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Within its genre this is simply a great movie to watch. It's a random slice of life that concentrates on a 'random' everyday family living in St. Louis, in the early 20th century. A real 'Americana' movie. It has all of the ingredients you could expect from a movie like this; drama, romance, comedy and basically everything in between.
But above all its a cheerful movie. After all it's a Vincente Minnelli musical, even though the movie is not filled with songs every 10 minutes. Nevertheless the songs that the movie does feature are magnificent and make the movie joyful to watch and gives it a lot of heart and color.
It's a great looking movie, that got shot completely in color. Early color movies from the '40's are often very bright because of their very vivid colors. It's doesn't always look too well by todays standards but in this particular case it works out greatly for the overall movie its feeling and atmosphere.
It's mostly a character driven movie, fore the story itself is of course quite formulaic for its genre but good and effective nevertheless, that has some nice themes in it, which get handled even better by the movie. The movie is filled with some great characters and the family gets portrayed nicely within the movie. It's a fine movie for Judy Garland, who looks great in this movie. It was the first movie she and director Vincente Minnelli did together. Shortly after finishing this movie they also got married together. I think its fair to say that their first movie was also the best one they did together, even though I haven't seen all of them yet.
There are a lot of musicals set in the same time period as this movie. I however feel that this movie in particular does a great job capturing the particular time period. with its costumes, sets, props settings, etcetera. It's a professional looking movie that got greatly put together, with some nice directing and editing. It's a well paced movie, which helps to make this a pleasant watch but not without being effective with its more dramatic themes as well.
Simply a great movie to watch!
9/10
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