In early 1944, Judy Garland started work on a movie that meant a great deal to her. It would be her first nonmusical; Fred Zinnemann started to direct it, but production stopped when the studio—and Garland—were unhappy with the results. Garland, who felt that Zinnemann wasn’t getting much of a performance from her, persuaded the producer Arthur Freed to bring in Vincente Minnelli—who had just directed her in “Meet Me in St. Louis.” Garland and Minnelli had had an on-again, off-again romance, and when they started working on “The Clock,” it was on again (they’d marry the next year), and, as I discuss in the clip above, the power of their attraction is palpable in the movie, one of the most intensely, authentically romantic ones ever produced in the Hollywood hothouse.
The scene I focus on in this clip is a breathtakingly natural view of a couple’s first embrace. But there’s another exquisitely tender scene which, despite being utterly artificial, is equally illuminating on the subject of love. It’s the morning after—the first moments of the couple’s awakening, in a hotel room, after their whirlwind wedding. It’s done without speaking—and without pantomime. The young couple, in the first blush of connubial bliss, are simply too breathless to speak, the intimate silence of wonder too holy to break. It’s implausible, heartbreaking, and exactly right—a cinematic metaphor that resounds with emotional truth.
P. S. The movie’s rhapsodic romance takes place within a remarkably gritty context of New York street life—and yet, the urban environment was conjured entirely at the M-G-M studios, thanks to rearscreen photographic projections, on-location inserts, and other, even more extraordinary, artifices. In 2007, James Sanders, the author of “Celluloid Skyline,” curated a terrific exhibit at Grand Central Station about New York in the movies. It featured an extraordinary artifact from “The Clock”—the enormous painted backdrop that was used as a stand-in for the cavernous halls of the late, lamented Penn Station, demolished in 1964. (I did a fuller post about it last year.)
P.P.S. It’s Minnelli time in publishing: last year saw the release of Emanuel Levy’s biography “Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer,” and Mark Griffin’s “A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life and Films of Vincente Minnelli” comes out next Tuesday. Both offer a wealth of information about the filmmaker’s private life and about studio politics; neither offers much insight about Minnelli’s art. For that (and for an even more satisfying synthesis of the director’s life and his work), there’s a splendid, long out-of-print book by the late Stephen Harvey, “Directed by Vincente Minnelli.”
