The Clock (Vincente Minnelli, 1945) (Patreon)

It's 1945, and the anxiety around World War II has turned everything, including courtship, into a race against time. One of the things I've found fascinating about these wartime pictures (cf. the Archers) is the way they depict life on the homefront as a nervous, accelerated form of living, a sense that death is really just around the corner. So this generates a different set of rules. Here, Minnelli literalizes this condition by making a clock -- one in the Astor Hotel -- the central point of connection for the film's adrenalized lovers. 

It all starts by complete chance, as the film opens and closes on the rushing throngs at Penn Station. Any two individuals in the crush could be the subjects of The Clock, and the two we get are thrown together at random. Joe (Robert Walker) is a midwestern solider on a two-day pass in New York. Alice (Judy Garland) lives in the city, scraping by as a secretary. She literally trips over Joe's feet, breaks a heel, and this clumsy interaction starts the ball rolling. The overwhelmed GI wants a local to show him around, and the young New Yorker is lonely, as one can only be in the big city.

Once it becomes clear that the two are falling for each other, trying to cram a few proper dates into a mere 48 hours, Minnelli orchestrates their onscreen relationship as if he were directing an action film. They decide to get married before Joe ships out again, and they're forced to race around town acquiring various bureaucratic talismans -- signatures, slips of paper, and finally a City Hall wedding. Afterward, Alice cries because their non-ceremony was "ugly." 

The fact that they repair to a hotel room and have sex seems significant in this context. Alice's roommate warns her not to "pick up a soldier," and even though she ignores his advice, she seems initially heartbroken. It's as though the quickie wedding was Hays Code shorthand for a sexual hookup she immediately regrets. But then they duck into a church and solemnly read the customary wedding vows to one another, sealing their union before God. 

In a way, this seems to have been the point all along, since this higher-level speech act ("I will") permits Joe to return to the war, and encourages Alice to wait for his return. Is The Clock overly optimistic about their chances? I suppose it could be read that way, and a film produced during the war could hardly get away with suggesting that soldiers' marriages might dissolve while they're away at the front. But the fact that Minnelli ends the film with a second, reverse-crane shot, returning Alice to the anonymity of the Penn Station crowd, is certainly bittersweet. 

Even if it's not a sign that Joe and Alice's marriage will fail, at the very least it returns them to the broader context of 1945 America. Many of these soldiers will die. Others will receive the proverbial "Dear John" letter. Life doesn't always work out. Regardless of the fate of Joe and Alice, The Clock certainly secured the cinematic terms for improbable whirlwind romance, even if most others offer their lovers a bit more breathing room. (Linklater's Before trilogy is unthinkable without this film.)