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On the clock1/30/2024 ![]() The delicate interconnections of seeming coincidences, the summed-up meaning of bare practicalities, veers toward the metaphysical and heightens each banal moment with an air of destiny. In “The Clock,” Minnelli takes on the majestic and mighty institution of the city, and unfolds its inner workings with a sense of wonder. In a directorial career that ran from 1942 to 1976, Minnelli was the poet of institutions, a forerunner in fiction of Frederick Wiseman, dramatizing the inner workings of theatres, schools, families, a mental hospital, the American West, and Hollywood itself. Reportedly, Minnelli himself changed the script so that it opens on a teeming array of happenstance characters, strangers whom Joe encounters, from one to another, before he stumbles upon Alice (or vice versa): a shoemaker closing up shop, a conductor on the top of a double-decker bus, children in the park and the museum, waiters in restaurants or the many passersby who randomly intrude on personal moments and drive the couple into self-conscious silences, a milkman who gives the couple a lift on a joyful yet serious nighttime adventure, the chain of officials whose daily rounds and exceptional efforts are essential to the couple’s ultimate union. The movie is built around a Rube Goldberg-esque mechanism of fortuitous connections involving a series of coincidental meetings with strangers who play large or small roles in the life of the couple as the bonds of romance tighten and they rush toward a wartime marriage. It takes a city to bring a pair of young lovers together. What begins, for her, as a grudging and uneasy duty quickly blossoms into a warm mutual connection and a breathless romance. Joe, who’s from a small town in Indiana, has never set foot in New York before, and overwhelmed by his first glimpse of the city, asks Alice to show him around. One Sunday afternoon, as she passes through Penn Station-a grand, cathedral-like hall that was shuttered in 1963 and then demolished-she trips over the inadvertently outstretched leg of Corporal Joe Allen (Robert Walker), who has just begun a forty-eight-hour furlough, after which he’ll ship out for overseas duty. Garland plays Alice Maybery, a secretary who has been living in New York for three years. Far from being a mere exercise in visual style, Minnelli’s direction incarnates a wide-spanning philosophical world view and an ardent emotional intimacy. “The Clock” offers an unbroken skein of poignant, tangy, and sensitive performances in a display of directorial virtuosity that was rare in Hollywood or, for that matter, anywhere. Though he was an exquisite cinematic stylist, his decorative methods aim at a kind of realism all his own. Minnelli and Garland share an emotional and artistic connection that elicited her freely expressive performance and his distinctive artistry. (They married in June, 1945.) The choice proved inspired. Louis,” and he was also her romantic partner. She had already worked with Minnelli for the musical “Meet Me in St. Garland was unhappy with the progress of the shoot and persuaded the film’s producer, Arthur Freed (the studio’s main musicals supervisor as well as a prominent lyricist, whose credits include the song “Singin’ in the Rain”), to replace Zinnemann with Minnelli. She had lobbied her bosses at M-G-M for a dramatic, nonsinging role, and “The Clock” went into production under the direction of Fred Zinnemann, an Austrian Jewish émigré who was something of a specialist in social-realistic dramas. ![]() Garland’s acumen and clout are at the movie’s very basis. The greatness of “The Clock” extends into many dimensions: as a movie of life on the home front and in military service alike as a New York City movie and as one of the most rapturous, tender, and, indeed, erotic romances released by a classic-era Hollywood studio. It’s strictly a romantic drama, and its drama is rooted in the overriding story of the historical moment, the Second World War. Garland was born on June 10, 1922, and “The Clock,” shot in late 1944, when Garland was twenty-two, is the first movie in which she starred but didn’t sing. It’s the film in which Minnelli first unleashed the full force of his artistry-and he did so thanks to Garland’s own dramatic power. Judy Garland’s greatest performance is in the 1954 version of “A Star Is Born,” but her greatest movie is “The Clock” (streaming on multiple platforms, including the Criterion Channel), from 1945, which was directed by her soon-to-be husband, Vincente Minnelli.
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