Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 22/12/2011)

One of five daughters born to a Grenadan father and Indian mother, Joyce Carol Vincent was raised in West London and seemed a happy child. However, she was deeply affected by the loss of her mother at the age of 11 and several of the friends interviewed by Morley suspect she may have been abused by the father she always told them was dead (when, in fact, he post-deceased her in 2004). She left school without qualifications, yet had taken elocution lessons and always gave the appearance of being well educated. Indeed, she landed a series of decent jobs, including a post in the treasury department at Ernst & Young that required her to move around large sums of money.

Joyce had been working for a shipping company in 1985 when she began dating Martin Lister, who took her to a hunt ball and amazed friends who considered the strikingly elegant Joyce to be way out of his league. However, she fitted into their circle with ease and Lister was surprised that none of her own friends and family attended the 21st birthday present he threw for her. Indeed, he recalls her being infuriated by the arrival of a stripping vicar, who may well have been organised by one of her sisters as a misfiring joke.

Along with workmates Kim Bacon and Daniel Roberts and school friends Mandy Allen and Prue Almond, Lister was bemused that Joyce's family failed to raise the alarm that she was missing. But she seemed to have a habit of jettisoning jobs and acquaintances as soon as they became an inconvenience and Lister recalls how she would often drift away for months at a time before returning as though nothing had happened. Moreover, she kept her private and professional lives separate and resisted all attempts at greater intimacy, even cheating on Lister with his friend William Barthorpe. Towards the end of the film, however, Lister admits that his father had dissuaded him from marrying Joyce on racial grounds and he breaks down in lamenting that he wasn't able to save the love of his life from herself.

But, as Morley gradually comes to realise, nobody could. Alistair Abrahams got to know Joyce when she lived in Wapping with Kirk Thorne, who ran the Nice recording studio and once cut a demo of Joyce singing his own composition `Tell Me'. According to friend Catherine Clarke, Joyce was invariably the life and soul of the party, although she never craved attention and refused to flirt with attached men, even though Thorne used to dress her in a French maid's outfit whenever Captain Sensible of The Damned paid a call.

She also formed a liaison with Abrahams, who managed such chart acts as Betty Wright and Osibisa, and Zimbabwean singer Alton Edwards remembers them doing a lot of clubbing together. Joyce charmed the likes of Isaac Hayes, Jimmy Cliff and Gil Scott Heron and even met Nelson Mandela at the 70th birthday tribute concert at Wembley in June 1988. Yet, once again, she simply walked away from a scene to which she had seemingly become pivotal and several interviewees testify that Joyce would always run away from a problem rather than confront it and moved house on numerous occasions, often leaving behind her meagre possessions in her flight.

In the early 1990s, she moved in with John Ioannou, but he confides that the arrangement foundered because Joyce kept sending mixed messages. She lived in a women's refuge for a time after a possibly abusive relationship with an unnamed Pole and suddenly re-entered Martin Lister's life at the turn of the century after quitting her City job after four years of seeming success and contentment. By all accounts, she had nowhere else to go after Abrahams declined her suggestion they resumed their romance and she slept on Lister's couch until he caught her in a lie about her employment and he was appalled to discover when she was rushed to hospital in 2002 with a peptic ulcer that she had given her bank manager as her next of kin on the admittance form.

By the end of the following year, Joyce would be dead and she would remain undiscovered until Haringey council officials came to evict her from her housing association flat for unpaid rent on 25 January 2006. Her identity was only established via dental records and Alison Campsie and David Gibbs from the Tottenham & Wood Green Journal strove to provide in-depth coverage of the story, only to fail to unearth anything about Joyce's life. Local MP Lynne Featherstone similarly drew a blank in trying to ascertain whether society had allowed a vulnerable woman to slip through its net.

Carol Morley first became aware of Joyce when she saw a report in a discarded copy of The Sun on a train. She was moved by the utter anonymity of the victim of such shameful communal neglect and vowed that she should not be allowed to slide into further obscurity. After placing adverts in various newspapers, Morley began meeting Joyce's former colleagues and friends, the majority of whom had never associated the corpse on the sofa with the vibrant woman they had known. She uses the detective element of her research to link the disclosures and editor Chris Wyatt makes a neat job of piecing together press cuttings, photographs and scribbled notes.

What makes the documentary completely compelling, however, is the performance of Zawe Ashton in the reconstructions that Morley stages with laudable delicacy and authenticity. Alix Luca-Cain plays the young Joyce, while Neelam Bakshi and Cornell S. John appear as her parents. But it's Ashton who most impresses, as she conveys the vivacity and vulnerability that form the core of the conundrum. The moment in which she sings into a hairbrush along with Carolyn Crawford's `My Smile Is Just a Frown (Turned Upside Down)' could have been hideously tacky. But Morley and Ashton judge it to perfection, as the meaning of the lyrics dawns on the swaying Joyce and she begins to weep in the crushing realisation that she is living a similar sham.

