The New Pictures

The Clock (M.G.M.), at its best, is so good that it inspires ingratitude for not being great. Its basic story is about as simple and moving as they come. A country-bred corporal (Robert Walker) arrives in New York to spend his last two days' leave before going overseas. After one brief look at the overwhelming city he ducks back into Penn Station. There he stumbles across a girl (Judy Garland), a little Manhattan office worker as lonely as he is.

Together they spend the afternoon sightseeing, the evening strolling in a tamed glade overlooking the Hudson River. A milkman (James Gleason) gives them a lift that turns into a nightlong ride through the city; his wife (Lucile Gleason) gives them breakfast and some easygoing advice about marrying in a hurry. Almost against their will, they come to suspect, that they are in love. The suspicion becomes a desperate certainty when, still without knowing each other's last names, they get separated in a subway crush.

When they finally find each other again, there is no question about it: they are going to get married. All afternoon, working against the city's implacably ticking clocks, they fight their way through the cruel bureaucratic mazes of getting a blood test, a license, a waiver of the 72 hours' invalidity. They tear in just under the wire for a grimy little civil ceremony that is shattered to bits by the passage of elevated trains. There follows a beautiful, bleak scene in an off-hours lunchroom where a munching stranger at the next table looks on and listens in as they droop over their inedible food, trying to fight off their bewilderment, their disappointment, their misery, their freezing shyness.

There are quite a few things wrong with this picture--some of them basic. The average lonely soldier in New York doesn't have the good luck to pick up Judy Garland, or true love, or anything remotely resembling either. But it could be justly argued that such things do occasionally happen--and ought to happen more often. Once you accept the basic premise, however, there are still drawbacks. The young lovers wouldn't be likely to spend the night so whimsically, to lose each other so casually in the subway, to find each other if they did, or to run into quite so picturesque a combination of gruffly kind metropolitan types. The trouble is more detailed than that. The pretty-enough "background music" (one of Hollywood's worst habits) reduces some of the storytelling from the sadly tender grandeur which the players and the monumental closeups earn to a sort of oversweetened, high-grade M. G. Mush.

But Director Vincente Minnelli's talents are so many-sided and generous that he turns even the most over-contrived romanticism into something memorable. He has brought the budding dramatic talents of his betrothed, Judy Garland, into unmistakable bloom. He has helped give Robert Walker an honest, touching dignity in place of the shucks-fellers cuteness he has sometimes seemed doomed to. It is Director Minnelli who gives a passage like the silent breakfast scene its radiance. He has used most of his bit players and extras and crowds and streets so well that time & again you wonder whether some swarming, multitudinously human scenes were made in the actual city, with only a few of the actors aware of concealed cameras.

The Clock is a pleasant, well-told romance rather than the great, true picture it might have been; but few films in recent years have managed so movingly to combine first-grade truth with second-grade fiction.

Successful Rebel. Vincente Minnelli has a number of predilections which normally don't go down too well in Holly wood. Boom shots, for instance, are generally under suspicion, both esthetically and economically. A boom shot must either be perfect or be scrapped. Constant use of a finder, too, is regarded as an affectation. Further, Minnelli often reports at the end of a day's work with only one shot perfected, and he is likely to make such remarks as: "The accidental juxtaposition of people and things makes for surrealism. The surrealists are the court painters of the period. They sum up an age which is at best utter confusion."

All such arty goings-on would ordinarily mean the kiss of death to a Hollywood career; but not in Minnelli's case. His semi-surrealist juxtapositions, accidental or no, help turn The Clock into a rich image of a great city. His love of mobility, of snooping and sailing and drifting and drooping his camera booms and dollies, makes The Clock, largely boom-shot, one of the most satisfactorily flexible movies since Friedrich Murnau's epoch-making The Last Laugh.

Before ordering a shot, he peers forever through his finder, working to make each shot the most abundant and expressive possible (he was once a photographer). Besides being "boom-happy" Minnelli is "extra-crazy," taking infinite pains to invent minor bits of business with anonymous individuals and groups. No man in the business gets more satisfactory results.

Much of the time, in his slow, expensive efforts at perfection, Minnelli drives writers, producers, actors and technicians quietly out of their habit-hardened professional minds. But he does it so gently, and always for such excellent reasons, that they end up, as his producer Arthur Freed says, by "loving him." Says his cutter, George White, "He may drive you crazy but he gets what he's after. For a guy who has that much on the ball, I'll string along."

Chicago-born 38 years ago, of theatrical Stock (his mother was a French actress), frailly handsome Vincente Minnelli got into New York theaters via musical comedy, as a designer of costumes, sets and ballets. Once dropped from Paramount (where he was paid $2,000 a week), he returned to Hollywood in 1940. Up to now, he has made musicals exclusively (Cabin in the Sky, I Dood It, the luscious Meet Me in St. Louis). He was frightened at first by the straight-dramatic Clock. But he turned it into a directorial tour de force. Studiously as he researches and plans his films, Minnelli is no theorist : "The exciting thing about pictures," he says, "is not to have a future plan. I like to work in a new quality every time." At the moment, his only future plan is to marry Judy Garland this June, if studio schedules permit.

Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe (20th Century-Fox) generally hits the dirt short of the peg; but it clangs out ringers whenever Betty Grable is pitching. It is the loudest and most energetic Grable vehicle in some time. As the Horseshoe's fastest filly, Miss Grable socks out A Nickel's Worth of Jive, dreams of mink coats in the manner of not-quite-a-lady in the dark, misleads and falls in love with young Dr. Dick Haymes, and demonstrates the fact that motherhood's extra pound or so of flesh can improve even the screen's most unimprovable body. Radio's wry, rough Beatrice Kay and bland, smooth Phil Silvers contribute some likable comedy; William Gaxton's performance, as Dr. Haymes's worried father, is a fine, quiet piece of backstage sentimentalism. The big production numbers (hung mainly on the idea that Gaxton, as Ze Chef, marshalls forth young women dressed to represent condiments and fancy desserts) are heavy, garish, good-humored and preposterous.

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