Halloween in Meet Me in St Louis

For those of us who live in the Northwest, the weather has been as confused as the financial markets––chilly one day, overheated the next, and scary the day after that. Now the weather has settled down into the cool, brisk feel of autumn. Just cool enough in the morning to make you realize your t-shirt is not enough. And with that autumnal smell that tells you winter is on the way. Christopher Campbell at SproutBlog kindly is helping us get ready for sweaters and meat stews by offering his “10 Movie Scenes To Put You in an Autumn Mood.”

Quite rightly the number 2 and 3 remember Douglas Sirk, whose cinematic style perfectly fit the changing of the seasons. Number two on the list is Todd Haynes’ scene from Far From Heaven [which is a Focus Feature as well] in which Cathy and Raymond walk among the falling leaves, which Campbell acknowledges “goes back to Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows opening. His 3rd choice is, of course, another Douglas Sirk film, Written on the Wind, whose intro sequence of Robert Stack speeding through the Texas landscape and its little cyclones of spinning leaves says all we need to know about the characters.

In addition to his excellent list there are two other films worth remembering. The lyrical, scary scene of Halloween from Meet Me in St Louis where the kids all in costumes surround a bon fire on the street. Director Vincente Minnelli, proving next to Sirk to be one of cinema’s great colorists, manages to evoke both the Norman Rockwell-esque pleasure of a neighborhood holiday and the terrifying, primordial forces that lurk beneath it. The other, while not specifically about the fall, is all about the spirit of the season––Robert Aldrich’s Autumn Leaves with Joan Crawford as a more than middle-aged woman who finds happiness with a man whom she soon learns belongs in an institution. A creepy, sensational tale as only Crawford and Aldrich can deliver with that wonderfu spiraling sentimental song “Autumn Leaves." In fact the film's name was changed to take advantage of the song's popularity.