Some Came Running is my biggest revelation of the year. I’d dabbled into Vincente Minnelli before, and with not enough attention to his melodramas. It’s not as if the canon is dismissive of him—his musicals are held in the highest regard—but there’s an overall lack of interest in the breadth of his work. When I was recounting my thoughts to a filmmaker friend, Scout Tafoya, he said that Some Came Running and The Clock were the secret keys to the post-war followers of Hollywood, the films that quietly shape and haunt cinema in the back half of the 20th century. I’d never heard of the latter.
Minnelli wasn’t initially tapped to direct The Clock. At first, it was for Fred Zinnemann, the worst talent of his People On Sunday Weimar cohort that all fled to Hollywood when Hitler took power (including Edgar G. Ulmer, Robert Siodmok, and Billy Wilder). Zinnemann’s a fine director, but he doesn’t amount to much more than a name on the statues they gave him for being a stalwart of America’s cinema of quality. Minnelli, on the other hand, is a filmmaker of life. In particular, when life suddenly gets swept up by so much emotion that it doesn’t feel like real life anymore at all.
Judy Garland had Minnelli brought on to replace Zinnemann during principal photography. She was directed by him in the year before in their runaway hit Meet Me In St. Louis, where they also began their relationship which would only last six years of marriage but would be immortalized in the cinema history as one of the great Hollywood couples (not to mention their daughter Liza). The pair rekindled on The Clock and were engaged by the end of its production—a twisted, metatextual irony to a devastating film about a whirlwind one-night rush into marriage.
A soldier is wandering around Penn Station. He’s got a two-day pass and no idea what to do in the city. Not one person wants to talk to him. That is, until a woman stuck going up on an escalator cries out to him that she’s lost her heel. He runs up the stairs in excitement. When he gets up there, she stubbornly tells him she wasn’t calling him up just to say hi, she wanted her heel back. He tries to run down the up escalator, then hops on the other, finds the heel, and sprints back up the stairs. He insists on helping her get the show repaired right away. There’s a shop in the station, which she points out is closed, but he bangs on the window until the clerk acquiesces. She says she has to hop on the bus, and he asks if he can ride along for just a couple of blocks—he doesn’t know what else to do. They sit in the open air on the top deck, she sneezes twice and he hands her his handkerchief. He asks if he can see her again later. She’s starting to like him.
The Clock is split into two halves: the forced build-up and the inevitably forced break-down. The film builds from Alice (Garland) and Joe (Robert Walker) constantly making decisions. In the first half, these decisions are about them continuing to spend time together, much to Alice’s friends’ chagrin, who think it’s just gonna be another one of those one-night-stands with a soldier that was so common in those days. But Alice and Joe do start to connect with each other, to the point where they’re inseparable. Minnelli plays it cool at first, not emphasizing the shifts in these characters falling for each other with close-ups, but movements the actors make, like the stunning moment when the two are in the Egyptian wing of The Met sitting on the base of a sphinx. A guard comes by and the pair hop off before getting right back on when he leaves the room. When they jump back up, Garland swings both her legs up and lounges herself just a little closer to Walker.
Minnelli, then, pulls out all the stops for the climax. Alice and Joe are sitting in Central Park at night, which he notes is so quiet. Alice tells him to really listen, and the sounds of the city slowly emerge: distant horns, trains passing by, people talking and laughing. The sounds create a symphony which is overtaken by the real symphony of the film’s score. The two step into silky close-ups as the music swells. When their lips meet, Garland’s eyebrow trembles.
From there they only have the next day until Joe is back off to base. They rush to try to get a marriage certificate, only to find red tape everywhere they go. They end up on a goose chase trying to get blood samples done, only to have that not be valid for their marriage license for 72 hours, so then they have to find a judge who can override it before the clerk’s office closes at four o’clock. When they finally are having their vows exchanged, trains out the window drown out everything except them being asked to say, “I do.” They sit at some shitty diner eating bad soup and realize that it just doesn’t feel like they’re married. They find a way to make it up, but at the end, Alice sees him off like any other of the soldiers’ girls at the station, with Joe’s train slinking out the station and Garland lost in a sea of anonymity. They forced their way into what they had (briefly), and the world showed them how much more it had to stop them ever having that again.