The man behind some of the most colorful and whimsical movies of the 21st century has picked out his favorite Christmas movie of all time, and — surprise, surprise — it’s one of the best Technicolor films (and MGM musicals) of the 20th century. Wes Anderson was surveyed by the British Film Institute this week alongside filmmakers like Luca Guadagnino, Alice Rohrwacher, and Guillermo del Toro, with all of them picking their single most-loved holiday season movie.
The list includes popular favorites like “It’s A Wonderful Life” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas” alongside more unexpected picks, like “The Godfather Part III” and the ’60s neo-noir “Blast of Silence.” Anderson, however, went with “Meet Me in St. Louis,” which he calls his “favorite musical ever made.” The 1944 Vincente Minnelli film pulled from a series of short stories to bring us a portrait of the Missourian Smith family, specifically spotlighting a year in the life of the four-daughter household from 1903 to 1904.
“Meet Me in St. Louis” may come up less than its ’40s counterpart “It’s A Wonderful Life” in Christmas-season conversations, but it’s a decorated classic nonetheless. It was the second highest-grossing musical of its release decade, according to data collected from “The Hollywood Reporter Book of Box Office Hits,” and critics loved it, too. The movie only won one Oscar (for Margaret O’Brien, who won the now-defunct Academy Juvenile Award for her extra-convincing tears), but it inspired several remakes, including a Broadway show. It also popularized several songs sung by star Judy Garland in the movie, and introduced the warm seasonal tune “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” to the world.
Wes Anderson loves Meet Me in St. Louis, and we can see why
Anderson is effusive about “Meet Me in St. Louis” in his quote to the BFI, though he draws no comparisons to his own works, which often use vignettes, color, and kid actors in interesting ways. “It must have been a magnificently nostalgic experience to see ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’ back in 1944,” Anderson says. “Now it’s magnificently exotic. Maybe the America it evokes only ever quite existed on the backlot of MGM, but, for myself, the characters and world of this movie come to life like they’re living next door across a little strip of lawn, snow-covered in the winter.”
The filmmaker behind “The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” goes on to praise the way the movie makes each character’s “minor/modest hopes and troubles” feel “crucial and captivating,” a detail that’s certainly in line with Anderson’s own best characters. He’s not the only celebrity to name-drop the movie in recent years, either: in 2020, Zooey Deschanel named it her all-time favorite holiday film, telling Entertainment Weekly that “it’s not all Christmas, but [it has] the themes of home and family and those are deep, holiday themes to me.” She reasoned that “the story culminates on Christmas, so it feels like a Christmas movie.” Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles has also programmed the film before, though in 2021, it screened on Thanksgiving.
If you’ve never seen “Meet Me in St. Louis,” you’re in luck: it’s streaming on both Max and Tubi this holiday season.
