Movies from the Heart—Meet Me in St. Louis

From last week’s Lolita—a very serious film about a sexual predator—to this week’s film that’s fun, fun, fun—Meet Me in St. Louis [1944] by Irving Brecher and Fred Finklehoffe, a musical romance—in fact, the very first one filmed.

World War II was swirling around the world as this film was being made—and it was just the thing people needed when they went to the movie palaces of the day. Because it was a chance to get away from their troubles and go back to a simpler time when people sang around the piano for entertainment and had innocent romances that hardly even involved kissing.

The 1904 World’s Fair figured prominently in the film as it was set in St. Louis. And when it looks like the Smith family is going to have to move to New York and therefore miss the fair, the family faces a challenge.

Take a look at a trailer for the film.

The movie definitely takes us back to a simpler time that, in reality, was never that simple. But it does focus on the trials and tribulations of how we fall in love, how we pair up.

Notice also how the film portrays the era it’s set in. From the locations to the furniture in the rooms to the modes of transport, the film stays true to its period. So as a writer, anytime you want to recreate another era on film there’s no such thing as doing too much research. You should try and read the most popular books of the decade you’re portraying, check out the films and television shows that were on then [if you’re writing about a time since film and television came on the scene], and you would be well advised to look at memoirs written about that decade to get an idea of how people’s daily lives were lived.

Meet Me in St. Louis is a good film to study if you’re planning to write a period romance film. Look at how people interact, at how the speech is a little more formal, at how the modern-day methods of “hooking up” with another person vary if we’re in a different time.

And if you’re writing period, you have to study the period you’re writing it in and try and reflect the manners and mores of that time—that might be the most important thing you could do. And it’s not easy to write in the manner people spoke in a different era.

As you can see, there’s so much for a writer to do once they step out of their own time and into another time. People might not have actually been different in that other time, but they may have approached life—and love—quite differently.

Next week we’ll look at another period romantic drama—this time, without music—The Great Gatsby.

Copyright © Diane Lake

27Oct24

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