Directed by Vincente Minnelli. Starring Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien, Mary Astor, Lucille Bremer, Tom Drake Club, QFT, Belfast Today-Thurs; IFI, Dublin Tues Dec 27-Fri Dec 31, 113 min

In the months before the 1904 St Louis World Fair, Esther Smith (Judy Garland) and her siblings sing and fumble their way through romances and Edwardian domesticity. But will Esther bag the boy-next- door before dad’s promotion moves the entire clan away from the Midwest to New York? And will she ever stop getting into mischief?

Judy Garland was not exactly keen to sign up for the 1944 film that would define the MGM musical for decades to come. Having just unstrapped her breasts for a series of roles in For Me and My Gal, Presenting Lily Marsand Girl Crazy, the 22-year-old had no desire to go back to playing a high school kid with a crush.

Producer Arthur Freed, the architect behind MGM’s golden age of musicals, had hired in the unknown Vincente Minnelli to direct. Garland went to see him, hoping to talk Minnelli out of the entire idea. “It’s not very good, is it?” she suggested. He talked her around and they were married a year later.

There was still a problem with the plot. After endless script revisions, MGM hired a Garland musical veteran Fred Finklehoff and Marx Brothers scribe Irving Brecher to make sense of Sally Benson's Kensington Stories, a quaint, uneventful series of New Yorkermagazine vignettes.

Somehow it all came together. Songwriters Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine created two standards when they contributed The Trolley Songand Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmasto the score. Minnelli's saturated, kinetic Technicolor seemed to ravish every strand of Garland's dyed auburn locks and every slick of Christmas- red lipstick. Corny turn-of-the- century Americana has rarely sounded better or looked so brothel-fabulous.

Sure, you could always have Christmas without Meet Me in St Louisor Judy Garland singing, but what would be the point?