The Clock

Very simple, yet engaging, "The Clock" makes use of some rather interesting casting, some slight but sincere characters, and a story that still works all right despite no longer having its original immediacy. Judy Garland and Robert Walker work surprisingly well as the lead couple, and James Gleason probably makes the picture with his scenes. The title is appropriate, both for its reference to the role of the station clock in the plot and also as something of a simple metaphor of the broader situation faced by the characters.

Generally, the best reason for having Garland in the cast is for her singing, yet here she carries the role without using her best-known talent. By keeping the character simple but believable, it works all right. Whenever you see Walker, it's almost impossible not to think of "Strangers on a Train" (although, of course, that film came later), yet here he also succeeds with a very different, sensitive character.

In contrast, Gleason plays exactly the kind of character role that he does best and most naturally, and it's hard to see the movie working without him.

He comes along at just the right time to keep things from petering out, and his character seems to provide exactly what was needed to keep the story from getting off-track.

Much of the movie is not especially memorable, and the production is unspectacular, though solid. Yet it's hard not to come away with a positive feeling from watching this simple yet pleasant and thoughtful film.

New York during WWII is at the center of this film. It was an era of innocence in the Big Apple. Despite the war being fought overseas, young servicemen came for some serious r&r before going to the front, and perhaps, to an imminent death. It is in this setting where we first meet the protagonists of this charming film that has to be one of the best films about the subject ever brought to the screen.

Judy Garland, a rising star at MGM was a singing sensation. That is why her appearance as Alice Newberry showed audiences her acting range. Ms. Garland was a charismatic woman who proved to be the right choice to play this adorable young secretary who meets an unknown G.I. and falls in love with him during a short stay in New York. Joe Allen, an inexperienced young man feels lost as he emerges to face the crowds. Inevitably, Joe and Alice were meant to meet. They fall into an easy relationship that will lead into Joe asking Alice to marry him.

Judy Garland is marvelous as Alice. She shows an uncanny sense for doing something that seemed to come naturally. She lights up the screen throughout the film. Robert Walker, with his good looks, is also an asset as the confused Army man who doesn't know the ins and outs of living in the big city. James Gleason, a character actor of many films, also appears as a friendly milkman who befriends the couple as they emerge from the park. In a way, the film shows how naive people were during those days. Now, they wouldn't be caught dead in the park at night.

Vincent Minnelli directed with a sure hand. It shows in the finished product. This is one of the epitomes of what a romantic movie was all about.

Maybe the most idyllic of those ‘40s movies that confected a storybook New York City on the back lots of Hollywood studios, The Clock tells the story of a whirlwind wartime romance so simply and deftly that it's almost mythic – like a legend Ovid might have recounted. It also preserves the first adult dramatic role, with nary a note nor a time-step, Judy Garland was to undertake, under the Lubitsch-like touch of her director (and new husband) Vincente Minnelli. Trusting his wife to hold the screen on her own merits, he toned down or tossed away the busy stage business so characteristic of the decade, ending up with something purified – close to perfect.

Indiana small-town boy Robert Walker, on a short leave from the Army before being shipped overseas, loiters in Pennsylvania Station when Garland trips over his gangly legs and breaks a heel. It's classic MGM `meet-cute,' but Minnelli doesn't milk it – they get the heel fixed and find themselves strolling through Manhattan. Though on the verge of diplomatically ditching him, impatient with his diffident, aw-shucks ways, Garland politely hangs on until finally she has to catch a bus home; she consents to meet him later, under the clock at the Astor Hotel, for a real date.

Her chatterbox of a roommate upbraids her for letting herself be `picked up' by a man in uniform, and Garland dithers but finally shows up half a hour late. They spend a stiff evening together, filled with awkward pauses and edgy moments of friction, but end up talking under the stars in Central Park. Having missed the last bus home, they accept a lift from a milkman. In a sequence that comes close to cliché but pulls up short, they spend the night together – delivering bottles throughout the city for their suddenly incapacitated driver. Next morning, they lose one another, thanks to the subway system, ultimately reunite and, after running an obstacle course festooned with red tape, marry, confident that the future will find them reunited once more.

