the original film ratio, and by no means am I advocating pan-and-scan or cutting off part of the image, but logically and geometrically, no matter what the original film ratio was, the image should be made to fill my screen, either in height or width, if not both. If it doesn't fill the screen in one direction, then zoom the hell in! Make. It. Fit.
Now, this film presents me with something of a puzzle - it's about a family with four daughters and one son in 1903, the year before the World's Fair, where such foods as hot dogs and the ice cream cone were first offered. What a terrible time people must have had before that, trying to enjoy ice cream while holding it in their hands, and creating a terrible mess. And to think those other Expos and World's Fairs just introduced useless items like the telephone and the electric light...
This family seems well off at first, since the father is a lawyer, but they also are forced to make their own ketchup! Why didn't they just buy bottles of it at the store? I suppose the father is pretty frugal, since he refuses to accept long-distance phone calls (he does know you don't have to pay for incoming calls, right?) and the whole family can only afford to sing one song - the title track, "Meet Me In St. Louis, Louis".
The family also is able to perform elaborate musical numbers and host dance parties in their parlor, but their only other source of entertainment seems to be riding the trolley out to the swamplands, where the World's Fair will someday be built. Presumably once they get there, they stand around the swamp and think about how great it will be once someone invents hot dogs and ice cream cones.
The year in the life of the Smith family also includes a look at what Halloween used to be like, back in the day. Before it was the commercial candy-and-costume affair it is now, it apparently used to resemble a junior "Hell Night" for the kiddies, who would go door-to-door and throw flour in people's faces, and then grab loose furniture from their porches to create a bonfire. Because that's not dangerous at all. Then I suppose they still wanted candy after all that destruction. Years later, kids switched to a policy where they didn't pull pranks if they didn't get candy, but that didn't really work, though it was pretty quiet. Then they tried suggesting they wouldn't pull pranks if they DID get candy, and the holiday became a rousing success. Oh, sure, it's simple in retrospect, but it took some time to get it right.
But really this is also about young(ish) love, since Judy Garland's character is enamored with the boy next door, but also seems to have a fondness for beating him up. Fortunately, he's into that sort of thing, and he asks if she can come by and beat him up two or three times a week. I admit that my mind went straight into the gutter when the two Smith girls talked about going to the dance and "handling" 10 men each. One said she could only handle 7 or 8 men - turns out she was talking about dancing!
Their father gets offered a better job, and decides to uproot the family - doesn't he even want to stick around for the World's Fair? Nope, he says they're moving to New York, where people (apparently) live only in tenements, not big houses - plus they don't have any hot dogs or ice cream cones there, so how good could that be? Plus then they'll have to endure the Stock Market crash, and wait like 35 years for a World's Fair.
The film is famous for two things - one is "The Trolley Song", where Judy Garland sings about the clang, clang of the trolley and the zing, zing of her heartstrings. (Note: if your heart is really going "Zing, Zing", maybe cut back on the pep pills) In the old days, if someone was chasing after the trolley, you couldn't offer him a hand until you'd performed an elaborate, 3-verse song about what the implications are if he doesn't make it on board.
The other is the introduction of the song "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", which has become a holiday favorite - but here its performance is bittersweet, with the family anticipating their move to New York in January. They're not sure what their life will be like in the coming year, and maybe no one really feels like celebrating, what with packing and saying goodbye to their friends. That's the reasoning behind the lines "Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow" and "Let your heart be light - Next year, all our troubles will be out of sight." The original line was "It may be your last - Next year we may all be living in the past", but that was deemed too depressing.
In 1957, Frank Sinatra asked the composer, Hugh Martin, to revise the line "Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow" to be more upbeat, and it then became "Hang a shining star upon the highest bough" - changing the song's focus to a celebration of current happiness, instead of hoping for a brighter future next year. Man, I loves me some Christmas Carol trivia...
Also starring Margaret O'Brien, Mary Astor, Lucille Bremer, Leon Ames, Tom Drake, with a cameo from June Lockhart.
DISTANCE TRAVELED TODAY: 242 miles / 391 km (Cedar Rapids, IA to St. Louis, MO)
DISTANCE TRAVELED SO FAR: 2,450 miles / 3,951 km
RATING: 4 out of 10 dance cards
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