Under the Clock
Vincente Minnelli (1945)
BFI advertised it as Under the Clock and that’s what the opening titles say but the film’s called simply The Clock in Pauline Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies. If you look for ‘Under the Clock’ on Wikipedia, you see that ‘Under the Clock (Pod Zegarem in Polish) was a Nazi torture centre in Lublin, Poland during World War II’. Although the film’s IMDB entry is Under the Clock (with a note that The Clock was the original title), the information on Wikipedia makes you wonder if ‘Pod Zegarem’ was the reason for ‘under’ being dropped from the name of a movie that tells a very different World War II story. Vincente Minnelli describes the whirlwind romance between Joe Allen, an American soldier on a forty-eight-hour leave in New York City, and Alice Maybery, who works as a secretary there. They almost literally bump into each other at Pennsylvania Station on the morning of Joe’s arrival – Alice breaks the heel of her shoe stumbling over his kitbag. By four o’clock the following afternoon, they’re married. Joe’s train departs from Penn Station the next morning. He’s heading back to camp in Maryland then expects to be posted overseas. Under the Clock was released just after VE Day so more than two months before VJ Day – at a time, in other words, when American wives and girlfriends still didn’t know whether the men they loved would be coming back.
Good actors show us what the people they’re playing are feeling. Star actors make the experience of the characters they’re incarnating feel definitive. When the characters played by such actors are in a situation experienced by many, those in the audience to whom the situation is familiar may feel that the intensity of their own experience is properly reflected on the screen. You can certainly believe this is what happened to people watching Judy Garland as Alice and Robert Walker as Joe in Under the Clock. The movie is based on an unpublished story by Paul Gallico and his wife Pauline; the story was bought by Arthur Freed as a potential vehicle for Garland and adapted for the screen by Robert Nathan and Joseph Scrank. Joe and Alice are both sincere, innocent characters – he’s a country boy from Mapleton, Indiana, although Alice’s background is less clear she too is a relative newcomer in the big city – but with Garland and Walker in these roles there’s an extra dimension. She’s in her first non-singing role, he had made a specialty of playing young soldiers – but they both suggest an underlying complexity. Of course this derives partly from the knowledge that their off-screen lives were not charmingly uncomplicated. But because there’s so much more to Garland and Walker than meets the eye there’s no danger of our seeing Joe and Alice as little or ‘ordinary’ people. This is what takes Under the Clock to a different level.
It’s refreshing to see Judy Garland, in her early scenes with Robert Walker, as the quieter, more reticent character. Her passionate quality emerges more gradually than it often does and just about redeems potentially the cheesiest sequence in Under the Clock. After their high-speed civil marriage, Joe and Alice see a bride and groom, and their guests, departing after a church wedding. They go into the empty church and quietly read the wedding service to each other. When shooting began on Under the Clock, the director was Fred Zinnemann. Garland didn’t get on with him and asked Zinnemann to be removed and replaced with Vincente Minnelli, with whom she’d just enjoyed a great success in Meet Me in St Louis. Zinnemann is one of my favourite directors but Arthur Freed was right to accede to his star’s demands here. Minnelli’s visual flair and romanticism are essential to the film’s success. He ensures there’s a third major character in the story – New York City. Although the film features some actual footage of the streets, it was mostly shot on the MGM lot. Most remarkable is the reconstruction of Penn Station (by William Ferrari and Cedric Gibbsons) with its bustling crowds. Minnelli handles the populous city sequences with as sure a touch as he does the intimate romantic scenes between Garland and Walker.
There’s a persistent ambivalence in this characterisation of New York. You get this from the moment that Robert Walker first comes up an escalator at Penn Station to meet the streets outside: tall and slim himself, he’s overwhelmed by the skyscrapers. Walker blends excitement and apprehension about New York expertly and the swarming complication of the place repeatedly threatens to thwart the lovers – when they’re separated on the subway, when they battle the repeated bureaucractic obstacles to getting married immediately. But there are delightful urban details too. When Alice and Joe are finally married at City Hall, the office is closing for the day and cleaners – who look like proper cleaners but are ably acted – are beginning their work. On their first evening together, Alice and Joe miss her last bus home and hail what he thinks is a cab but turns out to be a milk float. When the milkman Al Henry gets a black eye and a sore head from a flailing drunk (Keenan Wynn is almost too convincing in the latter role), Joe and Alice end up doing the milk round themselves; there’s a lovely shot of ranks of milk floats lined up in the dark. In return, Al takes them back to his home, where his wife makes them breakfast. The domestic rhythms of this scene are effortless and funny; the Henrys are beautifully played by the real-life husband and wife team of James and Lucile Gleason. There are very few bits that don’t work. Ruth Brady is rather dreary as Alice’s flatmate Helen, who warns her against romancing with a soldier, but the scene is saved by its closing line. Alice’s boyfriend Bill (Marshall Thompson, best known for Daktari on television twenty years later) hasn’t said a word throughout Helen’s chattering. As she and he prepare to leave the apartment and Alice in peace, the silent Bill cheerily booms ‘Goodbye!’
13 April 2012