Judy Garland

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. Garland was born on June 10 ...

“The Clock” is a movie of the social construction of private life, of love and loss, of sex and death—of ineffable beauty and its inexorable connection to horror. “The Clock” feels like the closest thing to an erotic documentary that Hollywood could offer at the time of the Hays Code; the fact that it was released uncontested suggests the insignificance and feebleness of the code, and, even more, of directors who took its dictates as constraints on their art. As Joe, Walker has a nearly campy intensity that captures the inexpressible fear of war’s consequences at the root of the role—and that the script itself, by Robert Nathan and Joseph Schrank, catches. She builds the role with gestures that are choreographically etched and vocal inflections that, with their rhythm and pitch and emphases and space and silence of music, are themselves a kind of singing. 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. But, of course, the center of the movie, its very engine, is Garland. She invests Alice with a blend of determination and wariness, weary solitude and pent-up energy. 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. 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. 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 already worked with Minnelli for the musical “Meet Me in St. Louis,” and he was also her romantic partner. 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. 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.