A few years ago we had a discussion on Christmas songs (I'm too lazy to search for it now) and the subject of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" came up. The song originally was written with the line, "Have yourself a merry little Christmas, it may be your last". Judy Garland refused to sing it as such (especially to a young kid, Margaret O'Brien) and it was re-written.
I have to agree with Judy on that call.
I've heard it said more than once that, allegedly, they got Margaret O'Brien to sob in that scene by telling her that they'd taken the role from her and she wasn't allowed to be in the film anymore.
It wouldn't surprise. This set had to be one of the more fiery and electric in the history of Hollywood. Minnelli, a brilliant director of musical and non-musicals alike, was extremely eccentric and a very closeted bi-sexual. Judy Garland's Wizard of Oz days were five yrs in the past and the public had began to see a different side to the Garland Girl. She had already entered her "black eye" days working 100 hr weeks at the studio, and the budding relationship between the two of them on set must have made the energy involved in production all the more intense and absorbing.
Also, a line in that review I found interesting: "Perhaps if Minnelli had been able to let the film to become more overtly reflexive (which of course MGM would never have allowed), its precarious structure would have collapsed in on itself. But instead he layers it with commentary both subtle and provocative, not to mention deeply subversive. Instead of larding the picture with easy ironies, Minnelli uses the very conservatism of the characters and their world to point up both their rigidity and their strength."
It really points to the fact that artists of the past have been subjected to barriers that contemporary artists have not. However, b/c of these barriers, the works are all the more clever b/c the artist has to find various forms of disguising the work's true intentions. The same with works from the Renaissance Age, etc., always subject to the criticism of the church. Artists such as Da Vinci had to veil the work's themes, thus, in the process making it all the more complex or mysterious, such as The Mona Lisa's smile mystery..
I just think it's really interesting that the restrictions imposed on these works actually made them better. The artist has to show all the more ingenuity to shadow his/her true motives; forcing the viewer to peel through even more "layers" to discover the story's moral.
