All these years of being a musicals fan and I’d never actually gotten around to seeing one of MGM’s most famous musicals: Meet Me In St. Louis. Oh, I’d seen bits and pieces here and there, and of course the “Trolley Song” and “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” are endlessly replayed, but I’d never seen the whole thing front to back.
I now have.
Um. :eek:
If the movie was about a turn-of-the-century household having to cope with two mentally ill children, shouldn’t they have actually dealt with the issue? And if it wasn’t, why introduce the issue?
The older of the two youngest daughters is dangerously violent (she threatens to stab the maid in her sleep through the heart and then chop up the corpse…and makes other, similar threats to others), a psychopathic liar (she tells people that she’s seen a neighbor murder his wife while drunk on whiskey–actually on second thought, this may have been the younger kid) and an attempted mass-murderer (the “wouldn’t it be fun to cause a trolley full of people going at about 40 miles an hour to derail and kill everyone on it” incident–and either she or her sister actually says words to the effect of “Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if everyone on the trolley did die?” The movie makes it absolutely clear that A) they understand the concept of death and B) they were not only completely aware of the potentially lethal consequences but they were planning for them.)
The youngest one is A) morbidly obsessed with death–not in a twee “Daddy, did Fluffy go to heaven” way, but in a Wednesday Addams sort of way. Her dolly has four fatal diseases and she goes on at great length about how she’s going to bury it (and she constantly talks about death and dying and murder). B) a psychopathic liar (she tells everyone that Judy Garland’s boyfriend beat her up when, in fact, he did nothing of the sort) and C) the aforementioned trolley incident.
And the entire family thinks it’s just marvellously thrilling that the two kids are insane. They get rewarded with cake and ice cream after the family has a jolly laugh that the two kids stated that they were trying to kill about 50 people. Um. I know that musicals tend to exaggerate characteristics of people, but this seems a bit much. They’re not played as mischevious, they’re played like junior Hannibel Lectors. Look, I know times change and things that back then would have seemed mischevious (tying a firecracker to a dog’s tail) now seem horrific, but trying (and nearly succeeding) in murdering about 50 people?? That wasn’t “mischief” then and it sure isn’t now.
So what’s up with the two psychotic kids? How are we supposed to take them in the context of the movie given that they’re literally psychotic. As in “needs to be institutionalized.” Ok, the two youngest daughters (Tootie and Agnes) were played by some of the most awful actresses ever, but even so and even granting that the actresses couldn’t get any nuance beyond “shriek” and “pout” and “sob” there’s still their dialogue which makes it clear that their (quite literally) behavior is intentional and Vincente Minnelli and Arthur Freed are good enough that I don’t think this characterization was just a sloppy oversight.
Lighten up, Fenris. The screenplay just acknowledged what is known from common experience: that children often have morbid fascinations. The family saw through their bluster; you should too.
But acting on those fascinations, not so much… they point-blank said they’d set out to kill (their word) a large group of people and acted on it (by putting a mock-up of a body on the trolley tracks at night in hopes that the trolley would either derail as it ran over the ‘body’ or would stop suddenly and derail) and expressed disappointment when they failed–but they DID all got a jolly laugh that they’d caused hundreds or thousands of dollars of damage to the trolley, even if no-one was actually killed). And the younger kid doesn’t just talk about funerals for her dolls, she actually goes to cemeteries and buries her dolly next to real corpses and digs them up again.
That ain’t normal by the standards of 1903 (when the story takes place), 1950-something (when the movie was made) or today. It just strikes me as bizarre.
It was 1944 and so in the middle of WWII. Maybe making fun of morbidity was a way to lighten up the atmosphere. Or the dummy body had a Hitler mustache.
OK, I admit I’ve never seen the whole movie either.
“Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” is hardly a cheerful song considering its words and in context to the movie, much like “We Need A Little Christmas” from Mame, they were trying to squeeze some happiness from some dire circumstances.
It’s all there in Sally Benson’s autobiographical novel, too, written in 1941. Nice mixture of charming nostalgia and an acknowledgement that childhood can be terrifying and very dark, too.
I thought Margaret O’Brien was brilliant in that movie, by the way!
A trolley derailment was not an uncommon occurance; it happened at least once a month in some cities. When it happened, usually a push from the combined passengers, or a pull from a nearby team of horses, was enough to put it back on the tracks.
So, a trolley in 1904 cost hundreds of thousands of dollars? Who knew?
Huh. I’d never known that it was based on a book…I’m a sucker for this sorta book (fictionalized period piece autobiographies). I’ll have to see if I can find a copy. Thanks Eve!
Urk. Um. Suffice it to say that our tastes strongly differ on this particular point! (As a pal of mine would say “It’d be a funny old world if we all agreed on everything.”)
I have to admit, while I like MMISL, if you had a little girl today who ran into the backyard in the middle of the night and in a massive rage violently knocked the heads off the snowpeople, who explicitly were supposed to represent her family, you’d definitely put her into therapy toot sweet. Or at least not let her near anything sharp or heavy and blunt…
I believe that in 1904 St. Louis no one would have called those public conveyances “trolleys”. St. Louis had “streetcars”. That was what my mother and grandmother (who was born in 1904 in St. Louis) told me.
Of course, trolley works a lot better in a song than “streetcar”.
You could also go to numerous baseball history sites and read about the 1944 World Series between the Cardinals and Browns, which is almost universally referred to as “the Streetcar Series”.
I have in my hands another book by Andrew D. Young, published in 1988 entitled “The St. Louis Streetcar Story”. On the front page, there is a reproduction of what looks to be a 1940s era map of transit routes in St. Louis.
There are two types listed:
Bus routes
Street car routes
The book also has numerous photos from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from the turn of the century which use the word “street car” or “streetcar” to describe what many (including the woman who wrote “Meet Me in St. Louis” would call a trolley).
I don’t know if this question can be answered to your satisfaction unless a living, breathing native St. Louisan who lived there prior to 1966 (when the streetcar lines were discontinued) chimes in.
All I can say is that my native St. Louisan grandmother and mother (both deceased) told me in no uncertain terms that they called the public transportation in St. Louis “streetcars” or “buses”, not “trolleys”.
(As a pal of mine would say “It’d be a funny old world if we all agreed on everything.”)