Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Absolutely the worst movie.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

BEWARE OF FALSE REVIEWS & REVIEWERS. SOME REVIEWERS HAVE ONLY ONE REVIEW TO THEIR NAME. NOW WHEN ITS A POSITIVE REVIEW THAT TELLS ME THEY WERE INVOLVED WITH THE MOVIE. IF ITS A NEGATIVE REVIEW THEN THEY MIGHT HAVE A GRUDGE AGAINST THE FILM . NOW I HAVE REVIEWED OVER 300 HOLIDAY FILMS & SPECIALS. I HAVE NO AGENDAThe backdrop for Meet Me in St. Louis is St. Louis, Missouri in the year leading up to the 1904 World's Fair.It is summer 1903. The Smith family leads a comfortable upper-middle class life. Alonzo Smith (Leon Ames) and his wife Anna (Mary Astor) have four daughters: Rose (Lucille Bremer), Esther (Judy Garland), Agnes (Joan Carroll), and Tootie (Margaret O'Brien); and a son, Lon Jr. (Henry H. Daniels, Jr.). Esther, the second eldest daughter, is in love with the boy next door, John Truett (Tom Drake), although he does not notice her at first. Rose is expecting a phone call in which she hopes to be proposed to by Warren Sheffield (Robert Sully).Esther finally gets to meet John properly when he is a guest at the Smiths' house party, although her chances of romancing him don't go to plan when, after all the guests are gone and he is helping her turn off the gas lamps throughout the house, he tells her she uses the same perfume as his grandmother and that she has "a mighty strong grip for a girl".Esther hopes to meet John again the following Friday on a trolley ride from the city to the construction site of the World Fair. Esther is sad when the trolley sets off without any sign of him, but cheers up when she sees him running to catch the trolley mid journey.Even though the there is barely a story-line the film works. IT gets a tad slow here and there but Margret O'Brien steels every scene she is in. Judy Garland however is always a delight to watch. If you like her in this then make sure to see "In the Good Old Summertime". This film was beautifully filmed. If you can watch it on a Blu-ray.

Movie musicals don't get any better than this! In "The Wizard of Oz" Judy Garland's character, Dorothy, opines, "there's no place like home." In "Meet Me in St. Louis" we are treated to a depiction of exactly what an ideal home, a home to cherish and nostalgically remember, is. The Smith family lives in a sprawling and lovely house in the nicer part of St. Louis. Three generations of the family live together: Grandpa Smith, Lon (a prosperous attorney )& Anna Smith and their five children: Lon Jr. (off to Princeton), Rose (smitten with Warren Sheffield), Esther (getting to know "the boy next door") and the two youngest girls, Agnes and irrepressible "Tootie" (always up to mischief). Family drama unfolds! The brilliantly talented Vincente Minneli has created in this film an irresistible homage to home and family circa 1903/04 with the added piece de resistance of Judy Garland singing some of her most well-known and beloved songs: "The Boy Next Door," "The Trolley Song," and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." Beautiful!Garland is the supreme entertainer of her generation and possibly for all time. She can relate a song to her audience and make them feel what is in her heart. Nowhere in St. Louis is this more clear than in her rendition of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas - a carol with obvious tear-jerking sadness and poignancy. However, the film's most exuberant display of joyous passion remains 'The Trolley Song'. At any rate, enjoy! This is one film that never gets old and Judy Garland was never more beautiful than she was right here.

