One of the finest and best-loved musicals, Judy Garland heads the cast in a peerless portrayal of America at the turn of the century and one family’s struggles to deal with progress, symbolized by the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. The film is extraordinarily alive, the characters strong, and the musical numbers are so splendidly part of the storytelling that you don’t feel the film has stopped for an interlude. Director Vincente Minnelli proves his eye for detail and captures the era and its values in richly coloured, gentle images, displaying a startling balance of emotions from scene to scene, song to song. Among the songs included in this triumph of Americana are The Boy Next Door, Meet Me in St. Louis, the marvelous production number The Trolley Song, and Garland’s evergreen Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.