Cheap Meet Me in St. Louis (Bfi Film Classics) (Book) (Gerald Kaufman) Price

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Customer Reviews of Meet Me in St. Louis (Bfi Film Classics)

Lovers of Minnelli, Judy and this film: look elsewhere.
Rarely has a book made me so HOT with ANGER. Gerald Kaufman's monograph on Vincente Minnelli's extraordinary 1944 musical purports to be a celebration of a great film and its multi-talented director. Not so. Despite proving a lifelong familiarity with Minnelli's work, despite his intimate knowledge of Minnelli's idiosyncratic style, his mastery of decor, camerawork and choreography, Kaufman can still write: 'I never deluded myself that he was a great director, up in the pantheon with Eisenstein and Renoir'. And why, may we ask, does Minnelli merit less regard than a Stalinist stooge? 'Minnelli was not a great director because he had nothing to say'. WHAT???!! Kaufman either believes this, and so shouldn't be writing this book; or he doesn't, but has an inferiority complex about the relative cultural worth of the musical, and definitely shouldn't be writing it. I don't know what he expects his cinema to 'say' - presumbably deal with heavyweight subjects such as social deprivation, war crimes or factory life. When it comes to movies 'saying' anything, I'm with Sam Goldwyn; 'If you have a message, use Western Union'.

Minnelli's style - which Kaufman recognises but misunderstands, characterising it as 'ostentatious' and 'glossy' - is so meticulously orchestrated because it expresses the characters' inner lives, their joys, dreams, desires, fantasies, fears (Minnelli himself said his mises-en-scenes were purposely designed to invade the unconscious of the audience, which Kaufman notes but doesn't seem to understand). He accuses the film of feel-good escapism, excising any of the less utopian aspects of the source material. But it is in Minnelli's style that these repressed elements are visualised. Kaufman doesn't seem to have read Thomas Elsaesser's or Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's pioneering articles on Minnelli's use of melodrama, the way he used his style of 'excess' (of colour, decor, music etc.) to give expression to those darker elements euphemised in the scripts. How can a film, even one glowing with cheer as 'Meet Me in St. Louis', with the terrifying Hallowe'en sequence, in which a young girl in a happy family spies on a chilly, loveless marriage; with repeated references to death and the possibilities of sexual unfulfilment; with its undermining the security of unchanging family life with the intrusions of modernity; with its father who must repress his professional (in a sense, 'creative') capabilities; how can such a film be called simply 'feel-good', untrue to life? As Oscar Wilde suggested: 'behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul'. Minnelli's soul BURNS.

Kaufman's wilful blindness is of a piece with the whole book. He deliberately misinterprets the auteur theory, before going on to prove it by noting the continuities throughout Minnelli's career, despite working in different genres and as a director-for-hire. He fails to recognise 'A Star Is Born' as one of the most overpowering experiences in cinema (sacrilege!!). There is a distastefully censorious tone in his account of Judy Garland's 'erratic behaviour' on set, like a disapproving headmaster correcting an errant schoolgirl, failing to note the minor fact that MGM had pumped her full of drugs since she was a child to maximise her utility value. He concludes with a hectoring speech about society's modern ills (Kaufman's day-job is as Member of Parliament for the ruling New Labour government).

Students will find this book interesting enough in a plodding way, as Kaufman laboriously and pompously recounts the film's troubled production from his undigested study of MGM records (dull reams of which are quoted verbatim). But there is one paragraph in this book quoted from Joseph Andrew Casper's 'Vincente Minnelli and the Film Musical', which contains more critical insight and empathy then the whole of this 70-page monograph. For Minnelli fans and lovers of the musical THAT sounds like the book to get.