If you want a five letter word for "the perfect musical", here is your title, a film so sentimental yet true to the human desire for home and roots that even today it remains fresh and alive, colorful and magnetic in every way. Of course, it will always be remembered as the film which first paired Judy Garland and director Vincent Minnelli (although he was the one responsible for the "Our Love Affair" fruit/cake orchestra in "Strike Up the Band!") and the film which moved her from black and white ingénue into one of MGM's most photographic Technicolor ladies. It will also be remembered as the film which moved rising child star Margaret O'Brien into the realm of Judy's past as MGM's greatest young actress and for the many beautiful songs which were written for it in its translation onto the screen. There's even the unfortunately short-lived but much loved 1990 Broadway musical version of it which had been trailing around as a touring production for years before being perfected for the Great White Way. A T.V. series was also developed years later when MGM moved into that medium, but nothing can top the wedding cake of perfection that is this salute to the early part of the 20th Century when state fairs (like one perfected in song by Rodgers and Hammerstein the following year) were must-visit attractions and "courting" was the way young lovers romanced each other-by gaslight!From the moment that Judy pokes her head out the window to sing her love of "The Boy Next Door", you know that her future as a maturing leading lady looks brighter than ever. Gone are the Mickey Rooney "Let's put on a show!" films, and even if she does put on a show here (in an impromptu duet with Ms. O'Brien), it's much more believable, as it is part of a house party where Judy does more than her share of trying to catch the eye of that particular boy, played here by the handsome Tom Drake. Her parents are played by Leon Ames and Mary Astor, and if it is at first jarring to see the vixen of "The Maltese Falcon" playing a house frau, just remember that she had played Judy's mother once before: in "Listen, Darling!"."Older sister" Lucille Bremer was Arthur Freed's big attempt to create a new leading lady, and while she's a likable young actress, she seems lost when shown on screen with the magnetic Judy and the perky Margaret. Then, there's the beloved "grandpa", played by that old rascal, Harry Davenport, and the family's cranky but lively maid, Marjorie Main, who dominates the kitchen (and her ketchup recipe) much like Mary Wickes would do almost a decade later in two Booth Tarkington similar stories, "On Moonlight Bay" and "By the Light of the Silvery Moon". Ironically, in the big Broadway musical, another MGM leading lady of the 1940's, Betty Garrett, would assume that part, stealing every moment she was on screen.The story is a simple one: Papa Ames wants to move the family from St. Louis to New York and their desire is to remain there for the upcoming world's fair. O'Brien goes homicidal, burying her dolls and killing the snowmen, which leads to a comforting scene where Judy serenades the sobbing girl with "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". It should be noted that the original lyrics of that Christmas standard were much darker than what was heard on screen, yet perfectly in tuned with the sometimes darkened theme of the story. Such is the case with the Halloween sequence where O'Brien must "assassinate" the town grouch by pelting him with flour. You wouldn't see anything like this in a Greer Garson movie!Once Judy steps onto a streetcar for the famous "Trolley Song", you've got the stuff that show business legends are made of. The team of Arthur Freed and Vincent Minnelli produced and directed some of Judy's finest works, and Minnelli proves that he is an artist in every way, making the film look as if it was taken right out of Currier and Ives. There's a big rousing version of "Skip to My Lou!" (which features a young June Lockhart amongst its dancers) and a sweet duet between Ames and Astor who re-establish their own love as they watch their growing children discover their first.While the World's Fair sequence is only briefly presented in the finale, it is the dramatic story leading up to it which makes this magical in every way. Simple times, maybe never as simple as this presents, yet still lovely, and something many audiences yearn for today, just like Judy sang with "Over the Rainbow". Sumstuous costumes, lavish sets and rousing songs make this a delight from start to finish which the newer generations have brought into their hearts and cherished to make a family tradition for decades to come, and hopefully much longer.

Next to "Easter Parade", "Meet Me In St. Louis" is my favourite Judy Garland vehicle from the MGM film-factory days. Chock full of those freshly scrubbed, wholesome family values that Hollywood used to love to propagate (if not necessarily emulate), the picture is a warm, endearing fantasy with just enough realism to keep it out of the treacle jar. Opening in the summer of 1904, it starts innocently enough with Esther Smith (Judy Garland) mooning over boy next door John Truitt (Tom Drake), older sister Rose (Lucille Bremer) pining for Warren Sheffield (Robert Sully) with everyone happily laughing and singing about the impending world's fair coming to St. Louis next spring. So far, so predictably good. But then the plot gets seriously leavened as we are introduced to Tootie Smith (Margaret O'Brien), the youngest sister of the clan whose girlish pranks and blood-curdling prose mix a little comedy with some genuinely mean-spirited Halloween behavior that take us to the darker side of human nature, adding some much needed sinister malevolence when it is most needed. But there's more as the plot thickens still further when patriarch Alonzo Smith (Leon Ames) imperiously (albeit with the best of intentions) informs everyone, the day following Halloween, that the family is leaving St. Louis for New York. Initially laughed off, this unexpected announcement turns out to be one post-Halloween trick that is no treat as nobody, wife Anna (Mary Astor) included, is much amused. "I don't believe it!" "It's true: I'm to start the first of the year. We'll leave right after Christmas." With noteworthy attention to period detail, the film is brilliantly directed by Vincent Minnelli, trumpets some excellent acting from its ensemble cast, and includes an engaging Ralph Blane/Hugh Martin score that, for the first time in motion picture history integrates the songs directly into the plot, something pioneered for the stage a year earlier by Rodgers and Hammerstein when "Oklahoma" premiered on Broadway. Better yet, "Meet Me In St. Louis" also deftly combines Christmas candy and homespun virtue with the contemporary reality of the danger of making the business agenda, the bottom line, the sole arbitrator of what really counts, even if that wasn't the film's original purpose. Indeed, with the Smith's standing in for all of us, the movie is not just an enjoyable, warm/fuzzies romp through a bygone era. It is also a timely reminder that even the best of well intentioned actions can elicit unforeseen responses, that people, not impersonal automatons, are the final repository of all human actions, noble, imperious or mean-spirited.