Vincente Minnelli's classic musical follows the Smith family through the seasons of the year 1903, before they move from the innocence of life in provincial St. Louis to New York City. Minnelli captures the spirit of Sally Benson's nostalgic New Yorker memoirs of girlhood in another time and place by combining a blatantly dreamlike vision--in his fantastic and determined color stylization--with a myriad of homey details that create the physical and psychological atmosphere of ordinary reality, in all its warm splendor. Judy Garland is given one of her best roles as Esther Smith; the vibrant "Trolley Song" has to be one of her finest moments on film. A young Margaret O'Brien almost steals the show with a cakewalk in a nightgown and her terribly terrifying Halloween adventures. In his 1944 review of Meet Me in St. Louis, James Agee already saw in the film those touches for which critics have since dubbed it a turning point in the history of the musical: "I like the general intention of the movie," Agee wrote, "to let its tunes and other musical-comedy aspects come as they may, and to concentrate rather on making the well-heeled middle-class life of some adolescent and little girls in St. Louis seem so beautiful that you can share their anguish when they are doomed to move to New York.... The solidest, single achievement of the movie, in fact, is to give the Smiths something to be sorry about: the real love story is between a happy family and a way of living."