The fairy-tale kind of soldier’s furlough described in “The Clock” starts in Pennsylvania Station when a sweet, pretty office worker (Judy Garland) breaks a heel stumbling over the foot of a corporal (Robert Walker), who has just been driven back into the station by his first frightened impression of skyscrapers. He coaxes the girl into spending the day sightseeing with him, and that night, after they have kissed for the first time in a Central Park glade, they are given a lift into the city by a milkman (James Gleason), whom they eventually have to help through his deliveries. During the next day they lose each other in a subway rush, find each other just as the heartbroken soldier is about to return to camp, decide to marry, manage to do so just before the City Hall closes, and part at the station the next morning with the soldier on his way overseas.
The movie is dominated by the desire to be neatly pleasant and pretty, and truthful only so far as will not basically disturb the neatness, pleasantness and prettiness. The furlough without an empty, disappointing, lonely, distasteful or fearful moment is as hard to believe as is the portrait of New Yorkers as relaxed, daisy-faced, accommodating people who send champagne to soldiers in restaurants. Most of the story is the sensation-filled, laugh-hungry, coincidence-ridden affair a gag writer would invent, and probably the hardest fact to swallow is the film’s inability to show anything in its lovers that might indicate that their marriage would ever turn out to be any less blissful than their two-day courtship. Mainly because of the direction of Vincente Minelli, “The Clock,” though, is riddled as few movies are with carefully, skillfully used intelligence and love for people and for movie making, and is made with a more flexible and original use of the medium than any other recent film.
One of the most awesome and emotionally accurate scenes in years is the lovers’ kiss in the park, which is enlarged with so much suggestion of fatality and importance—in the slowness with which they approach each other, in the heroically stated movement toward each other, in the close-up of Walker’s face, sculptured and blocked by a fearful lighting and the grandeur of the sense with which he looks at the girl—that it projects the feeling of their love out of slightness into monumentality. A similar expansion of meaning occurs in a church scene (they have wandered in after somebody else’s wedding, and after their own in the City Hall), with the lovers reading in turn from a prayer-book that is still open at the marriage service. The scene is shot in a few protracted, leaden close-ups, and the words are weighted heavily with the lovers’ understanding of them. With the exception of some syrupy kissing expressions of Miss Garland’s, some equally lush lighting and a great deal of unforgivable music intoning the growing pains of love, the movie is unusually good in its treatment of love, sex, or both. Walker’s stroking of the girl’s hand at one point is beautifully tentative, ungainly and oppressive; the breakfast scene after the wedding night swims in a feeling of consummation.
The movie continually mixes accurate and far less accurate images—the kind of illumination that operates in the scenes mentioned above with the most academic overexplaining and oversimplifying of movie tradition. The girl makes a nice observation in the park scene, that the city at its most quiet is never completely so, which is proved by exploding the sound track with the noises of New York’s entire transportation facilities—the elevated, two railroad systems, a police car, several ships and private automobiles. The City Hall ceremony not only moves over to the window so that the elevated can be seen running outside, but the elevated is used as noise to drown out the ceremony at the two most obvious moments. The grim let-down after the wedding, with the bride and groom trying to eat a cafeteria dinner, is played in their case as much for despair and fright and exactness as possible, while at the same time a comic eavesdropper is placed dead center in the scene and used throughout with a heavy, gag-intentioned hand. Against some of the best work yet done in Hollywood with extras, there is a scene of a Broadway sidewalk jam with people hurrying by one another like two opposing schools of fish charging in a confined space; and in contrast to all the good reactions are some like Walker’s Rip Van Winkle responses to escalators and skyscrapers.
Minnelli’s work in this, and in “Meet Me in St. Louis,” indicates that he is the most human, skillful director to appear in Hollywood in years. His films have been very soft and sweet, with individual sequences tastefully shaded, filled with sentiment, formed and smoothed to a point where they are without jaggedness or much strength, and are heavy and lush in a compact way. The emotional reactions of his characters are elaborated with unusual care and intelligence, sometimes with great subtlety and always with full roundness and definiteness. His handling of actors produces people who are unusually thoughtful, sensitive and innocent, and free of their most limiting or trademarked qualities—Miss Garland is relaxed, Walker is less boyish, Jimmy Gleason is sweetly meek (the best acting is by Miss Garland, who is often beautiful and always up to the most exacting kind of movie role, and by Lucile Gleason, who turns up a wonderful kind of violent robustness and good humor in the best bit of the year). At his best Minnelli handles crowd scenes so that they have great reality and interest, and he uses romantic photography to good dramatic purpose.
May 21, 1945