There's not much incident, much action, and what there is Minnelli metes out judiciously. As a drunk who precipitates the incident that throws them together for the night, Keenan Wynn contributes a bravura turn (surely improvised) that teeters on the borderline between funny and obnoxious. As the milkman and his wife, who feeds them a farmhands' breakfast, James and Lucile Gleason offer the young lovers a preview of how young lovers become old friends (as well they might, since the actors were one another's spouses).

Only in the difficulties they encounter in trying to get hitched – licenses, blood tests, civil servants' prerogatives – does the does the story threaten to careen off into frantic farce. But Minnelli reaches beyond that to find the urgency, the sickening sense that they might fail – and Garland heart-wrenchingly sums it up afterwards, at an ominously quiet wedding dinner at an automat, when she cries `It was so...ugly!' But after that discordant note Minnelli, ever the Italian, strives for consonance, and finds it in an empty church where Garland and Walker softly recite the marriage ceremony in a pew. Here, Minnelli adds his own benediction: An altar boy obscures the silent couple, sitting quietly in the background, as he enters to extinguish the candles, one by one.

This film gives Judy Garland a chance (her first, I think?) to appear in a non-singing role, as Alice Mayberry, a hopeless romantic who works in New York. When she meets soldier Joe Allen (Robert Walker) they fall deeply in love with each other and are soon beating a path to the altar.

As a war-based romance, this story moves fast because it has to - in a matter of days Alice and Joe know they belong together, and we know it too, thanks to the scenes we see in the museum, in the park away from the bustling traffic, and within the railway station. Garland and Walker are both excellent, the perfect representations of dewy-eyed young lovers.

We're not disappointed by the little roles, either - James and Lucille Gleason play a friendly milkman and his wife, Keenan Wynn plays a drunk in a diner, Ruth Brady plays Alice's housemate Ruth, and Marshall Thompson gathers many laughs all to himself as Ruth's silent boyfriend Bill, never allowed to say anything in response to her constant questioning, gossiping, and nagging.

Directed by Garland's husband Vincente Minnelli, 'The Clock' is a quiet and lovely film, not often quoted as one of the greats, but a good example of the best entertainment MGM could offer in the 1940s.

The first, but by no means the last non-musical film that Arthur Freed produced at MGM was The Clock based on a short story by Paul and Pauline Gallico about a whirlwind 48 hour romance between a soldier on leave and a young girl in New York. The title refers to the famous clock in Pennsylvania Station where they first meet and later agree to a rendezvous there.

The young lovers are Robert Walker and Judy Garland. Walker the previous year had scored with a couple of breakthrough roles in Since You Went Away and See Here Private Hargrove. Garland was doing her first non-singing part on screen.

It's a tender and touching story about young people in war time. Walker is playing an extension of the earnest young soldier he played in Since You Went Away. You can see his character living home and hearth and grandfather Monty Woolley from Since You Went Away and having a 48 hour leave and meeting Judy Garland.

Originally Fred Zinneman was to direct The Clock, but he and Garland had no rapport and Zinneman himself got Arthur Freed to take him off. Judy's then husband Vincente Minnelli finished his work on Ziegfeld Follies and came over to direct his wife. This was also Minnelli's first non-musical effort in any medium since on the stage he had done nothing but musicals.

James Gleason almost steals the film from Walker and Garland as the romantic minded milkman who gives them a lift and then when he gets injured, they finish his deliveries. Walker and Garland then join Gleason for breakfast at his home where his wife is played by his real life wife Lucille Gleason. They would suffer a horrific tragedy that year when their son Russell Gleason was killed in a fall from a window, circumstances still unknown. In fact this was a tragic film all around because both Walker and Garland died way too young.

Keenan Wynn is in the film for one scene and it's a good one as he does a great drunk act.

The Clock is a fine romantic story that still holds up well for today. For lovers of young love everywhere.