The film ends with Ashton propped up against the sofa watching BBC1 and wrapping Christmas presents (who were they for and why did they not check up on her?). As the camera pulls away, Morley switches to a grainy moving image of the real Joyce backstage at Wembley as the stars were introduced to Nelson Mandela. She looks perfectly at home in such stellar company and yet, in a shockingly short space of time, she would become tragically less than a face in the crowd. There was no evidence to suggest she had any drink, drugs or mental health problems. She seems simply to have died of natural causes.

It's a devastating end to a disconcerting, haunting and deeply compassionate piece of work that merits comparison with Clio Barnard's The Arbor (2010). Morley refuses to speculate about Joyce's fate and makes little attempt to fill in the gaps in the narrative provided by her talking heads. Consequently, this raises more questions than it answers. But that may be the point.

If Dreams of a Life presents the tragic side of Christmas, the cosy, sentimental side is shown in all its Tinseltown glory in Vincente Minnelli's sublime musical Meet Me in St Louis (1944), which has been re-released for the holidays.

Frustrated at missing out on the stage hit Life With Father, MGM producer Arthur Freed found a ready-made replacement in the `Kensington' stories that Sally Benson had published in the New Yorker. Charmed by the sweetness of autobiographical vignettes that were `like a Valentine in the palm of your hand', Freed originally conceived the project as a musical with period songs for director George Cukor.

However, the studio board had doubts about a film with a non-linear structure, despite Freed's assurance, `I'll make a plot with song and dance and music. That's the way my characters will come to life - that'll be my plot.'

But Louis B. Mayer saw the venture as a costume equivalent to his long-running Andy Hardy series and backed the screenplay that Fred Finklehoffe and Irving Brecher had written for Vincente Minnelli. He also sanctioned Freed's recruitment of Broadway art director Lemuel Ayers (who had designed Oklahoma!) and the construction of a 1903 St Louis street at a cost of $208,275.

Mayer also helped coax Judy Garland into accepting the part of Esther Smith - even though she was increasingly anxious to escape from juvenilia - and surrounded her with such dependable character players as Mary Astor (mother, Anne), Leon Ames (father, Lon), Harry Davenport (Grandpa Prophater) and Marjorie Main (Katie the maid), as well as newcomers like Lucille Bremer, Joan Carroll and Margaret O'Brien, as her sisters, Ruth, Agnes and Tootie.

Freed and Mayer were so committed to Meet Me in St Louis as it reaffirmed The Wizard of Oz's key message: `There's no place like home'. This was more relevant than ever with so many military personnel overseas and Minnelli's `sentimental mood piece' revisited Oz's contrasting concepts of youth/adulthood, fantasy/reality and faraway/home, while also placing patriotic faith in the rituals, inventions and values that America was fighting to uphold.

Yet for all its seemingly simple positivity, this is also a film of contradiction and complexity.

The spirited Smith women are determined to seize life. But they are also cheerfully subservient and domesticated. Conversely, the chauvinistic Lon despises the telephone, yet so aspires to the social mobility it symbolises that he accepts a promotion that will uproot his entrenched family to New York.

Even more ironic is the fact that this nostalgic saga is so firmly rooted in modernity. Great store is set by technological advance and the comforts and conveniences of consumerism, while the World Fair finale celebrates the future with an optimism that would have cheered contemporary audiences, who were already beginning to anticipate the peace.

Even the score blends 1900s standards like Bob Cole's `Under the Bamboo Tree' and Kerry Mills's title ditty with such Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane pop tunes as `The Trolley Song', `The Boy Next Door' and `Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas'.

Shot in lustrous Technicolor, the décor similarly combines authentic period details gleaned from Benson's stories and the paintings of Thomas Eakins with the inspired use of light, colour and composition that Minnelli had learned as a window dresser. This conscious theatricality also applies to choreographer Charles Walters's staging of the musical numbers, which, despite Minnelli's agile camera, largely remain within confined spaces - although `The Trolley Song' has more of a traditional production feel.

Yet it wasn't all cosy artifice, as Tootie imparts a sense of mischief and melancholy that turns disconcertingly dark during the Halloween and Christmas sequences. The latter even sees her launch a furious assault (on learning of her father's decision to quit St Louis) on the snow people that she had built so lovingly in the garden and such self-possessed shifts between innocence and experience earned O'Brien a special Oscar.

Meet Me in St Louis grossed $7,566,000 on its $1,707,561 budget. But, more significantly, by integrating the songtrack to emphasise the emotional aspect of the everyday, it had an even greater impact on the Hollywood musical than Oklahoma! had exerted on Broadway. Furthermore, Garland had found in Minnelli a director (and husband) who she hoped would protect her from a growing predilection for insecurity and caprice.