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Directed by Vincente Minnelli, Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) tells the story of the Smiths, an upper-middle class family living in St. Louis, Missouri at the turn of the century. The family consists of father Alonzo (Leon Ames); mother Anna (Mary Astor); two teenage daughters, Rose (Lucille Bremer) and Esther (Judy Garland); two younger daughters, Agnes (Joan Carroll) and Tootie (Margaret O'Brien); one teenage son, Lon Jr. (Henry H. Daniels Jr.); one grandfather (Harry Davenport); and one maid (Marjorie Main). Lon Jr. is preparing to leave to Princeton University; Rose is anxiously awaiting a long-distance call in which she hopes to be proposed to by Warren Sheffield (Robert Sully); Esther is infatuated with the boy next door, John Truett (Tom Drake); and Tootie and Agnes occupy themselves by burying dolls.   The film is divided into four sections, each covering a season during a yearlong period from 1903 to 1904. Summer finds the Smith family eagerly anticipating the 1904 World...

Original release poster for Red Dust Wilson Collison's 1928 play Red Dust had been gathering quite a bit of dust of its own on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer shelves since 1930 as a fifteen-page treatment of a «very purple melodrama about a poor little slaving whore.» At various times, Joan Crawford and Norma Shearer had been considered for the lead until screenwriter John Lee Mahin and producer Paul Bern settled on turning it into a comedy starring Jean Harlow and John Gilbert, with Jacques Feyder occupying the director's chair. Since Harlow's first film as an MGM contract player, Red-Headed Woman (1932), had proved to be just controversial enough to ensure its firm success, the studio figured that pairing her with Gilbert would help the former matinée idol's ailing image.   While Mahin was working on the script in late July 1932, he reportedly saw Clark Gable in William A. Wellman's Night Nurse (1931) or George W. Hill's Hell Divers (1932), dependi...