THE CLOCK (73)

Directed by: Vincente Minnelli (1945)

Starring: Judy Garland, Robert Walker, James Gleason, Keenan Wynn

The Pitch: During WW2, a soldier on 48-hour leave meets and marries a girl in New York City.

Theo Sez: A (surprisingly) successful hybrid, soggy material firmed up with naturalistic detail - we get the lovebirds swooning in a moonlit park, we even get a heavenly choir, but we also get unsympathetic officials, level-headed roommates telling her to forget him, Keenan Wynn as a convincingly belligerent drunk (he gets his own little moment, though he only has about ten minutes screen time - the camera staying on his ranting after the others have left), plus a profusion of cops, kids, helpful and unhelpful citizens, little old ladies and assorted passers-by, New York asserting its presence in every frame. It's from that tentative, exploratory period in American movies, when ordinary people - the unsung heroes of the War - seemed a worthy subject in themselves (before the realism-for-its-own-sake of Kazan's A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN turned into the realism-in-the-service-of-a-higher-message in his BOOMERANG and GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT) ; all of which may be why it's a bit uncertain about letting its everyday dramas speak for themselves, though at least its compromises and over-explications are always artful and intelligent - so that, for instance, the couple unexpectedly (and, it seems, hopelessly) separated in the big city is succeeded by a panorama of skyscrapers and a stentorian voice informing us there are over seven million people in New York City (bad), which then turns out to be a kind of multimedia window display beside which our hero is standing (good). Soft, but basically admirable ; and Garland's aptitude for caressing the most banal line into a kind of hushed, husky murmur was never more beautifully in evidence.