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"Wasn't I lucky to be born in my favorite city?" The titular tune makes its way through the Smith household in the spirited overture, the brother hums it in the kitchen and the sneezy little sister warbles it as she clomps upstairs, the grandfather ventures a step or two before Judy Garland arrives in the buggy. (She later leads the official version with Lucille Bremer on the piano until Papa comes home to plead for an end to the gilded earworm.) "Happy golden days of yore" from summer back to spring, turn-of-the-century Americana like a marzipan gift box preserved under glass—Vincente Minnelli catalogs the many artifices and neuroses that comprise the lustrous image of harmony. The swirling hoedown of "Skip to My Lou" follows the yearning of "The Boy Next Door," the seduction with Tom Drake offers auburn-tinted Garland in a Greuze close-up for "Over the Bannister." Homemade ketchup and bonfires and massacred snowmen and the devastation of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas," four seasons of familial cakewalk. Sauntering through is Margaret O'Brien and her graveyard of dollies, the knee-level tracking shot guiding the morbid tyke to the scary neighbor's porch goes past To Kill a Mockingbird and into Carpenter's Halloween. Technicolor nostalgia has its pitfalls and Minnelli is aware of them ("I feel elegant, but I can't breathe!"), his canvases and lithographs hum with uneasy edges, even cramped trolley seats are transformed by the choreography of torsos, hats and straphangers. (Father of the Bride picks up on the incestuous undertow, so does Visconti's The Damned.) "Isn't it breathtaking!" "I liked it better when it was a swamp." A lightshow caps the perfection of the portrait, the only thing to do afterward is investigate the fissures (Home from the Hill, Courtship of Eddie's Father). Cinematography by George Folsey. With Mary Astor, Leon Ames, Marjorie Main, Harry Davenport, June Lockhart, Joan Carroll, Henry H. Daniels Jr., Hugh Marlowe, and Chill Wills.
--- Fernando F. Croce |