Word: minelli
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Much to their credit Producer Pandro Berman and Director Vincente Minelli have stoutly refused to spice up the sin or gloss over the grimness of Emma's life. Instead, at a leisurely and often-lagging pace they have pried into every nook & cranny of Emma's avid, neurotic soul and the drab existence that nourished it. The handling of bumbling peasants and pompous tradesmen has an acid authority. One memorable scene-a whirling, overheated ball at a local château-is a wonderfully skillful projection of Emma's half-swooning sense of her own seductiveness...
...father (Leon Ames) accepts a business promotion which means their permanent removal to New York. During the later reels of the picture they realize with considerable poignancy just how cherishable the spacious and innocent securities of early 20th-century life in a good provincial city could be. Director Vincente Minelli and his colleagues are so profitably absorbed in such everyday matters that they make only a curtain-bow to the St. Louis Fair...
...benign gaslights of the period. Now & then, too, the film gets well beyond the charm of mere tableau for short flights in the empyrean of genuine domestic poetry. These triumphs are creditable mainly to the intensity and grace of Margaret O'Brien and to the ability of Director Minelli & Co. to get the best out of her. Her song (Drunk Last Night) and her cakewalk, done in a nightgown at a grown-up party, are entrancing little acts. Her self-terrified Halloween adventures, richly set against firelight, dark streets and the rusty confabulations of fallen leaves, bring this section...