Bremer made her screen debut to excellent notices in Director Vincente Minnelli's smash hit Technicolor musical Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) as Rose Smith, Judy Garland's older sister, and followed this with a starring role opposite Fred Astaire in the musical fable Yolanda and the Thief (1945). Despite sumptuous production values and a staff of high-priced talent behind the scenes (directed again by Vincente Minnelli from a story by Ludwig Bemelmans, with an original score by Harry Warren and producer/songwriter Arthur Freed, and choreographed by Eugene Loring), it was a box-office failure. The film's ambitious surrealist fantasy theme was not popular with wartime audiences, and unfortunately Bremer, a newcomer in her first starring role, took most of the blame. Her career never recovered. She followed this disappointment with featured dance performances, once again with Astaire and directed by Minnelli, in two memorable sequences in the successful musical revue Ziegfeld Follies (released in 1946, but Bremer's numbers were actually filmed in 1945, prior to filming Yolanda and the Thief). Her last major film musical was the lavish Jerome Kern biopic Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), in which Bremer has some good dramatic scenes and dances with Van Johnson. But after this, MGM began to lose interest in promoting her. After a minor dramatic film at MGM, Dark Delusion (1947), she was loaned out to Eagle-Lion in 1948 for her final three films. Bremer played her last starring role in the film noir Behind Locked Doors (1948).